Why do People Even WANT Pity?

 a question I know I've returned to frequently, especially as regarding the illness- fabulist topic.  I watched Scamanda this week, which I thought I'd already seen, because I confused her with the faker on-staff with "Grey's Anatomy"(Which I'm not exactly a fan of, but I watched the reruns over lunch one summer and enjoyed them enough to be a bit jealous of both that chance, but even more than the writer's room dream, which hasn't quite faded as much as  my childhood fantasy of coming back as a macaw.) But also, I'd love to have my life experience respected, instead of feeling like I'd better invent a seated version of stuff other girls get.(For me, it's mostly not been like that, but neither does the traffic part when I roll by, either.)

Maybe I'm kind of a bad person, I think, if not the same kind of bad person that gets vaguely aroused during "Killer Couples" because, though I do know that, for every one of these scammy gals, there are probably a thousand families struggling and white-knuckling and  losing out. Volunteer coordinators tearing their hair out(those that aren't waiting for it to grow back for other reasons-- because nobody thinks cancer patients are real anymore.(And I do care about that, I promise you, but part of me watches wondering why I don't "pull" as a charity case beyond an occasional spot in line. Are big *blue* eyes less emotional than brown? I would never, ever, do that, but I do wonder what I would do with a tenth of their chutzpah. Maybe I'd be truly happy right now. I was an audacious child, and spent class time fighting to be right as if I was on some game show "Who Wants To Be In The Middle Class?" perhaps, but I didn't exactly win, and at some point, people kind of took me aside and told me it was unbecoming.  which it probably was, but finding that out did a number on my confidence that I'm still trying to make up for.

What I think is that pity feels more like being spit on than a warm bath to luxuriate in.I wonder, "Am I bad at this?" Even though I'm not dying and my mother would slap the color out of my cheeks if I leaned in for the handouts the way these people seem to do. Sometimes I don't feel as connected and committed *to my real disabled life* as these women are to these scams.  Sometimes I think they won't get true justice until they get injured or truly sick...does that mean I think this is a punishment?  Sometimes.

Sometimes, when I sign my own paperwork for my permanent condition, I have the tiniest urge to look over my shoulder as if this isn't real.  (It may not be fatal, but it's WAY real. )

Crossposted from Dreamwidth...

Urban Dandelion 

I am slightly worried it is too passive, but the more strident attempt was also too unfocused. Also, you know, I feel for Norma Rae, but I can't BE her, right? And, you know, being Gen X means never being far from a voice in my head that says "Fucking poser," and doesn't mean it as a compliment  to my social-media savvy or brand ID.

Can't say I always love my brain, even if it weren't obviously damaged in shipping, but I am kind of loving that I can take a thought and a picture I didn't know I had yesterday and make it into something I'm even halfway proud to share.

And my own Afeni might even like that there's a plant in it. 

Everyone Wrote About "Adult Braces" So...

 

Everyone Else has written about this book, so….

1.      Reading “Adult Braces” the second time through to fully decide if it’s messy like a tomato that I love, or when one’s whole purse falls out in front of everyone.  Still kind of can’t decide, though I wonder if L&A might have gotten similar results from, like, hiring an assistant they pledged that nobody would bone. Since so much of what I’m reading about them and Roya is about coffee, and bill-paying and, well, non-shippy things. Not that I know what triads or throuples really feel like.  Obviously.

2.      Love is lovely, though, and I wish I had more. How could I begrudge someone for trying to keep their thing together instead of sacrificing for someone else’s version of a principle? Yeah, it would be nice to feel like someone really had it figured out, but does that mean that person has to stick with that version of her life forever because it satisfies us? It’s like a larger version of why I got stuck writing snarky crippled college girls after my actual life felt like something else.

 

3.      As a disabled person with one easy-to-diagnose condition and one tough one, I welcome Lindy West to the neurodivergent family.  I also have read that women with ADD tend less toward dramatic, impulsive acts and more toward dreaminess, being forgetful and things like that.  So, you might have gotten some bad advice—my hard-to diagnose thing was dyscalculia, which would only have factored in here if I’d fully kicked it Buzzfeed style and written “10 Things I Think About Lindy West’s Latest” and come up with eight.  Or twelve. (Yes, that’s why I stopped aping listicles.  Besides certain old-hat aspects.) Didn’t get dx till way at the end of college, though I could have written an article called “Why Does Math Class Make Me Want to Die?” way before that.  Again, didn’t come up till more high-level math so maybe that was my “too successful” while people were trying to find paper, or pens, or resolve my non-existent “Yes, You Can Be Cute and Still Factor Equations” issues(seriously, boys in my class thought of me as either One of The Guys or, possibly, drooling tapioca into a cup, neither of which was ever altered by classroom performance, despite my showing up as if I were on a game show fighting for a slot in maybe the middle class, or maybe humanity, a great deal of the time. Who wants to be that person’s friend? I compounded my own struggles without realizing it a bunch of the time.)

4.      Did people, including Lindy West herself, really set her up as the Queen-Sized leader of the feminists? Gen X usually doesn’t get included in the chat here, but I don’t remember that meeting.  (Although maybe there is a feature like that, because editors tend not to respond well to “Leaderless movement from the bottom up,” and just want Faces—with the added bonus of getting to one day debunk what you set up in the first place.) Although, yeah, it would be nice if “happily ever after” were real, but even Jimmy Buffett wrote about “Happily ever after/ every now and then” and maybe that’s what people really get. 

5.      Nobody really wants to read the book about the couple that never messes up the foreplay and where the husband does EXACTLY 50% around the house, but did this book have to be *this* messy? I’m kind of thinking not. Editing is still a thing that writers can do.

Reading Two Books This Week...

 during a rare-ish non-fiction binge that feature, coincidentally, references to Creationist theme parks, something I've not thought about in years, maybe even a decade or more.

What is that about?

#synchroncity 

Sometimes Disability Life Is A Little Sad....

 

Sort of a mixed message this week as I signed up for a workshop on “Illness in Fiction” in a few weeks (I’m still debating whether to get my money back, actually) but also a bit somber that I couldn’t share a meme that said “Our Disabled Lives Aren’t Sad.”

Because sometimes mine is, even though I wish it weren’t.

 Sometimes, it seems sadder than other peoples’ but maybe not as much as when I was younger and almost thought abled people doing abled things was some kind of magic I was feeling cut off from.

 (Spoiler alert: Sometimes the pretty girls had problems I couldn’t guess at by looking.  Life is not easy for anyone, all the time.)  Maybe if it said “Our Disabled Lives Aren’t ONLY Sad” I could participate a bit more—maybe I’m feeling like a uniter for getting a chance to annoy both the ableists and the hardcore disability-pride faction that are so defiant about never wanting to change a thing, being part of nature’s vast tapestry, blah, blah blah.  Like that’s such an answer when you get your heart crushed because of some thing that’s not your fault, one more way. Or when it feels like the answer for every one of your questions is “No”.  Or when you’re fourteen or so hearing that for the first time and you just wish Jeff liked you back and thinking “Fuck nature” is the first time it really wasn’t, like, the horrible F-word in your head, even if you don’t say it out loud for a few more years because you bought the “poverty of expression” hype far longer than any rational human should have, even after watching Eddie Murphy fucking paint with maledicta.

(Okay, it helped a little, the first few times, to know that other people shared some of these struggles, too, but it’s getting harder to stay excited about that in the absence of true solutions, much less that whole tween thing where you look at somebody in the next grade and buy a backpack that looks like hers because you can’t actually be her.)

Definitely not seeing many—can I be completely corny, and call them “roll models”—anymore, and I’m not being one either, trying to talk some…kind of anonymous macro into understanding why some disabled sadness makes sense, sometimes. Not being able to move around, just on its face, sucks hard sometimes. There are places I will never be, and, probably, people I haven’t met because this is true.  Maybe one of them was supposed to be my lobster, too.(Though I try to think otherwise, because what can I do about it?) And, yeah, it’s empowering to say “Maybe in a fully-accessible society…” but I’ve never seen one, and probably?  Neither have you. So you might as well call and get the weather report from Narnia while you are at it—not sure why I picked that—got two chapters into one of those books before I got bored, but maybe my friend Jacqueline would have liked that shoutout.

I get caught, as I often do, between “A Better World Is Possible”(this would be a lot less sad if societies would do better by us and stop making us sing for our suppers so much) and the more personal terrain of “Don’t Tell Me What Kind of Day To Have”—I think many Americans are still scared of our bad feelings and admitting that every piece of #persistence doesn’t lead to clear-cut success.

I’m not saying it’s great to be sad—I certainly feel that I’ve done my time and several other peoples’ on that front lately, but it is part of the deal of being a real human being that can, in theory, feel All The Things.

So, if you are, try to accept yourself. Hope for a better day, and stop worrying about some hypothetical abled eye, looking for bumper-sticker wisdom.

Dear Alice...#AliceIsLove

 

Dear Alice,
We are contemporaries, so you are not my ancestor. I’m a little older, in fact, starting on this crazy disability journey while you were just a determined gleam in someone’s eye. We talked online a few times but I’m never sure how much people remember about me when I do that.  It seems that possibly my name might not mean much, but that we’d have a reference in common and that you would say “Hey, how’s it going with (Vexing Disability Topic #12) that brought me into your feed, but, probably you’d remember it better than I am right now. What set you apart is that you would actually know *what* strand of bullshit an online acquaintance was actually trying to pull apart *right now* and it’s not fucking great;

(I wish I could have told you about that, too, but it’s too long a story to type for metaphor’s sake, though I am probably planning to post this. Suffice to say, from what I heard from your friends this morning, you probably would have been tickled about it.

Your feed gave me a glimpse of what disability community would feel like, and though it seems contrary to the spirit of today’s events, I’ll always be angry at Elon and, indeed, Nature Herself for taking that from me, since I have it so seldom, and in such tiny bites. My disability community fits together more like Italy, back when, or maybe even Yugoslavia, It makes me sad that I’ve never had an “Oh, my tribe at last,” crip story, but I’m too tired of trying to convince myself I have to try to make it sound  good for you, wherever you might be as  I write this, having cancelled my zoom registration to make room for your real friends instead of my fangirl-who-doesn’t-understand-the-assignment self.

 Maybe that’s why I like to hide behind characters when I write thoughts like this; I usually make them better and bolder than I am. They get to win and so far? I don’t. I get to live to tell the story, though, which, in deference to today’s occasion, I’m trying for the first time in ages to make a good thing instead of rather unfortunate—it would still be nice if the next chapter was a banger—either with or without(hopefully with!) an actual bang or two.  Right now, I don’t see anything…it reminds me of after college when I had “detail-oriented” on my resume and didn’t realize there was a typo in it—guess I can take “visionary” out of my bio, too, right?

I used to wonder if you had a secret, sometimes. Not that I pulled out the full-on “How does she do it?” trip on you like an old lady in a supermarket, but, sadly, thinking about you *has* made resenting those people just that little bit harder(which, okay, it’s always hard to give up the hobbies of a lifetime, but if I learn something, I’d survive.) Sometimes I thought it was as simple as “Greatest City” vs.  “Oh, I changed planes there once. Damn, it’s hot.” Or that I never got to be Erika in the way you got to be Alice—trust a writer to believe that bylines save past the point she should know otherwise, and, you know, I do have some clips.  But am I a phenom? Since I’m still Ms. Hannukah  a great deal of the time, I guess it’s safe to say “No,”, but if we arm-wrestled, I would absolutely win, which, given the competitive mess that is the United States, maybe ought to be more satisfying?
Still wish we could have been friends,

Erika J from Phoenix