First image: Black text on a distressed red background that reads “Disability is not a slur.
Second Image: Black text on an orange distressed background that reads "Autism/Autistic is not a slur.”
Third image: Black text on a yellow distressed background. It reads “We need to destigmatize the word disability. It’s not a slur, it’s not a swear word, and it’s not dirty. It’s simply a descriptor/label. But you know what are slurs? Words that actually hurt disabled people? The r-slur, cripple, lame, dumb, handicapable, deranged, deformed, crazy, insane. Most of these are still used as insults. Or equated to something bad.”
Fourth image: Black text on a red distressed background. It reads “Disabled people are already living in a world that was not made for us. A little consideration, even just about word choice, can make all the difference.
Fifth image: Black text on a yellow distressed background. It’s titled ‘Sources’ at the top of the image, which is then followed by a list of sources:
Something that I was unable to mention in the above infographic, the reason that words like insane or crazy are harmful because they reinforce that those are morally awful, horrible things, or at the very least something to be ashamed of. This is inaccurate and it only adds to the saneist propaganda already out there. The same goes for using the words 'blind’ and 'deaf’ in the wrong situations, like saying "Man I’m so deaf hahaha” or “Wow I really must be going blind.”
I love how ableist ppl always tell me stuff about my illness.
But what I love maybe even a little more are ppl that are allies and tell me that I shouldn’t be talking about my disability with these ppl in the first place, because I should know by now that nothing good comes out of it.
I mean.
Have y'all heard of awareness?
How am I supposed to get word out abt something like CFS/ME, if I’m not allowed to talk about it or if I’m only talking to ppl who’re already allies?
Also: Instead of telling assholes to not tell us sick ppl what to do - no, of course tell us to not talk to them.
As if it was that easy to just skip that topic.
Everybody asks me what I’m doing, what my hobbies are, etc. How am I supposed to respond? Shall I lie?
So maybe just everybody shut the everloving fuck up and let me be upset when I come across another asshole.
everyone’s all for disabled rights & anti-capitalism until your co-worker does the dishes slowly, or gets confused when given directions, or needs to be trained on how to do something that you think is fairly simple, or this or that or whatever lack of ability they have that makes you start to devalue them as a person and call them “useless” for not being a perfect cog in the capitalist machine
like sorry my existing makes your job harder but maybe direct your anger & aggression upwards instead of stamping down vulnerable groups who are just trying to survive and have gone their whole life being abused and screamed at for not being “good enough” or for being Inconvenient or a Burden
chronic pain culture is being told to exercise to help with the chronic pain… the chronic pain which causes you to be unable to exercise… also this is my first time ever submitting a post to anyone so I apologize if I did it wrong
“I judge people for this trait commonly associated with disabled people, but if they are disabled I obviously don’t judge them for that!” thats not how it works. holy shit thats not how it works.
Too many doctors act like living a full life while using a wheelchair is a pitiable existence but soul-destroying pain that stops you from enjoying any of the things you love is no big deal.
The number of doctors who say how sorry they are I can’t walk (something that doesn’t bother me often at all) compared to the number who don’t give a shit that I’m in constant pain (something that bothers me a lot) is telling.
I have been thinking about this a LOT since I had to (temporarily) start using a wheelchair after an accident.
Thinking that “I can stand on my less-broken foot for brief periods of time and it’s only moderately painful” meant that my foot was weight bearing, and thinking that weight bearing meant that I was able to bear all of my weight on that one foot while hopping, the ER doctor gave me crutches instead of a wheelchair. Surprise, surprise, I wasn’t able to use them. I got a wheelchair.
But even if I could use the crutches, I can’t imagine why they thought that was my best option. That I should be in pain instead of in a wheelchair? That I should use the most difficult mobility device I was physically able to use, regardless of how that impacted my quality of life? That I should be at a significantly higher risk of falling and further injuring myself rather than use a wheelchair?
I had to modify my house a bit for the wheelchair, yes. I had to learn how to do things from the chair. But once I had it figured out, my quality of life was miles better than it could ever have been on crutches. I could be up and about for longer periods of the day. I could get moderate exercise. I could cook for myself and water my plants and carry things. I wouldn’t have been able to do any of that on crutches or without putting myself in danger and unnecessary extra pain.
I saw a post about those knee scooter things that advertised one of their benefits: “patients don’t feel disabled.” Knee scooters have a significantly higher fall risk than wheelchairs and increase the risk of blood clots after surgery. But you won’t feel disabled! What does it say about the way society views disabled people that they would rather be in pain and unnecessary danger than feel like one of them?
Hey, just want to let you know the question about the autistic character in a fictional African country is my question. I have actually been to Africa - Uganda to be exact. That’s what I’m basing part of it on, but it needs to be fictional because I need to adjust the government and some of the terrain vehicles in.
I went with a church that associated with some medical groups. I have seen them training and teaching the local doctors a lot of medical basics.
Now, I don’t know about autistic people, but I’ve seen and heard so many cases about the mentally ill getting very poor or absolutely no treatment, or even being maltreated, especially with the very few expert psychiatrists around.
In one example, while I didn’t see the boy, but I heard of one with ADHD getting beaten and screamed at by his teacher because the teacher thought he was just very naughty. He had to be diagnosed by our psychiatrists and they had to teach the teacher and locals what to do.
In fact, one of the guys from Heartsounds told me that they had to teach that mental illnesses were not caused because they were cursed or something. In fact, he also talked about a lot of “healers” who actually tried to heal people by witchcraft. Something that went away in the West a long time ago.
In fact, I may be “improving” the situation by writing my autistic character as not being maltreated and being able to live quite well.
Hello!
This is probably beyond the scope of our blog but these are important conversations to be having. I want to begin by saying that I myself have never lived in Africa, and I would encourage any people who do live (or have lived) in Africa to share their thoughts. I will also add that by my understanding of this message, you have not lived in Africa either, although you have visitedUganda. To me, this is an important distinction - visiting a country doesn’t give the same understanding that one gets by living somewhere.
I think that we may be misunderstanding one another a little. My worries about colonialist overtones do not really come from the set-up of your story. A character who is homeschooled and living in a community where there isn’t knowledge of autism is not worrying to me. Instead, it is the language you chose to describe the set-up that makes me worry.
The colonialist overtones didn’t come from the idea that the doctors might not know about autism or that they might be ill-informed about mental health. It was calling them “uneducated” which raised alarm bells for me. There is a difference between being ill-informed or having no training about a particular subject and being “uneducated” in a general sense.
I am not doubting you when you talk about the difficulties and mistreatment faced by people with mental illness in Uganda. There is an extreme shortage of psychiatrists in Uganda, and there is stigma against mental illness.
Your example of the child with ADHD is unfortunately not unique to Uganda. Interpreting children with ADHD as being “naughty” is common around the world, and children with ADHD often receive harsh punishments. In a country where corporal punishment widespread (even if it is technically against the law), it does not surprise me that a child with ADHD would be punished in this way.
Similarly, stigma against mental illness and problems with the treatment of disability are not unique to Africa. As @scripttorturesays:
Does Africa generally have problems with the treatment of disability? Yes. But so does almost everywhere else. I don’t see these sorts of stories set in rich Gulf countries like Saudi and yet I know exactly why that is: because they mostly choose to isolate and imprison their disabled population and if you can’t see the abuse people assume it isn’t happening.
I think that working directly with disadvantaged people means that you become very conscious of the hardships and mistreatment that they experience. I realise that you have seen things first-hand in Uganda, and these things are troubling. I also think that if you do not have experience of working with patients with mental illness in the West, you won’t have the same awareness about people’s experiences in your home country. Which is not to say that things aren’t better in your home country - just that it is complicated, and some experience in one context does not permit complete objectivity.
I also want to talk a little bit about traditional medicine and witchcraft. There are real problems and dangers associated with witchcraft. However, traditional medicine has an incredibly important part to play. @scripttortureagain:
Yes, there are problems with stuff that really doesn’t work in a lot of African countries (there are also major problems with faked pharmaceuticals by the way) but the West has a long and massive history of misinterpreting African traditional treatments that actually work. We regularly dismiss genuine herbal medicines because they come with a song and dance.
We talk about the Ifa corpus as ‘divinitation’ when it’s used as a sophisticated therapeutic tool for mental health problems! I was lent a book on the ifa corpus by a friend at the university a while back and it literally contains a ‘divination specialist’ learning about Western psychology techniques and responding with ‘Oh! That’s your Ifa!‘ Like- genuine joy and surprise that Westerners had this too! Coupled with curiosity about how we performed ‘readings’
In the West, we operate within a completely different cultural framework, where it often seems easy to draw a clear boundary between “science” and “superstition”, but that is a Western perspective. Definitions of mental illness itself are very cultural, and presentations of mental illness vary around the world. This is absolutelynot to say that psychiatry does not have a place, but it is important to work within the cultural setting.
Joseph Atukunda, who founded Heartsounds, believes that spiritual medicine does have a role to play in the treatment of mental health issues in Uganda. Here is an excerpt from an article from the BBC:
The psychiatrists at Butabika estimate that 90% of Ugandans believe that mental illness is linked to curses or demons.
And Joseph himself didn’t discount that possibility. He spent time at a traditional healer’s clinic run by a man called Dr Hassan Serwadda.
Dr Serwadda was clear in his diagnosis: there was witchcraft involved. “Some demons were on your head” he tells Joseph, “so I cut your head to put the medicine in it, I slaughtered a cock and bathed you in blood.”
For Joseph it was a difficult period, but he thinks the healer may have saved his life, and that tradition could have a wider role to play in mental health care.
“I was treated in this spiritual healer’s crude structures, but I am well now” he says. “Even conventional medicine has its advantages and disadvantages. So I can’t quite discard this spiritual healer as somebody who didn’t contribute at all to the wellness that I’m enjoying right now.”
The problem is that this whole discussion is an extremely complicated issue that needs to be talked about with nuance. The honest truth is that I don’t know if I have been successful in striking the balance between acknowledging the difficult situations faced by people with mental illnesses in Uganda and avoiding basing my reading of the situation from a solely Western perspective.
It is very easy to assume that one’s own way of thinking is right, but that is at the heart of colonialist attitudes. Europeans were able to conquer, invade, subjugate, all the while convincing themselves that it was for the good of those countries - after all, they were bringing “civilisation”, they were bringing Christianity. This “white saviour” attitude is ingrained in Western perspectives of other cultures, and it is very easy to fall into patterns of thought and speech that reflect these attitudes.
This is why it is so important to have an understanding of the issues around representation and the impact of the ways we talk about Africa. It is very very easy to phrase things in a way that plays into stereotypes about Africa.
In my original answer I recommended referring to @writingwithcolor unless you had an intimate understanding of the issues around representing African cultures. I would very strongly recommend familiarising yourself with the problems common in Western representations of Africa, and the effect that these narratives have on perceptions of Africa in real life.
The Danger of a Single Storyby Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (this is a video, but closed captions and a transcript are both available). This is a good starting point for understanding the impact of representation in fiction. I strongly recommend this video!
The Americanization of Mental Illness by Ethan Watters. This is not specific to Africa, but discusses how culture influences presentation and interpretation of mental illness.
Of Africa by Wole Soyinka. This is a book discussing post-colonial Africa, but I have not actually read this myself. I have not included a link, but it can be bought as either a physical book or an ebook.
I will conclude by wishing you luck with your writing. It’s a great opportunity to learn about other cultures, so I hope that you have fun with your research!
It’s hard to be an aromantic asexual human trafficking survivor
Trigger Warning: What you are about to read will contain graphic descriptions of violence. If you will be traumatized by this, please stop reading now. I’m proud to be who I am and glad to still be alive. I love you, reader. :) <3 Because God loves you. I strive to love.
I’m proud to have survived human trafficking and I credit Jesus for helping me through it. All my life except for certain times, I have believed in God. Somehow I sensed God with me through all of my struggles. I even felt somehow my asexuality was a blessing from God that was hard for me to express to others. I was born into slavery and was trafficked to pedophiles since birth, and had to deal with incest along with that and Satanic blood rituals that involved my family cannibalizing me by drinking my blood.
I struggled with getting teachers and police and parents to believe that I was being cannibalized. No one ever believed me; they said that stuff was only in movies. Though some understood I was being raped and trafficked, they offered no support or help. They thought “a man should save me” and they hated the idea of me being rescued by an adult woman or a young girl, of having relationships that would support me like sister and mother type relationships. When I was younger, they wanted a man to marry my mother and he was supposed to save me as a protective father. That never happened, of course because my mother dated and had sex only with pedophiles as well as raping all her kids including me and all the other kids she could get her hands on. Gender did not matter to her, she just loved power and lust and blood. I believe she had demons within her that she invited there. She told me later that she sold her soul to the Devil years ago. I tried to get her soul back in 2012, but she said it’s too late to repent and she enjoys being evil.
As I got a bit older, people in the community and the high school suggested that I should marry a pedophile who had been part of the human trafficking to get me away from my mother or that I ought to find a boyfriend my own age (14-15) who I was supposed to have sex with and live with and then the boyfriend was supposed to protect me along with his dad. They ignored the fact that age 14 is too young to have a live in sexual relationship and also they had no idea or belief that I was asexual. None of them were reasonable in agreeing with me that I really ought to go to a girl’s orphanage and live with a woman and other girls taking care of me and not having any sex while I was still a kid in high school. So this caused boys my age to drag me into bathrooms to rape me or to stalk me and then ask me to live with them so they get ongoing sex which they apparently craved.
Meanwhile, while all this was going on, I also had to deal with purity culture, where religious girls who asked me if I needed to be saved were screaming and cursing me to Hell after I told them yes I do need to be saved because I am being tortured with rape. Please get me away from the rapists and my family, but do not do it all by yourself because if you are alone, you will get raped and may die. They claimed that I am too impure to be saved and that God does not want me. They victim blamed me. I had gotten my hopes up that they were going to save me from all the torture, but all they really wanted to do was to prosthelatize at me like Pharisees and do absolutely nothing to help me. If they truly had been worshipping Jesus they wouldn’t have shouted and said they are so much purer and better than me, they would have helped me. They also did not understand my asexuality.
When I tried to explain I am not attracted to guys to the kids in my high school, they thought that had to mean that I was a lesbian. I said I’m not lesbian, I am an incest survivor of female rape who is celibate. When I tried to explain I am an incest survivor from my mom raping me and getting my younger sister to copy her because my mom incites violence and is trying to brainwash my sister and I to become exactly like her, they were certain that this proved I am a lesbian and then they beat me up for it. Sometimes they tried to ban me from things, saying that I’m a lesbian, like the prom. But then some other students said that lesbians are allowed to prom and they ought to let me in. Neither of them were allowing me to say I’m not a lesbian. To them there were 2 orientations. Straight or lesbian. I have to pick one. So none of us had heard of asexuality.
I tried to explain my feelings by using the word celibate a lot and seeing each human as a creation of God and I can acknowledge that some of them look nice like in the light or the colors of their skin and hair and the clothes that they choose to wear, but I just don’t want to have sex with anyone, and I need to be rescued from the rapists and the cannibals.
The problem I faced with the sexual people was that they insisted the only way I could get away from rapists and cannibals was to pick one person I am supposed to want to have sex with. It can be a girl or a boy, although they mostly preferred I pick a boy. This partner was supposed to save me and protect me from literally everyone who came to torture me from my entire life and the life I was living when they said that. That included frenemies (girls diagnosed with mental health disabilities used by my mom to spy on me and see which boys in school were raping me so she could get them to pay her), police officers who beat me or raped me, teachers in the school who groped me or raped me, ex-felon sex offenders that my mom looked up on the sex offender list and invited over to to torture me, beat me, rape me and try to kill me, grown ups chasing me and raping me with weapons like knives and guns, people raping me with objects, all the kids my own age who raped me of their own accord and the ones who got coerced by their dads to rape me or kids coerced by the pedophiles who also made child porn of themselves or kids raping me, all the drug dealers/addicts, alcoholics, gang members, cannibals, KKK members, all of my incestuous family members and all the cult members who they knew who raped me (Baha'i cult, Seth cult, Satanic cult).
It just seemed like too much for one person to handle. I told the sexual people that and they kept insisting it is the only thing that can save me. I said no kid or man could resolve all this, especially if they were a 14-15 year old kid themselves. They all put so much emphasis on “the romantic sexual relationship will save you” while totally ignoring that I do not want sex and I hate it and am repulsed by it and I’ve almost died a lot of times when being tortured by rape. It is a very bloody and painful thing. I had PTSD and seizures and they ignored that too.
So things went on, I grew up and went to college and I was still dealing with some pedophiles from the state where I was forced to go back to having been gone for 6 years, so these guys were stalking me as I was trying to go to college telling me that they had been fantasizing about me being an adult so they could have legal sex with me instead of raping me as a child and a couple of them actually raped me and I fought them all off as best I could. This was part of the human trafficking because they were paying my mother as they were raping me and stalking me. I cried a lot in class but the teachers just screamed in my face that I was a drunk and told me to get a boyfriend and were appalled to hear I was celibate. I told them it made me happy. I still was involved in the Baha'i cult which does have a religious law saying to preserve your virginity and celibacy until marriage and I thought it was a good idea and I liked it, but when I discussed how much I liked it, all the sexual people harassed me and told me how horrible it was and now that I’m an adult I need to stop being celibate and go run around and have sex and then tell them all about it. They kept saying how hard celibacy was and projecting it onto me. I told them it’s normal and easy. This way of seeing the world made it hard for me to form relationships with anyone.
So after I graduated I tried to get jobs in my field of wildlife biology (degree from University of Idaho in Moscow) and I was able to get some seasonal ones. My mom made it a point to incite as many people at my workplace to rape me in the wilderness as possible by calling and emailing them to give them ideas on how to do that and then she got really mad when they did not send her a lot of money or any money. Growing up, she had made a lot of money when rapists raped me an paid her. She called me a slave and was convinced I was still her slave. She had married another pedophile human trafficker cannibal in 2000 who did horrible things to torture me and collect money from people to rape me too prior to me graduating high school. Summer of senior year. So I had to survive his torture and human trafficking of me and hers from summer 2000- January 2013. Though in 2012 he said he had been raping me since I was 12, which would be 1994. I have some traumatic amnesia so I can’t remember all of the rapists who raped me. So between 2001 - 2013 I had jobs where I studied wildlife or taught camping and nature science and English to kids around the world and had to survive stalkers and rapists at my workplaces, some of whom did attack me so I lost blood from their rapes and some also tried to murder me, all incited to violence by my mom. In between that I kept on going home to be with my family because I was suicidal and wanted them to kill me or because I was trying to rescue my sister from human trafficking, which I failed to do or because they threatened to kill animals, themselves or people and I got manipulated to go back.
All of the people around me who were not abusing me as well as the ones who were continuously told me that I need to get a man and have sex with the man in a relationship in order to not be tortured and be able to have human rights and not be a slave. Even the people in positions of power that could have helped me like the Child Protective Services, Police and FBI told me that. After I finally got the FBI to come over to try to rescue me because human trafficking is a federal slavery crime and it’s their job and they threatened to shoot me (despite me being naked and terrified and completely unarmed) I had a couple of pillows I was trying to cover myself with to hide my nakedness when I asked for help in 2012…I gave up on getting rescued by another human being and fortunately I survived all my suicide attempts and was able to rescue myself. I think Jesus helped me survive all my suicide attempts because looking back I think there had to be miracles taking place for me to survive everything I and others did to me. I also was given Jesus visions and dreams, and surprisingly so were my mom and stepdad who were hard core blood drinking Satanists. So Jesus was there, with me. Then entire time. Supporting my soul and keeping it safe. So I eventually left the Baha'i cult I had been raised in and became a non-denominational Protestant Christian. :) I go to Life Church Online.
So I escaped the human trafficking by going to live on a campus of a masters degree program I had started online while hiding under the desk from the rapists. I had done some classes under there in-between tortures in Environmental Education and I was able to get a summer job with the US Forest Service and go live with a cult member who my mom approved until she threatened me with violence and my mom saw the police and got scared and started screaming her head off and wanted to leave and I got to go stay in a hotel until the Forest Service could get me into one of their dorms. It happened on Independence Day :) Yay Perfect timing, right? LOL God is Good. So then I went from living in a Forest Service dorm to living at the college campus where I hoped to get counseling and help as I finished my masters degree at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point.
I got disappointed by the way I was treated though. In my body I was starting to heal. My therapist told me that I should forget about my stepdad raping me and one of my landlords raping me in Colorado in 2010 and go be a lesbian since I do not want sex with men. He said he wanted me to go have lots of sex with women even though my mom had raped me so that he could put on his resume that he helped a lesbian. When I told him I am not a lesbian, he said he was just going to put it on his resume anyway. He continually tried to force me to go have sex with women even though I did not want to. The student health center did not offer me any help or any healing and they claimed my way to healing was sex. I told them no. My academic advisor was pregnant and saw that I was hanging out with a guy. She was shouting at me that I ought to start a relationship with the guy if I hadn’t already because that is how you get pregnant and I need to get myself pregnant. I told her I do not want to be in a relationship like that and I do not want to get pregnant. I already know how people get pregnant. I am obviously well versed in biology. So she was mad that I didn’t want to be pregnant and also said that a man will save me from my family if they are abusive and that I should devote myself to one man and then suggested I must be sleeping with lots of men if I can’t pick just one. I told her no, I am celibate and I do not have sex with anyone. So she was confused and angry and told me, like many other people that I will just always be abused until I get myself a man. I said I don’t want a man. So then she was scared I’d want a woman and I told her I don’t want a woman. So then she insisted I wanted to be all alone. Completely alone forever and I told her I want good close friends and she like many others told me I am not allowed to have them or I can’t find them.
Some people when I say that tell me that I need to join a convent and live with nuns and they laugh at me when I bring up the idea that I might get raped by priests because it’s not safe anymore to be a nun and nuns these days do get raped by priests along with kids being raped by priests. Some nuns who get raped by priests then go on to rape kids too. So there is too much corruption in the Catholic Church and predators hiding there waiting to attack me for me to be able to be safe there, it makes more sense to just be a regular Christian layperson who is Protestant. When you dress differently like in a nun habit, you become a big rape target for people like soldiers who enjoy raping and murdering nuns, like in “Les Innocents,” a story of some Polish nuns who got raped by soldiers in WW2 and had to have an atheist girl and a Jewish guy from the Red Cross help them with the pregnancies and the orphanage they built so the Catholic Church would not murder them. The Catholic Church has murdered pregnant or raped nuns before so its dangerous to be a nun.
So long story short, I finished my degree okay and I found my classes interesting, but the guy I was hanging out with broke into me dorm room late one night and violently raped me despite me saying no and having no clue this was going to happen. I had already told him prior to the rape that I was asexual and celibate and had been abused and had nerve damage from the abuse. He was Catholic and told me during the rape that his priest told him to do this to me and I learned he also heard it from his roommates and people in our dorm had been stalking us and asking us from time to time if we were going to have sex. We both said No because we were celibate. I found out from him that he did all kinds of sexual things minus the vaginal sex and called that celibacy wheras I did nothing and felt no desire to things and I called that celibacy. He was doing it because of Catholic purity culture and I was doing it because it was part of who I am. I felt very betrayed by his torture of me and I got suicidal and he got aggressive and tried to convince everyone in the dorm it was consensual which caused the dorm and Title 9 office to completely ignore me and discount me. The rapist then denied my access to a doctor (The doctor I saw that Medicaid approved already was screaming and cursing at me and saying it was consensual and then the guy who raped me called the doctor to shout and curse and say it was consensual too.) So I got a lot of abuse and no one really understood my celibacy or my asexuality. I did not get help with my pain. So in addition the bleeding from the rape, I developed severe pain with peeing and difficulty walking without pain. I had a lot of seizures every day then which I now think to be Psychogenic Non Epileptic Seizure Disorder (a disorder caused by the mind of traumatized people to make the body have seizures usually associated with PTSD, Anxiety and panic attacks.) So I was just about to graduate when the rape happened and I had made plans to go get Wilderness First Responder Training in the Grand Canyon hoping to get hired in Wilderness Rescue and some places which do environmental education that require WFR training. I hoped I could get away from human trafficking and Wisconsin that way. Because I got raped and was in so so much pain, that it was hard to walk much less hike the Grand Canyon, I had to cancel and I ended up being homeless for 5 years instead of getting a job with my great new master’s degree. 3 of those 5 years I was experiencing severe chronic pelvic pain from the rape. I still am within the statutes of limitations and I hope to get the guy who raped me arrested and sued.
So I had made another friend in the dorm, a girl, and she was nice but I mistook her kindness for her church being nice and helpful to me as a homeless person looking to find work I could do or a way to take care of myself while I had severe chronic pain and cried a lot every day because I hurt and was terrified to get raped by homeless men. Her church sent me to a series of abusive churches, shelters, and houses of abusive men who tried to rape me or did rape me and claimed that its okay or correct because I do not have a husband to protect me, and that I ought to marry one of the old men who was waiting for God to give him the reward of my body because he had practiced celibacy and I’m supposed to be the prize. I was like Princess Jasmine and I was like “I am not a prize to be won!”
Anyway she married one of the guys in the church after being celibate and taking part in the purity culture and she was like me, in that she didn’t think much about sex. But she felt strong fear and guilt whenever she did think about sex and wouldn’t hear from me that its normal and okay if you are not asexual to occasionally have thoughts on sex. Or just to have thoughts every day is also normal for non asexual people. The difference is that celibate people have the thoughts but they choose not to act on them and non celibate people choose to act on their sexual thoughts. But she insisted that the thoughts themselves were terrible and unnatural and she needs to feel guilty about every time she has a sexual thought. I thought we were discussing heterosexual urges and thoughts because she is heterosexual.
Then she suddenly told me she was scared that I was a lesbian and I had to reassure her that I was not one and that incest does not turn a person a lesbian. Its just a form of torture. Apparently the people in the church had been calling me an abomination and she was trying to stick up for me. Then they started to harass me and ask me and her if we want to kiss on the lips. I said No I don’t like kissing because Ive been raped and kissed by both genders. She was trying to kiss my cheek without my consent which made me uncomfortable so she decided she ought to kiss my shoulder instead and I just thought it was silly and I just let her. I knew she was trying to help me, to be a sister to me. Sometimes she comforted me by holding my hand which is a normal human thing to do. The men at the church saw how we were affectionate like sisters and shouted at us that they needed to marry us off so that we wouldn’t become lesbians even though we both told them we consider ourselves to be sisters. They ranted and raved that we’d one day come to wanting sex with each other and she cried and had a panic attack and I comforted her and told them to go away and then after they went away, I cried and had a panic attack with seizures and she comforted me. Then we went home.
The guy she married, he was abusing her emotionally and making her cry all the time and she used to call me for emotional support, even though I was also crying all the time and was being raped or emotionally abused by the church or the people they knew because I was homeless. I tried to encourage her to leave him and the church but she insisted that if she did that, her family would disown her and she would end up homeless like me. She thought the church and her abusive husband gave her stability. She didn’t think she could just use her college degree to support her. So the church got fed up with me not marrying anyone and running away from rapists and calling them rapists and trying to warn her so she would not get raped by the rapists who raped me, so they tried to throw away all my stuff I had stored in the church attic and tell her I died, which made her cry. She managed to salvage some of my stuff before they tossed it and has sent it to me but has said we can’t be friends and seems to want to believe that I am a bad person now. The church and her family and husband finally brainwashed her. :( Maybe in a few more years we can be friends.
So all of the homeless shelters and social workers I came into contact with while homeless and even the ones when I was not homeless insisted that I need to get into a sexual relationship with a man and that is how I’m supposed to stop being homeless and some suggested also getting myself pregnant. They expected me to just find a man and move in immediately and start having sex. They claimed I wanted sex, a family, a husband and children. They refused to listen to me when I explained I am asexual and aromantic and that I just want to find a way to take care of myself. Once I figure that out, I may get myself a pet and some good friends as I am advancing my environmental career, because I want to take care of the environment. Once I have a good enough network of friends, I may choose one to three friends to live with me in the same house, but separate bedrooms, to help me adopt one or more orphans and raise the children. I was called stupid and crazy for saying this and told I can easily end my homelessness if I submit to sex. I was also told to sell my body for sex by stupid misogynistic social worker men that made me scream and want to tear their throats out because besides physical and emotional pain from being human trafficked, there is a lot of rage. I had to give the rage to God to not completely lose my mind and try not to commit suicide again.
Some churches were a bit helpful but not that much because they thought the government was going to help me. The government had misogynists in it that wanted me to live with someone for sex or sell my body for sex. The government thought the churches would help me. There were plenty of men in the church who wanted to take me home with them for sex when I came just to worship God but very few women willing to let me come over and stay with them to trade my labor for room and board. When it did happen, I was glad to clean for them or take care of their kids or pets.
I did get accepted into Palmer College of Chiropractic in 2015 in San Jose for doctoral degree and I thought things were looking up and I did get some chiropractic treatments to feel better but people constantly sexually harassed me and tried to get me to enter into sexual relationships with men. I survived one attempted rape by another person before a classmate broke into my apartment to rape me and then he tried to rape me again and I had to brandish a knife to get away and then another guy at the party tried to rape me. One of the teachers sexually harassed me really badly, so it wasn’t just students. They don’t have a Title 9 office. The therapist was not all that helpful and they only allowed me to see them 5 times. Everyone harassed me for looking at the genitals of the cadavers to give myself exposure therapy so that if I see a naked person who wants to rape me I can fight them off better without having a panic attack that makes me faint. They said I want sex with dead bodies. This hurt me because my stepdad raped my grandma before and after she died. I couldn’t get the police to do anything about both crimes. They just laughed at me. The other chiropractor who had dealt with chronic pelvic pain caused by rape was trying to force me to do it her way by having sex every day until her body healed even though it hurt her for three years. I had to tell her, no I am asexual and I have no interest in that and I believe I can heal without sex, over and over and over again. It was so exhausting. Anyway because of the stress and abuse, I ended up flunking half my classes I had taken over the past 6 months I was there, and being homeless again until I got into my current graduate program in the summer of 2018 where I work to protect the environment and there is a working Title 9 office here and good campus security to protect me.
Throughout my time being homeless, I was continuously harassed and told to shave my legs and remove my body hair so I look like a woman and some people might have filmed me naked because they were concerned I am not a woman due to having all my body hair. Plus a police man molested me after a teen boy screamed at me for having armpit hair when I was swimming to try to get clean. So getting myself clean was dangerous and so was having body hair…but I like my body hair and I dont want to get rid of it. I almost got thrown out of a homeless shelter because they were worried I was a hermaphrodite and they said they only have beds for men and beds for women and hermaphrodites have to sleep outside or die.
I was constantly being told by shelter staff that I deserve to die, they want me to die, they want to throw me out so I can die…followed by them telling me they hate me and then some weird explanation of how they think I ought to behave or live so they do not murder me with hypothermia (stop being a vegan, eat expired food and give myself food poisoning/botulism because other homeless people do, let the witch doctor posing as a dentist who tears out people’s teeth at the Salvation Army in Madison WI next to the hair salon named “Lust” and gives them no medicine tear out my perfectly good teeth for his tooth collection, have sex, shave my body hair, mop the same kitchen floor 5 times so they can break my spirit, etc) Hearing all the death threats was really scary and it made me cry a lot and have panic attacks and seizures because I knew that the likelihood of me dying of hypothermia was very real and if they really did throw me out to die in the freezing cold, I could be dead in a couple of hours. Some of them did throw me out in the freezing cold, hoping I would die, but thanks to God and my own drive to survive, I made it to warm place in time to not die. Yay!
I did a variety of work trades in people’s farms or houses, some of which I nearly got raped in or did get raped in and then I was singing musical theater or Christmas carols as a minstrel on people’s porches until I entered this graduate program.
It’s a pretty good graduate program but the police of the town are mean and misogynistic and they don’t help women, children or animals. They are still using the old Nazi inspired gas chambers in the animal shelter to kill the animals and that takes like an hour of suffering. I know about it because my mom gave her approval that the pound in Idaho ought to make me kill some shelter animals by gas chamber when I was a 10 year old child and I got really upset and tried to kill myself in the gas chamber along with the cat. I survived but the cats and dogs I was forced to kill did not. Since 1992 when I was forced to do that a lot of states have banned animal gas chambers but not this one and not this town. When I called the police to come stop people hitting each other, their kids and their dogs, they literally told me that they go home to hit their own kids and dogs so I need to stop reporting domestic violence and animal abuse to them. They also called me a schizophrenic and they said they do not help disabled people. I went to the police station to report and the officer kicked a police dog right in front of me. They are cruel and hate women and children. My friend got raped and defended herself and they arrested her and put her in jail and refused to give her the bipolar medicine she needed so she was running into the walls and then they strapped her to a restraining table and this hurt her and made her have a miscarriage. Now she hallucinates that she sees police all the time because of the trauma. She got raped by some other people too and then one o the rapists was threatening me and I knew I couldn’t rely on the police to help us so I tried to just tell the security staff at her apartment to take care of her as I knawed on my hands in fear and tried not to draw blood. The KKK is active here but so far I haven’t been raped my anyone. Anyway I don’t know what became of her, because the last I knew she was living with a rapist who took away her phone and I can’t get in touch with her anymore. :( She came from an abusive family of lesbians who beat her and tried to kill her so it’s not like she is able to reach out to family for support. I hope she found a shelter. I kept on sending her shelter links. I only got raped one time at a couple of shelters and not at all at some others (just had to deal with panic attacks and lots of death threats and horrible food and emotional abuse) so I was safer there in shelters than being put through rape every day by human traffickers who were making me lose lots of blood every day and trying to murder me every day.
So when the pandemic hit, I was really pleased to be able to move on campus where we have kind and responsible officers to take care of us and not a lot of violence. There is still lots of drug abuse on campus and that was giving me asthma attacks. But I have an air purifier now that takes the secondhand vape and smoke out of the air which is actually not allowed on campus. I wasn’t allowed to live on campus before, because they try to say that all non-freshman must live off campus, despite how violent and awful the town and the police and all the drug addicts living in all the off campus apartments are. So they took my money to live on campus because the freshman went home and they wanted people to pay them to live in residence halls.
Then I finally started to get a little help from medical professionals and got a letter stating my PTSD and need to be accommodated in class and in housing and I finally have a safe place to be. I have now been told I may have mild agoraphobia because of hard it is for me to leave the safe place I have found. Hopefully once I am done here, I can find another safe place to be and can still support my progress through academia to become a professor who works to save the environment and teach children and I can just be an asexual without any more bloodshed and torture heaped on top of me. I’m trying to make friends. I have two good friends that are treating me well and do not seem to be associated with any bad churches that want to hurt me or kill me. We find ways to worship God over the phone or just hang out and pray and talk together. We sometimes just hang out and hike. I spend a lot of time alone, trying to heal. I still need a lot of medical care that I am not getting and I keep not getting hired, so I can’t pay for it. I just did my appeal for SSI disability because I got rejected the first time. If I get SSI, then I can get Medicaid again. Right now, I’m not eligible and I got rejected. I feel pretty good and relaxed most of the time and I am working on my thesis to help homeless people experience nature mindfulness meditation so they can heal any broken bonds they may have with nature. It’s a qualitative study with pre and post interviews that will explore the relationships homeless people have with nature. I should be able to publish it in a sociology journal. :) We’ll see. I’m looking forward to helping them, so hopefully I have come somewhat full circle.
I hope the rest of my life is much more productive and I can teach a lot more people and avoid all the violence. So far I have taught about 7,400 children about nature and also English in my temporary seasonal jobs and really connect with them and have a positive impact on them despite bleeding and being tortured, and I was able to do a bit of substitute and assistant teaching during the 5 years of homelessness as a working homeless person living out of my SUV. So I know I have already impacted a lot of lives and helped the environment too. I will just be able to do so much more once the torture stops and I am accepted as I am. Christian vegan asexual kind creative powerful academic woman. I am going to try to get everyone into jail that I can who hurt me. This will help protect others. :)
Thank you for reading my story. :) Please share it. We should educate people about human trafficking and asexuality and aromanticism.
mobility aids are PART OF US. they are not accessories you can just take and play with. even if you ask us nicely to take it, it’s still weird. you wouldn’t fuck around with someone’s leg like it’s a toy. so don’t fuck around with our mobility aids like they are.
even if you think you are “helping” us, you still need to ASK and GET PERMISSION to touch us and our mobility aides
you can’t imagine how terrifying it is to have someone forcibly move you when your body is fragile and doesn’t move like theirs and YOU DONT KNOW THEM!!! Its creepy!!! it’s like common sense goes out the window when it comes to disabled ppls boundaries. stop being weird
Removing someone’s mobility aid is basically like tying someone up: it’s incredibly serious and you should basically never be doing it unless you’ve specifically been asked to.
CW abuse:
Something I wish i’d known when I was younger is that constantly refusing or making it harder for you to access your mobility aid can be an abuse tactic. If someone is happy moving your chair or cane, especially without asking, that is a massive red flag.
In my case my partner would keep my wheelchair completely out of my sight/ reach “to save space”. Then one day they refused to get it back. This meant I was physically unable to leave their bed, leaving me very vulnerable to other kinds of abuse, I was reliant on them for everything that kept me alive (they prevented me getting access to paid carers), and when I got scared/ hurt/ raped by them I might as well have been chained up because it was impossible for me to leave or get help (they also took my phone charger so I couldn’t call anyone). It was an incredibly dangerous situation and I only just survived.
I’m just gonna go ahead and address it again because it’s really bothering me. And as someone with PTSD/TBI who has struggled with PBA in the past, and someone who works with people who have PTSD/TBI, I think I’m plenty qualified to speak on this.
The Gregor tag is still absolutely rife with ableism and misunderstanding of the condition he is portraying. I’m not exaggerating when I say almost every single post. And the reasons given for his unpopularity are just…yikes. From people claiming to be anti-ableism no less? Yikes, guys. C’mon.
Education time.
If you didn’t know already from my posts from last year, regardless of writer’s intention, Gregor is portrayed as someone with Pseudobulbar affect or PBA. PBA is neurological syndrome that can be caused by brain trauma. It is characterized by involuntary, uncontrollable, exaggerated, and often inappropriate outbursts of crying and/or laughing that can cause severe distress, embarrassment, and social dysfunction. It’s condition of emotional expression — crying and/or laughing that’s exaggerated or doesn’t match how you feel. Crying and/or laughing spells are uncontrollable and can last seconds to minutes. They are sudden and frequent. Your mood will appear normal between the episodes, which can occur at any time. They not at all connected to your true emotional state.
For example, you might laugh uncontrollably when you meant to just chuckle in response to a mildly amusing comment. Or you might laugh or cry in situations that you don’t actually see as funny or sad.
Just because Gregor laughs a lot does not mean he is “stupid” “goofy” “a silly character” or inherently has a silly personality. The guy has a good sense of humor. That’s it. He can have different traits.
Describing Gregor as (and these are words I’ve seen used repeatedly) “crazy” “annoying” “grating” “unhinged” “insane” “childlike” “a sterotypical crazy person”“a crackhead” etc. is…I shouldn’t have to explain.
If him laughing or acting differently from other clones makes you “uncomfy” you might want to take a moment to examine that
Variations on “why am I STRANGELY attracted to him”…dude just be attracted. Treat him the way you do all the other characters. “I wasn’t into him before but his laugh is so sexy” “I don’t know why but his crazy voice and laugh is so hot” Okay great. Laughs can be sexy. But due to the nature of his disability, this is just…not it. Saying this reads like the only reason you’re into him is because he has PBA. I shouldn’t have to explain why that’s not okay. Imagine if you could not control your laughter. Something that is very embarrassing and stressful for you. A daily struggle. And someone comes up to you and says “I wasn’t attracted to you before and I don’t know why but your crazy laugh is so hot. I’m strangely attracted to it.” Yeah. It wouldn’t feel good, that’s what the correct answer is.
Conversely, those screaming “don’t write/draw anything sexual about him at all” because he’s visibly disabled- STOP. Stop it with the weird benevolent ableism (please look up that term, I beg you) that’s rampant on Tumblr. I’m so tired of this. On here and in real life. He’s not a child. Having PBA and PTSD/TBI (or any disability) does not take away your humanity, sexuality, or romantic needs/inclinations. Acknowledge, research, and respect the character’s condition and needs, but treat him like everyone else for fuck’s sake.
Just because you are personally uncomfortable doesn’t mean it’s “bad representation”. Stop deciding what’s good and bad representation for people if you don’t have the disability/condition. TBB Season 1 representation was just fine and exciting to see for many people who have TBI. Rebels is pretty obviously really pushing it representation-wise, but that’s not the character’s fault. His body is much older and brain injuries can deteriorate over time and symptoms can worsen. Give him a break.
Gregor has been shown canonically to be resilient, competent, courageous, respectful, compassionate, intelligent, independent, resourceful, and good humored. His character has one of the richest backstories in TCW. He is more than a silly character. He was a highly trained and competent Commando. He was in one of the the worst battles of the Clone Wars. His experience was so traumatizing he mentally blacked out upon seeing so many of his dead brothers. He was trafficked during the blackout. He was emotionally abused and gaslighted. He was exploited for labor and who knows what else. He lived in poverty. He sacrificed himself to save the thousands that would have been killed with that stockpile of rydonium. He sustained life-changing head trauma. He was held captive by an Empire that violated his humanity and principles. He fought and died in the rebellion.
Yet all some of you have to say is that he’s goofy and annoying.
Now, I can’t make my fave your fave, and I’m not trying to. But people bend over backwards to give literally every other clone love and attention, love interests, oc friends, serious fics, character studies, fix-its, headcanons, metas, redesigns. Despite the fact he’s a fairly significant character, Gregor is suspiciously absent in fandom. People don’t make or reblog Gregor art. They don’t write Gregor fics. He only gets these comments. Because he giggles.
If your first reaction to learning about plurality was “Interesting… I kinda wish I was like that-”, you may already be plural, and even if you aren’t, it’s okay to want to be plural, and it’s okay to make a system if you really want to.
Don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise.
why the fuck would you wanna create a system. just say you’re an osdd/did fetishist and go. some of yall reek of fucking privilege. ppl with did/osdd fucking suffer from their disorder and some of yall really just see “wow imaginary friends” and decide you want that. if someone saw someone missing a limb and cut theirs off because they wanted to be cool would that be okay?
dont encourage people to create systems. its offensive to people with osdd and did.
Turns out you are not the centre of the world, shocking I know. Some of us believe in non disordered plurality, and in fact live that reality every day. We do not consider our existence a tragedy. It slaps actually.
>if someone saw someone missing a limb and cut theirs off because they wanted to be cool would that be okay?
can we talk about this argument because i see it a lot and what?? you know people with BIID exist right? even then, i dont fit the BIID diagnostic criteria and i still feel like i would like my body better if i didnt have arms, and i didnt know people without arms existed before i saw an amputee IRL.
maybe it’s because i think having a prosthesis would be “cool”, maybe i actually have dysphoria around my arms, you dont know me enough to make that call and im not going to tell you- just like nobody owes you an explanation as to why they might want plurality for themselves.
i know thats not the point of this post but it speaks volume to me that sysmeds are so quick to jump to implying peoples bodily autonomy can be revoked when what they want is too “weird” or “harmful” in their eyes
Literally everyone will ask if you broke your leg(s). Everyone. Even people you don’t know. Theyll ask a lot and think you’re extremely fragile.
bruises show up within the first day of rolling around, and they can really suck
people will try to grab your chair if they think you’re struggling and it can be hard not to snap at them for it
static electricity is a huge issue. You will probably either continuously shock your leg when you’re rolling around or do what I did today and zap someone so hard as you pass that both of you nearly keel over
people will call you out as a faker if you do anything even remotely fun ever on your wheelchair. Wheelies? Obviously your legs are fine lol not like you have to go down fucking curbs /s
puddles are the worst and if there’s a curb with a puddle all around and you have some ability to walk its a better idea to just stand up and navigate the chair than to fall backwards into said puddle
weird looks from people are inevitable, especially from people who don’t like you
bus drivers will often push your chair and give you advise you don’t want to hear, even if you tell them nicely you can push yourself. Its really hard not to get mad at them for it
no wheelies in school. Though if you do it in the elevator when no one else is with you you can’t really get caught.
speaking of wheelies, always be ready to throw at least one arm behind you in case you fall. They say tuck your chin in but its easier and more reliable to throw your hands back and keep your neck up so you don’t hit the floor. Sore arms are way easier to put up with than head injuries
don’t even bother to try and roll back up curbs. You will either be there for an hour or fall backwards. I managed to do both.
90% of classrooms that aren’t special ed are not very wheelchair accessible.
people will automatically assume you’re faking something if you’re not considered dumb enough in their standards to fit in with disabled students (aka high class ableism at its finest)
people are going to give you weird looks if you don’t suddenly start sitting with the other disabled kids
standard backpacks usually dangle way too much to keep on you easily, so try to pack light
built in storage on wheelchairs cannot sufficiently carry books
don’t try to hold an umbrella. Period. Especially not with your teeth. It doesn’t work.
don’t try to give the bus driver your ticket while you’re stuck on the ramp. And speaking of, its easy to start falling down the bus ramp so be careful, and when in doubt throw on the breaks
and finally if you’re like me pray to god you don’t go nonverbal when someone is trying to push you and you don’t want them to because it is hard to get them to stop if you can’t speak
able-bodied people can and should 1000% reblog this, some of these things I’ve seen on tips about using a wheelchair but a lot of these weren’t things I’ve seen
