How Indistinguishability Got Its Groove Back

is something that might someday appear in all its parts and might not. Right now I'm primarily interested in writing about staff infection. Spoiler alert though: the answer to "how did indistinguishability get its groove back?" is exactly that.

Or like I said before: it never really lost it.

I think there are two reasons "staff"--very broadly defined as doctors, teachers, therapists, aides, and a million other people--end up trying to control people with disabilities.

1. They believe people with disabilities inherently need to be controlled.

2. They get in a position of power because of people with disabilities' support needs and/or youth, and have the opportunity to make people with disabilities more convenient to deal with.

Whichever reason is not your reason can be used as a straw reason to support the real reason. I could give examples but basically you know it when you see it. Doing this relates to the Harder Fallacy and Shocking Behavior and things like that.

The way indistinguishability got its groove back is that a person with power looked at a person diagnosed with autism and decided they didn't like the way person's body looked or the way the person felt about things. Or (I say when I get angry) the way the person said no.

The person with power started trying to change the person with autism's body (or whatever). The person with autism couldn't defend themselves because they couldn't talk. Or, if they could, other people felt their beliefs, opinions, and arguments were inherently weaker than those of people without disabilities.

The person with power told their coworkers or their employees or the other people in their field to do the same thing. They by and large did.

Occasionally someone was bothered by it but afraid of losing their job, being seen as a pushover by their coworkers, or not being respected by other autism scientists. But most people weren't bothered. Maybe the original person with power was very charismatic and converted them. Maybe they already didn't like how the person with autism's body looked. Maybe they just didn't think about it, accepted it as part of their job, and eventually came to be a little passionate about its rightness. After all, no one was trying to change their bodies.

When I say this happened once I mean that people in power make this decision about people with autism on a regular basis. Probably as you are reading this a person is deciding to be this way, and their decision will spread because it doesn't occur to many people to question it.

To some extent this is true about any decision within that dynamic. Let's say someone decided that all kids with a certain disability have to play soccer, or read Tarot cards. I think this would actually catch on to a greater degree than you would expect. But indistinguishability is such a historically popular thing for people in power to choose to force on disabled people that it has a kind of momentum. You just think about it and it's already there.

Every person in power who unthinkingly chooses or supports indistinguishability is adding to its mass. It's an army of laziness, an army (usually) of feeling safe in your body. Of being able to talk about how much you love The Office in between sessions of training a kid with autism not to make jokes that don't have an obvious punchline. It's easy to do pretty much anything to people with disabilities but indistinguishability has an army.

The pressure of the army makes room for more soldiers. Obviously. This has all been an excuse for a pun. The way indistinguishability got its groove back is that indistinguishability actually is a groove being worn into the fabric of society by sheer constance and bullheadedness. Have a nice day.

also: JINX!

me: it's so weird to have this identity that's massively important to me that I feel like someone could just take away
untoward.lady: nods
I have felt like that about my autism for a long time
...
you know something though? A lot of people have told me I'm not autistic or "not really autistic" or some other you're-really-"normal" statements but I have never, EVER been accused of being neurotypical by an autistic person
ever
sometimes those who have power over us, like doctors and "autism moms" and bureacrats and stuff will try to deny us who we are and tell us that we can't belong to our community
but that's why we have a community

from the inside, #3

Talk disabled to me.

If you want me to have a crush on you and/or consider you one of my best friends, this is a pretty surefire way to do it. I'll make it easy for you, actually, if I think you're going to be good at it. It goes like this:

"Wait, well, I mean, do you think I'm really disabled?"

And then you list the reasons I am disabled.

My friend Ari does this. He is Up There in my estimation as a result. One time he spent a really long time telling me all about how I'm disabled in different areas. It basically felt the same as if he made me a cake.

Some people will have no idea what this means and will probably take it as some kind of self-hatred. That's cool, you guys, because I actually hate you for having that reaction. These posts are called "from the inside" because they don't concern themselves overmuch with explaining a bunch of context to people who haven't experienced it and can't put two and two together to understand how other people feel.

If you do understand how I feel...well, I don't hate you. And if you want me to opposite-of-hate you, you know how to do it.

The Classic Disability Catch-22

(this is pretty basic, I'm sort of writing it to use for something else)

Conflict: A disabled person is faced with some kind of task that because of their disability seems impossible, or, if not completely impossible, so incredibly hard and draining that it probably wouldn't be a good idea to take on. This can happen in two ways:

1. The person is expected to complete the task. Other people don't think of the person as disabled; or, people like family and friends are very intent on the idea that while the person may once have been disabled, they are now not disabled anymore. Because of this pressure, the person doesn't feel like it's acceptable for them to say, "I can't do this." If they refuse to complete the task or fail in the attempt to complete it, they will either be seen as a non-disabled person who is lazy and weak, or they will be recognized as disabled, and demoted to the stigmatized category #2 experiences.

2. The person is expected not to complete the task, or no one wants them to complete the task. However, the completion of the task is the only way for the person to get something important to them; in the eyes of other people, the only thing that will make the person qualified for that important thing is the completion of this particular task. (Tell me if this is too abstract, because I can think of a lot of examples but I don't want to lengthen this unnecessarily.) If the person does not attempt the task, or tries and fails, they will have to continue living the life that's expected of them, which they don't want.

Resolution: A lot of disabled people end up doing things that are very very hard for them. Some people fail. And often success can feel just as bad as failure because working so high above your ability level can have effects on your mental or physical health, relationships, and general quality of life.

The Classic Disability Catch-22

Some of the people who do this may happen to refer to themselves as disabled (or as having whatever their particular disability is). They may do this to explain a problem to someone in their life, they may do it just in the process of describing themselves, or they may be identifying as disabled while they are engaging in some kind of self-advocacy or disability rights work.

And when this identification happens, other people often respond, "You're not really disabled, because you completed this task." (Or they admit that you are disabled but they say that you're not disabled enough to count.) Disabled and non-disabled people both engage in this sometimes against disabled people.

I don't necessarily like the idea of saying that certain phrases are always offensive and shouldn't ever be used. I guess I can imagine there probably is one person in the world claiming that certain things are really hard for them when they really aren't. But I find The Classic Disability Catch-22 to be such an extremely hateful and unfair situation--to basically refuse someone their identity or refuse to listen to their experiences as a disabled person, because of "the task" which is frequently making their life unbearable. It's basically like having people deny you your identity because you smashed your finger in a door. Smashing your finger in a door already sucks, guys!

Thoughts?

7. Break for love

While writing the last post, I felt required to say this.

I know that when I've talked about this before I've been disrespectful to people who identify as socially impaired and I'm afraid of being that way again. And I'm also afraid that bringing up the whole love thing will sound like a cop-out--"you can't disagree with me or be offended if you feel like I'm erasing your experiences, because I'm only saying this because I love you so much."

So I mean, you can still be mad at me, okay.

But I love a lot of people who have autism, and autism-ish things. And I've experienced so much connection and affection and support and sensitivity, with/from these people. This is why I am so upset about the pop-culture-and-even-a-lot-of-professionals concept of people with autism as lacking love, or not knowing how other people are feeling or how to support other people, or not knowing how to connect with other people--because who the fuck has been supporting me and connecting with me, Nailbunny? And I'm really really upset about the medical model, "the person is the problem" way of looking at weird and/or disabled people who are bullied or isolated. Because I love people who were/are bullied or isolated, and it's fucking damaged them, and they didn't and don't deserve to have that happen to them.

I mean, I like arguments. And sure I'm defending myself too. But I think this is a project that comes out of love and the rage that comes from love.

eyeballs to entrails

Loving another passing person is an intensely powerful experience.

By passing I don't just mean people who hide the fact that they're ASD, but people who may be identified as ASD but are considered to be "really high-functioning" or exceptions. What I'm thinking about as the primary characteristic of such people is calculation. Pretending to understand or not understand, trying to be charming, desperately trying to appear valuable in some area, or to remind someone of their disabled brother so they'll look out for you. Crying on purpose to get a break. Doing anything possible not to cry. Becoming comic relief. Dressing like you do drugs so you don't have to explain.

The feeling you experience is a feeling of sliding into home base constantly with nanoseconds to spare.

Getting what you need by sneaking around and manipulating it out of people; moving until you're about to drop dead; constant running commentary in your head about how much you're fucking up.

These people feel brilliant and veer between terror and immense arrogance. When you are constantly dissembling you feel like you could take on the world but you also feel incredibly alone. And you feel like you're made out of paper sometimes. You feel like you've borrowed someone else's momentum--like you're going really fast and that's really cool, but you could also smash into a brick wall and crack your head open, but it would be stupid to stop because it's possible you'd never be able to get moving again.

Loving another passing person is an intensely powerful experience, and if you know what I know you know what I mean. It's like being blood brothers. Not being blood brothers, but the act of pressing the inside of your arm against the inside of another person's arm. That's where we are now.