You Don’t Owe An Explanation Of Your Orientation Or Gender Identity To Anyone. You Do Not Have To Prove

Zel has a bunch of toy mice, and sometimes she naps with them. Happy Pride!

Because of my executive dysfunction, I have to treat every difficult task as a life of death situation If I want anything done. So when I end up failing the task, Or not doing it anyway; It feels like dying a little. I used to grin and bear it, but lately I’m wondering How much of me Is still left Before I’m completely Gone

Je suis totalement d'accord si tu initie un fandom Les lames du cardinal ! Je n'ai lu que le premier tome pour l'instant, mais je le trouve génial ! C'est décevant qu'il y ait si peu de contenu en ligne à propos de ce livre...

Pourquoi faut-il encore que j'aille me fourrer dans un fandom anglophone, hein ? J'sais plus comment on écrit en anglais, j'ai oublié, et pis j'aime mieux écrire en français d'abord. Je vais finir par initier un fandom “Les lames du cardinal” ou n'importe quoi où il y aura des francophones, na !

Vous étiez tellement nombreux (3 pélos) à me dire que vous vouliez les voir en magical girls, j'ai pas pu résister x)

Whenever I get a particularly nasty message, I always check to see if they're following me first. Nine times out of ten, they're not. But they're also, unfortunately, the same people who feel entitled to send me multiple messages in a row, most of them heavily steeped in the language of moralization and purity.

Like whenever I talk about painkillers or pain management, I always get a handful of well-meaning people who are maybe new to my blog or are just young, asking me if I've tried diet/exercise/meditation, etc.

Sometimes I'll respond to them. Other times I'll just ignore them because I get those kinds of messages so often it's like white noise, and maybe part of me hopes if they stick around on my blog, they'll learn it through exposure via my incessant bitching.

When you see me responding to someone offering that kind of advice, it's either because I'm at my fucking limit or because I'm hoping it's a teachable moment and an otherwise seemingly nice person might unlearn some harmful biases.

The people who don't follow me are not interested in any kind of conversation on the subject. They do, however, feel the most qualified to tell me, someone they didn't know existed until one of my posts crossed their dash, how to manage my life, everything I'm doing wrong, and why I'm a bad person.

And for them, my disability is proof that I am a bad person because they view health as a moral issue.

If you're sick, it's because you don't exercise enough, don't eat the right foods, don't pray enough, don't do enough. They genuinely believe that if they say and do all the right things, like a Good Person, they'll never get sick.

It's their security blanket against the harsh reality that anyone is one bad day away from disability. One faulty gene, one bad infection, one bad accident away from a life-long diagnosis. And if they do get sick, it's a test. A challenge to be overcome with Willpower as they learn the True Meaning of Life.

It can never just be a simple fact of life that sickness happens. That disability exists without a moral reason.

And it's suffocating.

Day in, day out. Folks who don't know me from fucking Eve telling me I'm being punished. Not always as outright as that. They don't always use that word. But sometimes I appreciate it when they do because at least then they're being honest. They're not couching it in the softer language of leftist circles. Not hiding it behind concern.

Because the truth is, there are just as many folks who think they're liberal and enlightened who'd be happy if disabled people just stopped existing. They don't like thinking about us because it makes them think about themselves. About their own fragility and mortality, and they hate that. They hate that there's something they can't control with their thoughts and actions. That they can't moralize their way out of.

Honestly, it's a relief when people are just cunts about it because I can hit the block button, safe in the knowledge that they were never the kind of person who would see me as a person. But when it's some 20yo kid with their pronouns, orientation, and "ACAB" in their profile spouting the same kind of moralization, sometimes even with the language of eugenics, it feels like such a betrayal. Like a loss.

And perhaps if I wasn't multiply disabled, I'd have the energy to pull them back. To tell them why they're wrong and hope like hell they realize what they're doing is harmful. But then, if I wasn't disabled, they wouldn't be messaging me, so I wouldn't be dealing with it.

I wouldn't be expected to use my existence as a teachable moment to spoon-feed them compassion. But I am, and I do. When I can. Not always with the grace that's warranted. Not always with the thought and compassion I ought to. (And I don't; I acknowledge that. I'm prone to anger and off-the-cuff remarks that are hurtful too. Though I try to keep most of it to myself or save it for therapy.)

Basically, if you've made it this far through the TED talk, don't be fucking cunts to disabled people. Don't tell chronically ill people to try yoga. Don't moralize pain relief. Suffering is not noble.

You need to kill the cop and the priest in your head telling you otherwise.

And also if you're the nice people sending me nice messages. Thank you. It helps cushion all of *gestures* this.

University life is so goddamn weird because I don't understand anything and the only reaction my teacher had to "I'm going to write a paper about my Immortal" was a genuine "Ok, sounds very interesting."

Terry Pratchett started his career as a crypto-monarchist and ended up the most consistently humane writer of his generation.  He never entirely lost his affection for benevolent dictatorship, and made a few classic colonial missteps along the way, but in the end you’d be hard pressed to find a more staunchly feminist, anti-racist, anti-classist, unsentimental and clear-sighted writer of Old White British Fantasy.  

The thing I love about Terry’s writing is that he loved - loved - civil society.  He loved the correct functioning of the social contract.  He loved technology, loved innovation, but also loved nature and the ways of living that work with and through it.   He loved Britain, but hated empire (see “Jingo”) - he was a ruralist who hated provincialism, a capitalist who hated wealth, an urbanist who reveled in stories of pollution, crime and decay.  He was above all a man who loved systems, of nature, of thought, of tradition and of culture.  He believed in the best of humanity and knew that we could be even better if we just thought a little more.

As a writer: how skillful, how prolific, how consistent.  The yearly event of a new Discworld book has been a part of my life for more than two decades, and in that barrage of material there have been so few disappointments, so many surprises… to come out with a book as fresh and inspired as “Monstrous Regiment” as the 31st novel in your big fantasy series?  Ludicrous.  He was just full of treasure.  What a thing to have had, what a thing to have lost.

In the end, he set a higher standard, as a writer and as a person.  He got better as he learned, and he kept learning, and there was no “too late” or “too hard” or “I can’t be bothered to do the research.”  He just did the work.  I think in his memory the best thing we can do is to roll up our sleeves and do the same.

Part Two of This

"There's millions of Tumblr users" to you. To me There's only about 12 and we all reblog the same five posts from each other