one of the most fucked up aspects of being an adult is really how life-goes-on everything is. like you can be dealing with the most fucked up trauma-drama-grief and still have to sleep and eat food to survive and like. poop. pooping while you’re really sad shouldn’t be a thing but it is. we don’t have a say in the matter. life goes on
There is an aspect to disability that feels very under-represented and under-spoken about, which is struggling to wash and dress yourself. It’s one of those things that feels…. embarrassing. Wrong and icky, like you’re supposed to know how to do it, like you’ve failed, in some way, if you can’t do it right- so much so that I think some severely disabled people pretend they can do it better than they can, dismissing their incapability as having been too lazy to do it. “Sure, I haven’t showered in weeks, but I’m just being lazy” and such.
I was forced to understand that I cannot wash myself- i have “high support needs” or “level 3” autism, physical disabilities, and i am chronically ill. i get too overwhelmed, my motor functions and muscle development are really bad, there are too many steps, it hurts me to move like that, my mobility and balance are very poor, i can’t reach everything, bending certain ways dislocates my limbs, and i’m so fatigued all the time that I don’t have the energy to make it through a shower alone. I really vividly remember once in the middle of a shower getting so exhausted and overwhelmed that i curled up on the floor in the stream of the water. Dressing is hard, too- for similar reasons. It’s painful, it takes me forever, i don’t have much energy, i hate a lot of textures and smells, and my mobility and motor skills suck. I can’t really do buttons, i struggle to tie things, and zippers without pulls are my enemy. Moving the way i have to is difficult. I need help with these things- but that’s the thing. The big hush-hush embarrassing subject we don’t talk about- needing help washing and dressing. Because that’s what old people do, or that’s what stupid people do, you can’t be like that, you have to be normal, you have to function the way you’re supposed to. You can be disabled, but you must be disabled in the pretty, acceptable way. You can’t need help with embarrassing things like that. “I’m [autistic] [neurodivergent] [disabled] [sick] and I can do those things, so why shouldn’t you?”
It’s important to me that i work to destigmatize this. It’s alright to need help with these things. You can need help with these things. I promise it’s okay if you need someone to bathe you, take care of your skin and hair, dress you, or whatever else it is you may need. We have helped each other from the very beginning of our species, and you are no different.
I am about going to gripe about something that’s been really annoying me lately.
First let me start with a disclaimer that I am speaking generally here. Of course both the U.S. and Europe are both massive and diverse places containing hundreds of millions of people, and a lot of regional differences. Neither the U.S. or Europe are a monolith (although a lot of people on the internet speak of both places as a monolith, which I wish people would stop doing, since neither are).
I could be wrong about this, since I don’t live in the U.S., and haven’t visited everywhere in Europe. But between where I have visited in the U.S., and where I have visited / lived in Europe, and from what I know from my friends in the U.S. and friends in other European countries, I get the feeling that overall the U.S. has stricter disability access laws than a lot of places in Europe do, especially in regard to building codes.
Of course there are exceptions, I know New York city is abhorrently hostile in its design towards anyone elderly and/or disabled. Although when I visited New York city it really just felt on par with a lot of major European cities with how abhorrently inaccessible it was.
One example of this is that recently I saw a Reddit discussion where a USAmerican vacationing in France was surprised at how many staircases didn’t have handrails, because according to this man handrails are required by law in the U.S.
The comments were all Europeans having an absolute field day with this. Pretty much all of the comments were some variation of “I can’t believe Americans are too stupid and lazy to use the stairs without a handrail 🤣🤣🤣 what’s wrong with you fat lazy stupid Americans that you can’t even use stairs without a handrail 🤣🤣🤣 thank GOD I was born in Europe where I was just taught how to walk up and down the stairs on my own and don’t need a handrail like a lazy fat stupid American 🤣🤣🤣”
A few people tried to gently point out that this was about accessibility for elderly and disabled people, and it’s not cool to laugh at building codes that are about accessibility, but those commenters were usually shut down with some variation of “yeah well in MY European country if someone is disabled or becomes elderly we either move to a more accessible building or we modify our home to be more accessible, we don’t sit around whining like a bunch of Americans that our building isn’t already accessible 🙄”
Which is, such a cruel way to talk about accessibility. Why wouldn’t disabled and elderly people deserve the same access to a building as anyone else? Are elderly and disabled people not allowed to visit friends and family? Anyone could get hit by a car today, and after that struggle with going up and down stairs without the use of a handrail for the next several months, years, possibly the rest of your life. It’s so easy to feel smug when you can easily trot up and down the stairs without a handrail, but so cruel to be unwilling to consider anyone who struggles with stairs should maybe be allowed access to the same places as you.
Honestly when I go on vacation abroad with my elderly + disabled mother, it’s often easier to go to the U.S. with her than other places in Europe, because the U.S. does tend to be more accessible (in my experience, and except for New York city ofc) making going around to different public places with my mom generally a lot easier than somewhere like France or the Netherlands.
Out of all the things you could clown on the U.S. about, why you gotta go for accessibility of all things? It’s disgustingly ableist and ageist, and I have to wonder if these people actually just hate disabled people / accessible design, and are using the U.S. as an excuse to hate on disabled people and accessible design.
I’m a Canadian. Our disability access is probably better than much of Europe (although I haven’t visited a lot of different European countries). But it’s definitely worse than the USA.
The USA has something called the Americans With Disabilites Act (ADA), and apparently it works fairly well. An American in my WhatsApp group went to a figure skating championship in Toronto a while back and was stunned that the arena didn’t have wheelchair access for spectators. Because an American arena would have.
Not everything about the USA is awful. Not everything about Canada and Europe is great.
Also, I live in Vancouver. We didn’t have a subway system until 1986, that’s when the Skytrain was finally built. Several of the Skytrain stations were originally built with noelevators. People with wheelchairs were expected to enter or exit the system at a different station that did have wheelchair access. In 1986.
The system wasn’t built in 1896 or 1926, when wheelchairs were a newfangled idea. It was built in 1986. British Columbian Rick Hansen’s Man In Motion world wheelchair tour started in 1985 (in Vancouver).
Or well, the Skytrain was opened in 1986. Let’s say the plans for it were finalized by 1983, since it would’ve taken a few years to build. In 1983, there was already a substantial disability rights movement in Canada, but several Skytrain stations didn’t have elevators anyway, presumably because it was cheaper.
Naturally, it eventually became politically unacceptable to make wheelchair users (and people with strollers, and people with canes or walkers, and people with suitcases) skip a station because they hadn’t bothered to put an elevator in that station.
So those stations had to be retrofitted at vast expense to make them wheelchair-accessible. It probably would’ve been cheaper to just build them accessible from the start, in retrospect. But we didn’t have a Made In Canada version of the ADA, so it didn’t happen.
Also, wheelchair accessibility does not only help wheelchair users. It also helps people with babies or toddlers in strollers, people using walkers, crutches, or canes, travellers with heavy suitcases, elderly people, etc, etc. I take the Skytrain several days a week, and I see all those people taking the elevator instead of the stairs or escalators.
Video Essayists were a lay priesthood common to the late American empire, whose primary function was to classify Toys as either ruined by woke, or secretly leftist.
this 4 year old asked me “do you know what dogs hate?” and i said “i dunno, what do dogs hate?” and she replied “they hate when strangers take them away and take all their skin off”
don’t let the christmas season make you forget that the lead singer of Pentagram (bobby liebling)) had literal bugs growing under his skin from being a disgusting old unhygienic freak and had to have them surgically removed in an emergency room in 2007
so i just rewatched the beginning of the pentagram documentary and realized bobbly liebling was hallucinating the bugs in his skin and was just picking at his flesh and went to the hospital because he was on crack so i apologize for spreading misinformation however i prefer the narrative i have pushed over the truth so i will keep reblogging what i said
