“Here they are, young brown queer crippled and in love
holding hands in the co-op with an adaptive device like its nothing
here I am a middle age young illder staring at them teary eyed in cripple parking
I don’t say shit
I don’t make it weird
I smile, turn the key, drive home”
-“Cane Dweller”, by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
CW; Frank discussion of suicidality and ableism, as well as common intrusive thoughts that disabled and mad people experience. Also, in my use of “disabled”, I am explicitly also including mental disabilities such as ADHD, Autism, Developmental disabilities, and other neurodivergence that people often have issues recognizing as “real” disabilities.
I’ve spent the last night and a half listening to disabled trans women try to keep other disabled trans women from killing themselves.
Frankly, I’m part of the latter category, I just don’t have the means to do it in a way I can be sure won’t simply make me more disabled with a lower quality of life for failing. I’m more scared of that than anything else.
It feels selfish to be as suicidal as I am, with how much effort so many people have put into keeping me alive over the past six years in particular. My disabilities mostly aren’t even ones I’ve dealt with my entire life; I was physically abled until 2017, with somewhat manageable physical disabilities worsening over time and having new disabilities occur because of that worsening. My medications don’t make me abled, not by a long shot, they make me mostly functional (when I’m not recovering from surgery, anyway) similar to how my mental health medications barely keep me going.
You know what? Fuck this.
I started writing out an explanation of how long I was “one of the good cripples”, “one of the good Mad trannies”, how I was a working cripple who helped other disabled people even through my own pain, my own inabilities, even through the periods where I was only kept alive by the kindness of the people I lived with at any given point. I started this as an appeal to the otherwise-marginalized abled to see us as good people, real people, no matter whats going on with us; not “puppygirls” to send to the farm upstate when our insanity, our disabilities, our inability to be a small/helpful/minimally problematic becomes too much because we cannot access the help and support we need through our own disabilities and madness within a capitalistic white supremacist system intent on erasing us.
It’s not the abled who need to hear something right now.
Baby I know how it feels to think you’re a burden. To feel how the labor that goes into your survival “weighs on” those you love, those surrounding you, and know that you will likely never be able to return “labor” equivalent to that to them. That within the capitalist system we are being forced to barely survive under, there is no equation where we get to survive on our own without some type of financial patron(s), caretaker, partner/polycule, otherwise kept family, or frankly, luck. Luck to beat the odds and get some kind of “pays enough” job accessible enough to keep while disabled/mad and not have it crumble on us because we got too disabled/mad for it too.
I know how it feels to not be able to control your bad days, your responses physical or mental, to be told constantly that you’re faking it or just want attention or aren’t really [x] by those around you, that you are a labor equation poorly done by someone who can’t even understand why so many people like us are upset about any of this, and baby, seeing you like a REAL person or “one of the good ones” just ain’t mathin’ to her. I know what the status quo is. I know what you are reading and seeing and feeling every fucking day. We often can’t get smaller than we already are, but because so many wish that we simply weren’t there at all, even this remnant of us disturbs them.
But you are also loved as you are now, whether by one person, by many, or even just by me if there’s nobody else around. I know you’re scared, that you think they could be, we could be, I could be lying. That we just pity you, or just don’t want to feel the guilt around hurting you. That we wish you could just be “one of the good ones” so that things could be “normal”.
I’m not lying to you, and I don’t think they are either. Even if they do leave, it doesn’t mean they were lying about loving you, about seeing you. It’s ok to ask for and need help. It’s ok to be a whole person with needs and not just the smallest, least intrusive “botherance” to the people around you.
Your disability/madness does not make you lesser. The fact that you have different needs, reactions, that sustainability and functionality looks different to you, whether you know exactly whats going on with you or haven’t been able to see a medical professional since you were born, none of it makes you lesser. Your disabilities/madness damn sure don’t make you inherently abusive, manipulative, or a liar to those around you; those aren’t something that you got free along with the disability/madness.
Sometimes surviving a day, a month, a life, may require figuring out how to communicate in a new way to minimize triggers or meltdowns. Sometimes it may look like texting a local mutual aid group to set up walking your dog because you’re doing worse than normal for longer than normal and live alone, but still want to make sure she gets to leave the house further than potty trips to the backyard. Sometimes it may look like being bedbound and entirely reliant on the care of those around you to stay alive. There is no shame in having to figure out what needs to change to make things work for everyone involved, and when things have to change again? We figure it out then too.
You may end up accidentally harming someone. It’s a hazard of living and not unique to us as disabled/mad people. If you’re transgender or racialized (especially Black), that goes quadruple for us because holy fuck are like all of us so fucked up in so many ways. Sometimes there are conflicting access needs, sometimes there are conflicting traumas, sometimes we lash out or truly cannot pull ourselves out alone and act in ways that at least comfort the pain even if we know it’s just picking the scab instead of healing the wound.
This does not make us inherently a failure, permanently untouchable, etc. but we do need to be able to apologize, address the harm we accidentally caused, and either find ways to not do it again or create plans for if it might to mitigate as much harm as possible. It sucks, it might take time, and you might not be able to do it immediately because of other things going on. Hell, I have a couple of longer outstanding apologies I need to make that I haven’t been able to bring myself to do yet because of trauma anniversaries and then surgery prep/recovery. But we do have to honor that, for the people we care about, whenever it happens and whatever comes of it.
I can’t promise that nobody will leave – people reach their own limits or things get worse for them, and at times people need to be able to change and grow for themselves in a way that they can’t where things are now. Frankly, some people are also just going to be ableist/sanist and it’s how they are until they choose to fix their hearts themselves. But absolutely none of this means that this life would be better off without you.
It’s hard to remember that things are better with you than without you, and sometimes that remembrance isn’t enough, fuck knows I spend enough time spiraling about how I should’ve killed myself ages ago even with so so many people telling me how much I’ve helped them or improved their lives. But I really hope you can at least remember that I’m happier with you here, that every surviving cripple or crazy or whatever they want to call us over this still matters to me. That if you’re disabled/mad and reading this, regardless of how close we are, I’m proud of you for making it this long at least and I hope that you’ll get to make so many more happy days after this.