more thoughts about disability and presentation

(this is sort of part two of squandering slack)

I'll spare you a long description of my mom's problems with the way I look and dress. Besides, I write about them all the time. But it is just sort of a clusterfuck in the summer because my mom has logic on her side, i.e. it isn't reasonable to wear jeans in the summer, especially if you get easily overheated like I do and tend to throw up and have headaches. So my mom picks out the kind of pants she thinks I should wear, which are usually knee-length, and then puts me under pressure to wear them. And I go along with it sometimes even though I really want to keep wearing the same pants I wear all year. But I really don't like those other pants at all.

This summer the best thing ever happened though, because I got several pairs of athletic shorts to wear at camp, and I realized I liked them even better than jeans, and I also realized from observing other counselors that it is pretty standard to wear shorts in the summer and that's actually a more common thing to do than wearing knee-length pants. So I realized that I didn't have to feel awkward about not wanting to wear capris and they probably actually looked weirder than jeans.

You can spare me any shit about how I shouldn't care whether my clothes look weird or not. I can care if I want. And in a lot of ways I don't care, for example I could wear short shorts in order to look more standard but I like athletic shorts better. But it's just sort of galling to be wearing the capris and feel like I not only look different, but I look like I'm not in charge of how I dress.

It sort of reminds me of when I was younger and my mom would always try to tell me what I should say to other kids when problems arose. Even though the things I said really screwed me over, I wouldn't use her scripts either. I knew that her word choice was slightly off and would sound weird coming out of a 12-year-old's mouth. I feel like normal people don't think about word choice, but when they are kids they do pick out people with unusual word choice and make fun of them, so I was very aware that I already didn't use the right words all the time. If I used the wrong words I wanted them to be my own, even if they were catastrophic ones.

I was getting strangely and incoherently annoyed in an attempt to explain to my friend why it makes me mad to see a thirty-year-old disabled woman in the same high-waisted pants that her mother wears. Those pants look normal on the mother, but on the daughter they "look disabled." Except that when I say that, it sounds like I'm saying that the daughter should be dressed in order to pass, and that's not what I mean. I just feel like, whether or not a person is obviously disabled, there's a certain style of dressing that is prevalent among disabled people and makes the person look like they didn't pick out their clothes themselves. It can look very "nice"--very clean and neat--but it looks awful to me.

When I was 14, my mom forbid me to wear sneakers and skirts together, because she said it would make me look like I was mentally ill. I guess wearing combinations that aren't considered to go together, or doing other things that seem over-the-top, "looks disabled" in a different way, but to me, that way looks really good. I know a few people with ID who always wear a lot of necklaces and medals and to me that is the opposite of the other kind of looking disabled--disability is visible, but it's visible because the person is making different choices from the choices someone else their age would make, not because an authority figure is making those choices for them.

Am I making sense? I always feel embarrassed when this turns into a blog about arguing with my mom.