Confronting another attempted murder of disabled man

I write unsent letters, and I write unfinished stories.  Today, I did both.

Letters are simple--bursts of emotion dashed off to myself or to people who will know what the meanings are.  Writing a story might take more time.  In the days when I wrote every day, I might spend twenty to forty minutes and have 300 to 500 imperfect words to show for it.  Something, at least.  But the stories that mean the most have been with me since I was young, before I was writing them down.

I fold pieces of them into other stories, other characters, other circumstances, and they are not literally mine anymore, they're safely somewhere else.  But only I could tell them.

I began writing the stories I couldn't write down when I was four or five, and instead of written words they came out in tears.  Tears of emotional release as I settled into my private world where I could process the terror of my childhood.

Poems came later, at age ten, when I woke long before I had to for school and sat down to write as my form of meditation.

I brought the old poems out of a forgotten cranny in my room today and put them on my office shelf.
Then I went off to be with friends.  Friends of a friend, and some of them knew me and some of them didn't, but it was good.

Sometimes maybe you shouldn't log back in to the Internet after a thing like that.  Or maybe you should.  I don't know the answer.

A "mother" left her son, her disabled son, with CP, in a park, alone, to die there.

As a child of five, of ten, of fifteen, this was my single greatest fear.

The parallels are there--not exact, but close enough. Close enough that I wrote stories so close to this mark from age nineteen until I don't know when--I'm still writing them.

In the stories, always, my character is saved.  Not saved by love of a mother, because I have never been able to write that story, but saved by the love of caring, obstinate people who believed in him, chosen family, of a partner, of a life.

When I was younger, imagining the details of the life was an easier task, and I don't know if what I have now would seem like much of anything to most people around me, but here I am, alive, having cried my tears, having had my heart palpitations, and having gone to find my characters.  I listened to them process the news, reassure each other that they were safe and so was I, and then I put words to paper--the letter unsent, the story unwritten, but known, inside of me, and I breathed. Because I must.

Thoughts on surviving familial abuse over Samhain week

It's been a tough week for me, and for many people in the disability rights community.  When a terrible thing happens, it brings out all the things that make us sad.  But I can only speak, right now, about my own personal experiences, because it's what there is energy to do.  These personal experiences reflect something many people go through...so we'll get to common ground eventually in this post.

Last Friday was Halloween, or, for me, Samhain. I guess when a person dies early in your life, someone who taught you what you knew about activism, someone who put the fire for it in your blood, you might get obsessed with holidays for honoring the dead at an early age, and that's pretty much me.  My uncle's been on my mind, and I felt that I did a good job honoring him last Friday.

The last time that I felt I was honoring him properly, I came out to his family (more) about abuse I dealt with in my home.

My family is Irish Catholic, and we don't talk about much.  That's the way it is. But abuse still happens, and I don't get anywhere by bottling it all in.  I felt that I would have been supported by my uncle when I went into more detail than I ever had before about things that happened in my immediate family's home, partly while I was estranged from him and the rest of my maternal relatives.

My mother is an extreme, unrepentant abuser.  Her situation is complicated.  But this post is not about her. It's not really even directly about my family, either...  It's about the reaction to when you can't contain it anymore and you come out to your family about abuse.

A lot of people are disowned by their families of origin. And for coming out about the abuse I dealt with, I lost contact with an aunt.  No, I was not in a good place. No, I was not considering her feelings.  I was exploding inside.  I was going out of my mind.  I was not going to be quiet about it any more.

There are many layers of abuse in my past, and for a lot of complicated reasons I confronted my family on St. Patrick's Day.  I'm Irish, but it's not a good day for me because of associations with abuse, and other cultural reasons it's too complicated to get into here.  And I was trying to reclaim it.

And I did do that.

If I lost contact with this aunt, part of it was my refusal to see things her way, that I had "been inappropriate" in disclosing.

I did it for myself, yes, but I also did it for the many disabled people who suffer endless abuse from family and caregivers. I am older than many of my other disabled friends, and I was showing them...it wasn't just them, it was me too, it is all of us.  And it is okay to confront your family.

It is okay to confront your family--if you will be safe physically from retribution. It is okay to protect yourself and it is okay to call out able-bodied people for the ableist, abusive things that they do.

It is okay, and it also hurts.

It hurts to lose family, which you might.  It is terrible, really, to feel unsupported... but if your brain is going to cook from the stress of holding it in... you are under no obligation to protect people like that. You are under no obligation to protect people who abuse you and you are under no obligation to protect the people who protect your abusers. Even if they are your "family."

My family is small. Some relatives, a few who are dead, and a few who are alive. A few friends.  Not all of my family are blood relatives and not all of my friends are family.  It's a lonely road, but holding in stories of abuse has always been worse.  Holding things in is not a thing I do well.  Call it not being raised with boundaries, call it having no filter, call it being a loudmouth.

Whatever it is, I know I'd have my uncle's support.  Every year, I'll reclaim the day I confronted my family a little bit more in his name.  It's all I can do.

If any of this resonates with you, find your chosen family.  Talk to them. If you can't confront family members, at least let it out to safe people. There is nothing wrong with any of this. There is something wrong with abuse, with protecting abusers, with condoning abuse, with blaming the victim.  But not with calling abuse of people, especially disabled or otherwise marginalized people, what it is.

Happy Samhain, all. May it be a better new year.

Systemic Eugenic Thought

This entry is in the category of entries I wish I didn’t have to write.  This should not have to be a thing that is delineated.  But nevertheless, here we go.  Please note examples used in any links on this matter are only the ones readily available and where they are there are many others underreported or unexamined.

I am trying to process a bit of the crud that crept into another entry and made it nonsensical. It’s possible that this entry will also be full of palpable, white hot rage.  But that’s okay.  An entry like this is supposed to be full of well-channeled anger.  We shouldn’t live in a society where I have to write entries like this.

The truth is that eugenic thought has powered society possibly since time out of mind.  Creation of categories, shoving people into them and making one category better than the other category is all the basis for eugenic thought.  Eugenics itself is the theory that with better breeding practices we can eliminate undesirable people. And that is bad enough, as it is the origin of the prison system in the United States as well as the mental health system, draconic as it still is.  There are a lot of very obvious examples, the most obvious of them being Autism Speaks, a 24/7 eugenics propaganda machine actively encouraging parents of autistic kids to hate, harm, and kill them.  There are other examples too, though.

If you think of your disabled child, any disabled child, as less than your other children, congratulations, you’re engaging in eugenic thought. If you think your disabled kid should come to more harm than your other kids, you’re engaging in eugenic thought. If you think of your disabled kid as a burden, too annoying, too hard to handle, bingo.  And it is the position of this blog that if you don't even bother to treat your kids equally on any level, if you abuse one kid more than the other kids, you've officially gone around the bend.  Go ahead.  Ask me how I know.

But eugenics is really everywhere in pretty much every way.  Just look at the way the way the law applies disproportionately to people of color, to women, to  disabled people and people with mental health issues. (As someone profiled by police on the basis of disability I can tell you this is a real thing as well.)  We don’t even have to apply cut-and-dried eugenics to any of these situations because the system is now so air-tight it permeates every aspect of society.  Racism is eugenic. Classism is eugenic. Sexism is eugenic. Subjugation of an underclass is eugenic.  So how many times in society does eugenic thought really come into play?  We play into it every single day.  Eugenic thought spawned the first articulation of eugenics as a social movement.  Society is preoccupied with it at the deepest levels of its institutions and how they are oppressive.  It had to come from somewhere, and it was there and systemic enough already to spawn the first eugenics movements in the world. (America, I'm looking at you.)
Try to be mindful.  You’ll start seeing it everywhere.