Currently working on very small parts of projects.
I have had to make a break of most social media. The anger directed at disabled and/or chronically ill people like me has just been like nothing I have ever experienced. Often we can go to support communities, but the people angry at us use those spaces as well, and specifically to share their anger, not to learn.
And of course anyone who isn’t exposed to that finds it really hard to understand how very traumatic it is, even people “just asking” or positing thought experiments on how disability is a burden to others.
If burden is a word you are primed to hear/read because it means you, it adds up.
Many of us live utterly afraid of losing personal connections by being remembered of as part of that burdensome community. That every kindness, or help, or support will be tainted and a backload of resentment will spill out. Because it does happen.
Often we can reach a point in when we feel that compassion is running out, based on past experiences, and it’s only a matter of a few wrong words before it happens again.
So why is this year making that ever so tense?
An entire year being told in every way imaginable (and to most people unimaginable) that me and people like me should just hurry up and die so everyone else can get back to normal. There has simply been no response that hasn’t either directly lead to people like me dying, or rejected by the public because it didn’t.
The effort it takes to keep believing I’m worth saving, that my life has value, that I deserve every chance to stay alive is exacts so much of a toll.
People often tell me they can’t imagine living like I do, and that is not a compliment. It hurts.