Hate Wins and Love Loses

A very important message to all disabled beings this disability pride month:

You don’t have to push yourself to do something for pride month.

[Plaintext: You don’t have to push yourself to do something for pride month.]

This is the entire post, because otherwise I would also be a disabled being pushing himself to do something for disability pride month!

I still see the lightning bolt disability pride flag (the one with the zigzag-shaped non-bg part) being used occassionally.

Your reminder that it can *kill* people with epilepsy, as well as hurt those with other kinds of photosensitivity (I'm autistic and have chronic migraines, I can't look at it)

The creator was alerted of that and has long since made a photosensitivity-friendly redesign. It is also open to further edits. Her tumblr is capricorn-0mnikorn, she has the flag in her pinned, but just in case, perhaps also will draw attention more, I'll add it here too:

[Image description, copied from the creator's original post:

A “Straight Diagonal” version of the Disability Pride Flag: A charcoal grey flag with a diagonal band from  the top left to bottom right corner, made up of five parallel stripes in  red, gold, pale grey, blue, and green

/End image description]

Yes I hate the cure narrative and was actively harmed by it, literally making me more disabled in the attempts to make me less disabled. Yes I constantly wish I wasn’t disabled. We exist. This is a serious post. I don’t want to be “fixed” because I do not fit the norm or because other people feel bad for me. I want to live without my body making me suffer. I am sick of people conflating the two and saying the latter can only be because of the pressure of the former.

My disability pride is not “actually it’s awesome to be disabled”. If it’s awesome for you, I’m glad, but don’t extend that to every single one being. My disability pride is being loudly miserable when everyone wants me to pretend like I’m not. My disability pride is “my pain is my fucking issue, stop acting like it’s yours and like my autonomy should be replaced by your authority”. It is not all of it, too, but a core part.

I have no wish to position my feelings as universal, including as universal for people whose disabilities cause them inherent suffering. But too many people position their feelings, that exclude mine, as universal.