Abled people find it hard to believe how many people are actually disabled, vulnerable, mentally ill, or have chronic pain and impairment that requires ongoing medication or other treatment because they think of themselves as "normal" and "the default" and assume other people are faking.
It's a pretty common story, the same as every other dominant group looking askance at the marginalized and asking why they can't just bootstrap themselves out of the problem.
Even as they make it worse.
I’m in my mid forties, deaf and still shocked that so many of my friends from school and uni are in constant physical pain and/or have been diagnosed as neurodiverse. I don’t dispute their diagnoses at all, I just never imagined this would happen to us. The mainstream mindset is so pervasive that it even infected me as someone who was never part of the ‘norm’.
I’m in the UK, so in theory have the NHS…but in practice I watch as friends and relatives are just put on waiting lists to rot and have to constantly fight for any element of benefits and support. It’s exhausting. I had my own scary experience a couple of weeks back. After having worn NHS prescribed hearing aids since age of 6, I was suddenly advised by GP to go to high street opticians (?!) for hearing test. Luckily optician said I was 5 yrs too young and still NHS.
The problem is the Tory government is slowly killing the NHS because it wants to replace it with a US style insurance based system. Tories are the elite who have always resented the NHS as they see paying for it through taxation as wrong because they would never deign to use it…so paying twice.
But we don’t have a history of employers contributing to employee insurance, nor do people my age have savings or disposable income to pay to go private. So we’re doomed.
I do intend to fight like hell…it’s just waking up the folks who are sleepwalking into this saying ‘I’m alright Jack’, not realising one day they or their kids could wind up with extortionate medical bills that will bankrupt them.
Nowhere Girl
Juggling With Eggs