Hate Wins and Love Loses

It’s okay if you can’t do something.

There is so much “positivity” surrounding the idea that you can do anything. No matter what. Regardless of chronic illness, mental illness or whatever else. You just have to put your mind to it.

And you know what? That’s bullshit. There are things we can’t do and we will often feel ashamed or harm ourselves trying.

Even if someone else with a similar experience can do something, it doesn’t mean you should automatically be able to. Even if you could do the same thing yesterday, it doesn’t mean you always have to be able to.

Sometimes you can’t do something.

And that’s okay.

yes for some autistic people some autistic traits / symptoms may not be disabling. have all rights to feel good about these symptoms / traits. have all rights to like them. to enjoy them. to be proud of them. not wanna get rid of them. have all rights to be mad when these symptoms / traits are called wrong harmful etc only because they're autism symptoms / traits. without taking in consideration living experience of individual. is bad is not ok is malpractice is ableism.

but still. very same autism traits / symptoms may be n actually are disabling for lots of autistic people. n they have all rights to not be erased. to talk about their experience n emotions. including frustration. including harm these symptoms / traits make them. including wish not have these symptoms / traits. deserve recognition n respect.

it applies to every single autistic trait / symptom. including stimming. including special interests.

stimming may cause trouble be harmful be dangerous be disabling. special interests may cause trouble be harmful be dangerous be disabling. etc.

generalizations don't work. it's not ok when medical workers generalize n pathologize things that not harmful to this individual. n try to force individual to get rid of things that not harmful n even may be good for them. same opposite. it's not ok when people generalize n say things are never harmful always good n safe. n try to force individual like these things not cope not seek help not talk about problems with them.

lived experience should always be taken into account. generalizations don't work in any direction.

"Actually it's ableist to say disabled people can't [DO THING], look, here are some disabled people [DOING THING]!"

I Do Not Know How To Explain To You that disabilities are not all identical

I am a wheelchair user due to chronic joint instability and pain. I don't always need to use it. I can walk, I can run, I can even do a lot of sports with minimal modification...on a good day. On a bad day, I will briefly dislocate a kneecap just laying down after standing up long enough to cook, and yes, it hurts to pop it back into place about as badly as you think. On a good day, I can run a half marathon. On a bad day, I can't walk to the end of my block.

Contrast with someone who was fully paralyzed in an accident, who can't walk even a single step.

Contrast with someone who can start the day doing what I can on a good day, ANY day, but also just as reliably only has about 20% of my good-day stamina and has to move to a wheelchair after that.

All disabled in ways that are outwardly similar - but the accommodations we need aren't the same, because we can't all do the same things the others can.

Some disabled people can stand upright all day but start to burn out the minute they start walking. My lower body starts to scream in agony if I stand still for more than 5 minutes or so, but again - on a good day, I can run a half marathon. I've known of at least a couple of guys who can stand and walk for a good number of hours on end, but can't sit upright for more than a few minutes - it's stand up or lay down, period. Again, these are not the same. We cannot be treated the same. One of us being able to do something does not change the fact that another cannot.

I'm autistic and hyperverbal (could you tell? lmao). A good number of acquaintances I've met online have been autistic and nonverbal. Contrary to some stereotypes, I am chronically understimulated and constantly seeking out more intense sensory input, and overstimulation in an environment I chose to enter and can leave at will can be a euphoric experience (though when it's against my will it's every bit as miserable as the more commonly recognized cases); in fact I can't taste most of the classic autistic "safe foods" and the few I can taste I don't like, in fact some of them even provoke that "this isn't food" response in me! Needless to say, this does not make the experiences of people who are chronically overstimulated somehow invalid. I can go to concerts. Many other people can't, not safely. Meanwhile, many of those people can get by on much cheaper and simpler food than I can.

I'm mildly allergic to bees. The accommodation for this, obviously, is NOT the same as the accommodation for someone with a life-threatening peanut allergy. I can eat a whole PB&J without consequences; they can go on one of those shows where they get deliberately stung as a dare - doesn't change the fact that we can't trade those actions.

All this to say, if you're going to say "but I/my kid/my friend/my third cousin once removed have/has that same diagnosis or one totally unrelated to it and I/they can do this thing, so you should be able to, too!!" then what you actually need to do is shut the fuck up.

It bothers me a lot how so much of how tumblr has decided is the “right way” to do disabled representation is so. Alien from actual disabled experiences. Your good disabled representation has to have a lightweight, low backed, sporty manual wheelchair. Dont think about the fact that many wheelchair users can’t self propel in a manual chair, or that most people can only afford the most basic standard hospital chair. Dont you know that’s bad representation! Your cane user OC shouldn’t be putting more than 20 percent of their weight on their cane because that’s Wrong, don’t worry about how canes are the most accessible mobility aid and be plenty of people who should actually be using crutches or a rollator are using cane out of necessity and will have to use them “incorrectly” that’s bad representation. They shouldn’t be embarrassed or ashamed of their medical devices, they should always wear their ostomy bag outside of their clothes, because that’s the way I can show my viewers that I care about representation! All feeding tubes go through the nose right? That way I can show off my representation! They can all help in their own way! Just because they’re disabled doesn’t mean they can’t lift heavy boxes, or join an adventuring party, or play sports, or be a punk rocker! They can’t be suicidal: that’s bad representation! They can be angry but only ever at the obviously evil ableist cardboard cutout villain. Never at their own limitations, or at the well meaning protagonist who doesn’t even have to be told how to make the setting 100% accessible. Everything less is Bad Representation!

Wheelchairs and other mobility aids are definitely freeing and liberating

But it’s okay to feel confined to your chair and to wish it allowed better access to the world. It’s normal to get annoyed with the limitations of your mobility aids and to have complex feelings around them.

My wheelchair is absolutely my freedom, but it’s also more complex than that

i keep seeing this idea that Real wheelchair users all have custom active chairs, and that transport/standard chairs are just an embarrassing stereotype. “no one really uses those!” “stop drawing disabled characters in standard chairs!!”

well, plenty of us are a stereotype. sorry. custom chairs require MONEY and good medical support. meanwhile active chairs are unusable for some people. i used an uncomfy transport chair (the kind with tiny wheels and no way to self propel) for a year, and a standard chair for 7yrs. until i got my powerchair i was only ever pushed by a carer. a lot of disabled people will never use an active or custom chair. don’t pretend we don’t exist just because we don’t fit some cool independent ideal.

shoutout to people who use transport chairs and adaptive strollers and other chairs that need to be pushed by a carer

shoutout to people who use standard chairs that don’t fit their body

shoutout to people who use secondhand or makeshift wheelchairs

in my teens i literally felt invalid as a disabled person because i didnt have the ‘real actual’ type of wheelchair everyone talks about online. just my garbage transport chair that my mom had to push. ​but people with shitty wheelchairs exist and are extremely common actually

Sometimes u just need to sob and scream and cry and bitch about ur disability

I think a lot of people feel like they need to be at completely at peace with their disability

And you don’t!

Be mad be sad be pissed off!

I'm a fan of accessibility but with the conditions I have the most convenient thing really would just be if they could just cure my disability entirely.

Like, I struggle to walk more than 10 minutes without intense pain, and pushing much further than that makes me feel like I'm going to faint.

Normally one would get a wheelchair in this situation (and at my college they recommended that I get one) but I would strongly prefer to just... be able to walk without pain as much as I want?

Actually, walking is one of the more extreme things I want to be able to do here. Even just existing the way I am now, with a body that can't generate energy properly, means I spend a lot of time unconscious, brain fogged, and/or in physical pain pretty much every day. Things as trivial as playing video games with my friends can end up being inconsistently possible because I'm always losing to sleep.

The social model is just not enough to fix this. The barriers I'm dealing with for many of the things I want to do (such as not being in pain all the time) are in fact medical rather than social, and I want to have a medical solution to them one day.

hey

hey whoever is out there trying to police how cripples talk about our disabilities

stop your fucking toxic positivity shit

people are allowed to be sad about being disabled

we don't have to turn cripple into a positive thing, or crippled

we are allowed to express sadness, rage, depression, fear, upset, all of it over the things we can't do and the things we lose

we are allowed to say that our disabilities "cripple" us

we do not have to reframe it as a positive thing

that shit is poison to actually learning how to live well with your disabilities.

YOU ARE ALLOWED TO HAVE NEGATIVE EMOTIONS ABOUT YOUR OWN DISABILITY AND TO TALK ABOUT YOUR NEGATIVE EXPERIENCES WITHOUT SOMEONE TRYING TO TELL YOU THAT YOU NEED TO CHANGE YOUR LANGUAGE AROUND YOUR OWN FUCKING EXPERIENCE

people are allowed to be sad about being disabled, and no, not just about how ableism impacts our lives. i am allowed to be FUCKING SAD that my disabilities are progressing and i can't knit anymore (maybe ever) or that i can't take my dog for long walks anymore

i am allowed

fucking stop it

Also, we’re allowed to refer to our disability however we want. Don’t come to me with that “you have to say person with autism” shit. I’m an autistic person. Watched a woman nearly get bullied off tiktok because she called herself hearing impaired instead of HoH. Don’t police how other people describe their own fucking disability

You know what? My disability does hold me back! I'm sick of pretending it doesn't because society only thinks we're worthy if we're actively trying to "overcome" our disabilities or that we "defy the odds". I'm sick of hearing "you can do anything you put your mind to" because that's just not true and is often invalidating of the struggles disabled people face.

I am worthy either way, regardless of whether I can contribute in a way that society deems acceptable or not.

The same applies to you! You are worthy if you can't drive, can't finish school, can't work a conventional job. You are worthy if you can't live on your own without help. You are worthy if you'll need assistance for the rest of your life. You are worthy, always.

Friendly reminder to disabled people:

It’s okay to be bitter sometimes. Yeah, mental and emotional management will always be beneficial and helpful, but guess what?

You don’t have to be happy all the time, you don’t have to be grateful that your pain/illness isn’t worse. You don’t have to “try to look on the bright side”, or force yourself to try to be content with your struggles.

I’ve seen so many posts like, “I choose joy!” Or, “Stop comparing your healthier body to the one you have now!” and other toxic positivity posts that make me want to reach through the screen and throttle the op.

Chronic illness fucking sucks sometimes. There’s no way around it, and sometimes words aren’t enough— they can’t even begin explain to how painful and mentally draining it can be to exist in a body that is constantly malfunctioning.

Be bitter, be mad, be angry, cry, sob, just let it out.

Because you’re going to do it over and over again through your life, and you have to learn how to manage both the negative thoughts and scenarios that come along with being ill. It’s not going to happen overnight, it takes time and constant work.

It’s hard, it hurts, it’s frustrating and sometimes you might even feel like you’re failing because of all the messages that we see on the internet telling us what to do and how to manage our own disabilities.

You won’t always be mad, but there are some times (like how I’m feeling today) that you just don’t want to deal with this shit anymore. You might be irritated with everything and everyone (including those you love), and you might think about if you’re even going to be able to hold it together. And that’s okay.

You’re human. And you have a wide range of emotions for a reason. Utilizing them doesn’t mean you’re failing to recognize the good. It simply means your brain is telling you what it needs to feel in order to move forward.

Also being neutral about things can be way better for your mental health than a lot of the positivity stuff that gets thrown around. Like yeah if you want to be positive that is fully your choice, but if you are trying to avoid being called, "Too negative" or you don't want to be negative for your mental health but are largely struggling with positivity, neutral is an option. Like in my health journey, it has become clear that trying to be positive about things that just keep not turning out positive can be even more defeating than just going into something with the idea of, "this might be okay, it might not, but I'm doing it so we will just see how it goes."

Also negativity can be healthy and necessary. I just decided to stop doing injections, my pain management doctor has done 3-4 different types of injections for me trying to find something that work, all of them made me worse overall and did nothing positive for me short or long term. So I used that and my own negativity to decide that enough was enough, because he had 3-5 more injections he wanted to do, and I couldn't keep doing that to myself. Yeah, maybe one of those injections would help, but would it be worth potentially getting rid of the very small barrier standing between me and being at a pain of 10 all the time? No, not to me. Being negative about this made me able to stand up for myself in this instance and decide that this wasn't helping me. Negativity can be a positive

eugenics is a big scary word and yet people that would claim to be left-leaning can very easily be convinced to be pro-eugenics if you just never use the word. like oh you think "dumb people" shouldnt be allowed to reproduce? you think "dumb people" shouldnt be allowed to have children? its kinda scary

remember kids:

evolution is a stochastic phenomenon and that is a feature, not a bug

we cannot predict the future. we do not know what traits will be helpful or not in future scenarios for the survival of our or any other species.

Eugenics is, fundamentally, an expression of human hubris. it's the idea that we know better, we know what we need, and we should control everyone around us to do it.

That is patently nonsense. Sure, in our current world, being blind is a disadvantage (mostly thanks to society) - but there are many animals that lost their sight because it was a benefit. And that's the tip of the iceberg.

We cannot predict the future. We do not know what will be helpful or hurtful. We should trust in the chaotic, stochastic, random processes of evolution because they've worked so far - life survived a giant volcano 252 million years ago and an asteroid 66 million years ago. The process works.

Whenever humans try to control nature - not work with it, control - it goes poorly. And so many people still think that that's a viable option. It's madness.

Learn history, learn biology. Shun eugenics.

Are you fucking seriously doing "well those people might be useful too" on a post about eugenics?

No one has to be "useful" to have a right to live. That's kind of the fucking point.

Disabilities do not have to be advantages for the being themself or for beings around them. Many disabilities are disadvantages very much fucking not because of ableism, oh yes my chronic pain is such an advantage, oh yes my friend who is allergic to literally all food is going to advance the human species.

"It's the idea that we know better, we know what we need, and we should control everyone else around us to do it"

The "we" is lovely, huh. "And we should control everyone else around us to do it"? If "we" is the human species, who are "everyone around us"? I hope for nonhuman animal liberation, but this is a post about eugenics among humans.

I'm not those "we". I'm a queer cripple from a Jewish family. I was born a cripple. When my mom was pregnant with me, doctors tried to coerce her into abortion so she would not give birth to a cripple. And I do, in fact, think that human hubris is fucking awesome, that we, individual beings, absolutely fucking know better and know what we need, obviously we need full information to do things, but we fucking should control nature where it can actually improve things. That's how insulin happened. That's how eradication of horrible contagious diseases happens. That's how the eradication of nonconsensual ageing and death will happen.

Life survived a giant vulcano. Life survived an asteroid. But unimaginable number of individual beings didn't. I weep for every fish that had their gills flooded by lava, for every dinosaur that had their bones smashed by the impact. Claiming that more individual beings don't deserve to live certainly fucking won't prevent such events of mass death. But the fact that some life survives and transforms does not make them any less tragedies. Each and every one of those beings has had, has, will have, exactly just as much right to live as me, a cripple whom eugenicists wanted to prevent from existing because I am a cripple, not because they didn't want me to suffer or something but because they deemed me unworthy of living. Right to live does not disappear when it is violated by something that is not a moral agent. If nature is unjust, change nature. When sentient beings are unjust, fight that injustice — and fight the injustice of nature too.

That does not mean trying to eradicate disabled people by whatever means. That means respecting everyone's individual autonomy.

Infighting among disabled people is NOT going to make abled people want to perform eugenics on us less.

If you don’t identify with “we” as a member of the human race as a person who believes in animal liberation, okay. Fine. But some disabled people DO identify with the human race and want it to survive.

….that is not what I said?? They put “we” and “everyone around us” as separate, and I took it as them placing the people affected by eugenics as those “everyone around us”. I also very much actively talked about wanting humans to survive, I am sorry if that wasn’t clear. But that is literally what I talked about when I was talking about the events of mass extinction. They talked about them and the “life finds a way”, but the life that finds a way is not the beings and specieses that lived before the events and died in them. I don’t want anyone to die in such events.

…….edit, also is me saying that disabled people don’t have to be useful to have the right to live “infighting among disabled people”???????????

No, your entire post is infighting among disabled people???? I can’t believe for a second that you’d really believe a fellow disabled person would honestly think that disabled people have to be useful to have the right to live. You know better than that.

There is a HUGE distinction between the idea that disabled people need to be “useful” under capitalism and the idea that the human species shouldn’t perform eugenics because limiting the human species might end to our extinction.

I took OP as being disabled, as this is a post about leftists ignoring ableism. Rereading your post, I think you took OP as abled and aren’t intending to be infighting. But I still am peeved you’d reblog this from me, someone you know to be disabled, and read “we” as being “abled people” rather than “the human race.”

OP is not being ableist.

a-dinosaur-a-day is being HUGELY ableist and outright stated that many disabilities (including ones that they believe are mostly only disabling because of social access factors) can be an "advantage" and is a form of evolution that makes our species "better" and that the reason we shouldn't do eugenics is because we don't know what might be helpful or harmful more than nature does, NOT because all disabled people have an inherent right to exist.

Revan isn't calling out OP. They are calling out the reply to OP. There is no evidence that a-dinosaur-a-day is either abled or disabled, but even if they are disabled, that's still some inspiration porn with added "ooh evolution pseudoscience" spice thrown in for good measure. It's still ableist. It's okay to call out ableism even from other disabled people, especially that DEGREE of ableism.

In case you can't see it:

Like sorry actually, my chronic pain also will never be an advantage for anyone ever. That doesn't mean that it's suddenly okay to eu-genocide people like me.

I assume this is a misunderstanding, you say you don't get how Revan could think another disabled person would think disabled people have to be useful to live when the reply in question implies exactly that.

Oh, never mind, I see you defending the idea that it's okay to use stopping human extinction as a reason for not doing eugenics.

No. The ONLY reason to not do eugenics is because disabled (and other marginalized!) people inherently have the right to live. Because if we stopped eugenics completely and humanity still went extinct, that doesn't mean stopping eugenics was pointless.

Because it doesn't matter if eugenics leads to extinction because it's BAD EITHER WAY. It's utterly irrelevant if it has unintended consequences largely outside of our control because the very intended consequences within our control are what matters!

It's fine if you don't want humans to go extinct! It's not fine to say "oh well we shouldn't kill disabled people to ensure that they can potentially maintain the survival of our species". That's using us as a fucking PAWN to potentially maintain survival of our distant descendants, centering our USEFULNESS over our inherent right to life. Any argument that is not our inherent right to life distracts from and makes that argument less potent by saying "our existence is not enough, we have to justify our existence in other ways.

I know I'm a stranger, but I'm disappointed. I expected better of you, transdove.

As a final note, it's not "infighting" to have zero tolerance for bigotry in marginalized groups' spaces. That's just the paradox of tolerance misapplied yet again. You CANNOT have a safe, effective coalition that fights for the liberation of any group if you allow bigotry against it to proliferate. Come on.

Thank you thank you thank you thank you t h a n k y o u