“Being disabled but carrying on living doesn’t make me special or worthy of recognition. I’m not ‘brave’ for having a disability: it’s not a choice. I didn’t pluck this semi-defective body from the lineup so that no one else had to. This is just who I am.”
Holy shit. I have ALWAYS thought the people around me were being unconscionably intrusive and power-playing in their starter conversations and they told me I was antisocial and oblivious to culture norms. Turns out, maybe I’m just from a different culture.
Huh. This is really interesting.
I’m disabled, and it’s really uncomfortable to field that question about work in a social setting. (”Why no, random person at the yarn store, I don’t want to tell you about that, or about the nature of my disability”.)
I like his
“So how do you spend your time?”
question better.
A formative experience in my early twenties was when I was in a mixed group of people and we were instructed to pair off and get to know each other. My partner and I looked at each other glumly. I was a young white girl who had arrived from another country and was painfully lost and alone. He was a magisterial black British man in his forties with a greying beard and interesting clothing. He looked at me with the expression of a socially awkward introvert being asked to do a group exercise, so I tried to Hlep.
“So um what do you do,” I started, and then I saw this most complicated and weary and sad expression on his face and just yelped “WAIT no I’m sorry I’m SO sorry I didn’t actually want to ask that! I meant! AH! What do you love!!!”
“Ugh,” he said. “Well, I really love pottery.”
“I ALSO LOVE POTTERY,” I yelped like a Hleping chat-robot.
“I am assisting my disabled elderly father in his dying process, and I am not currently employed,” he said.
“I have just immigrated and I am not currently employed,” I said, gratefully. “What kind of pottery do you like.”
“The kind that is rough on one side and shiny on the other,” he said.
“ME TOO,” i said.
The leader came over, “how are you getting on?”
And we both barked, in the identical tones of introverts being asked how they are getting on, “WE LIKE POTTERY.
We took two pottery classes together, made some rough/shiny objects and never spoke again.because he did not believe in the internet, and at the time I did not believe in phones.
But I think about him, and that exchange, all the time. I didn’t even want to know what he “did.” I just felt like it was what adults say. And if I hadn’t recovered the question I wouldn’t have known Hermes and made a bunch of really fucked up pots with him
See, I know I ask the wrong questions at times, and I know some of that is due to WhitenessTM, but some of it is because I’m an Autistic person trying hard to Do Conversation by trying to remember what neurotypical people talk about and HOW they talk about it, which is heavily informed by media, because how else do you learn anything? Basically I’m nearly 37 and I know I fuck up about 60% of the time but I’m trying to be a person and not be racist and ableist. And I’ll never stop trying, because social interactions do not come with a script, so every new conversation with a friend or an acquaintance or a person at a store is like stepping into deep water and trying to remember how my limbs work so I don’t drown. I apologise in advance if my flailing injures you; it’s a constant battle, but I’m never going to NOT try to do better.
Discworld is nice Bc half the plots sound like shitposts
Skeleton quits job to become fry cook
Wizards play football
Malls are actually a hive mind who feed on cities
welcome in, have a seat, stay awhile.
first female wizard fights institutional sexism
wizard goes to australia
shakespeare play defeats evil king
labyrinth but with tiny scottish men
cinderella in new orleans
german tourist visits low budget middle earth
A secret society summons a dragon so they could have a “hero” who’d listen to them come and slay the dragon and be crowned a king. The dragon burns down the secret society’s place and gets crowned a king instead. Them the dragon gets arrested.
“I think it’s vital that teachers are trained about dyslexics, about dyslexia, about spotting it, and about working with dyslexic kids. It’s absolutely vital because the world is changing and imagination is key to everything and there’s going to be a lot of kids whose potential are lost unless we train our teachers to effectively teach them.”
If you think Walt Disney was the first person to create a feature length animated film you’re wrong. The first person to do it was a woman – Lotte Reiniger. See more about how her silhouette stop motion worked.
Way back on the seventies, even before the first Star Wars movie came out, Laura Mulvey, feminist film theorist published her work “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. In it, she explained, according to Freudian theory, the two pleasures from cinema come from 1) identifying yourself in the story to forget about life for a while, and 2) enjoy looking at visually appealing images and people. Because the industry was entirely controlled by straight white men, though, they inherently filled the first niche with people like them and the second one with objectified and sexualized women, especially there solely for the enjoyment of the male gaze.
Left without lead characters to identify with, minorities —what an ugly and deceiving word when they amount for the majority of people in the world— had to desperately search for themselves in background characters. A big part of the fandom consists of women, people of color, queer or with disabilities, latching on to the few characters they could find representation in. They get attached to this characters, love them like part of their own family and friends, because they provide something that is so rare to them in mass media: a voice.
One can only imagine what it is like to be a straight white male. To go to the movies, enjoy the story fully, and then leave without the necessity to form any kind of emotional attachment to the characters. Why would they? They will find themselves perfectly represented all over again in the next movie they decide to watch, whichever it might be, and the next one, and the next one. Representation to them is not a luxury, it’s a given right.
Seeing this, it’s no wonder how confused and scared straight white males are, now that they can’t find themselves leading the charge of the new Star Wars franchise. Two movies in a row they’ve had to sit on that theater and face the minority’s reality, facing a situation that is so unlike anything their psyche is used to they react like wounded animals, with a primal fear of being erased from a narrative they are sure to own.
The best part is, for the first time, they are so desperate to find themselves that, like lost children in the dark, they have latched themselves to the one character that has given them a chance at representation: Kylo Ren. They have projected on him their airs of grandeur, blind expectative of an easy redemption and even the misguided self-assurance that, in the end, he will be the ‘true hero’ —instead of the women and people of color who are actually fighting evil in the story. Inadvertently, though, they have willingly chosen to self identify with the most annoying, manipulative, mediocre, unbelievably self-righteous and unbearably whinny fuck-boy this franchise has ever created.
Though, looking at their reactions and comments online, they might not be too far off on that one.
“Imagine that you wake up in the morning and I hand you twenty-five very sharp forks. Every time you say something ableist to me, I take a fork away from you. When you are all out of forks, each ableist thing you say means I get to stab you really hard with a fork, and leave it stuck in your skin.
You are still talking. And so I take the last fork, and I shove it down your throat. This is called fork theory and it’s about how angry I am.”
thinking about the statement that all maladaptive coping mechanisms were helpful and, well, adaptive, at some point, and that they become maladaptive when the circumstance changes or when their detriments outweigh their benefits, and how the framework of “this is no longer helpful to you” is probably better than “this is a bad habit/this is bad for you.” How much better “you don’t have to live like that anymore” feels than “that’s a bad habit you picked up when you were in a bad place.” “It’s ok, you can look now,” vs “you’ve been tainted/infected/sullied by a previous bad circumstance.”
Thought about this today while reading about hermit crabs.
Hermit crabs start out their lives tiny and defenceless, and they choose a small shell to protect them. When they grow too big for the shell, big enough that it stops them from growing more, they abandon it and move on to a shell better for them at that size.
Does that mean the old shell was a terrible mistake? No, because it protected them back when they were smaller and more defenceless! But now it’s limiting their growth, and it’s time for them to find a better shell.
Humans, like hermit crabs, pick up shells when we need protection. Sometimes, we need to ditch those shells to keep growing! If we look at them as shells instead of Irredeemable Moral Failures, it’s a hell of a lot easier to let them go.
knitting in the dark 
