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.
This is particularly true for mental illness, chronic pain, or anything that doesn't have an obvious, blatant reason why the person is suffering.
I understood this intellectually before, especially with regards to mental illness, but I have become more personally acquainted as my health and mobility have gradually declined.
More people will demand to know what's wrong with you than will offer to help.
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.
@gwynnion Yeah and it doesnt help me at all for these normies to suggest I should go to a mental hospital, when all I need is for them to make a tiny little adjustment so I can live where I live in this apartment.
Suggesting I go to MH lockup is like trying to move a tiny crystal vase with an elephant trunk.
Over-doing what I need help with.
@Rasp I spent years beating myself up over depression because I wanted to believe it was all about being trans and dysphoric and I should have gotten over it eventually.
And that is a lot of it. But it's in there now, the trauma has happened, and it's just part of who I am.
It hasn't stopped me from doing the same over whether I'm really borderline or mildly bipolar or what. I just know something in my head doesn't always work right, whatever the reason.
Izzyzzie
Nowhere Girl
Juggling With Eggs
Green Roc Thoughts
Ricki Yasha Tarr
Nini
Fred Checkers
Frigid Crystal Tormented Wrath