UGH as an hEDS haver i am SO sorry. hEDS sucks but it’s not gds most special disorder. I have several rare issues on top of my eds & comorbidities and it’s frustrating when I try to talk about them and it’s all other hEDS havers being like “we don’t need this!” or thinking it’s eds related when it likely isn’t 😭
I hear this is a chronic issue in that community , I try to avoid drama about it, but god is it annoying getting the 3827493th hypermobile motherfucker in my notes saying absurd ableist bullshit and then capping it off with “but I’m just like you so it’s ok for me to say this” like pls stop playing with my Paralysis Products before I Become Unglued
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Happy disability pride month to anyone with depression. You have a disability too- the constant fatigue, exhaustion, not being able to get out of bed, emptiness, all of that, it's all part of this disability. Just because it's not a physical disability doesn't mean it's not a disability. I know it's easy to feel like it's not, but it is, and you aren't stealing valor by saying that. People don't normally feel exhausted all the time. People don't normally feel unable to get out of bed, or do stuff they love doing.
You're disabled too, you deserve a seat at the table.
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oh god ed reddit is having the “uwu anorexia isn’t rooted in fatphobia my mental illness is not abt you” talk again please god help me
fatphobia doesn’t mean “being a meanie to fat ppl” i’m begging you to use critical thinking skills for five seconds and apply what you know about literally any other form of oppression to this situation.
people’s point isn’t that you having anorexia makes them feel bad and therefore you’re a bad fatphobic person.
they’re pointing out how the deeply ingrained fatphobia our society upholds, from misconceptions about health to moralization of looks and weight, including yes being jerks to fat ppl’s faces bc they’re fat, is affecting what you think about your own looks, weight, health, body, clothes, eating habits, etc.
the logic isn’t “you became anorexic because you hate fat people so much you never wanted to be fat yourself (and that makes you a bad person)” it’s “fatphobia is a prism that transforms the root cause of your ed into disordered thoughts, behaviors, and patterns (and unlearning fatphobia will help you with recovery and harm-reduction)”
like. it’s not for no reason that anorexia is a disorder that disproportionatedly affects women. it’s not for no reason that there’s sky high comorbidity rates for eds and ocd. it’s not for no reason that people who need control in their lives so badly that they develop a mental disorder abt it get obssessed with being skinny and not with being a sumo. it’s not for no reason that ppl who feel the need to retract to childhood due to trauma envy things like being skinny light and frail, instead of being a tubby baby. it’s not for no reason that there is an incredibly common anorexic thought pattern (internal and self-directed, don’t make me say what i didn’t say) that associaties restriction and weight loss with moral goodness.
for each of these there IS a number of exceptions, but you can see case by case how the root cause (trauma, need for control, for self-destruction, growing up poor, whatever you think is “unrelated to fatphobia” basically) is processed through the prism of the fatphobic culture we’ve all been raised in. some people just, voluntarily or not, deal with those root causes in different way, which might or might not be healthy. but it’s a consequence of ambiant fatphobia that “i should starve and be skinny about it” is a statistically pretty common response to this distress.
the point isn’t “it’s fatphobic that you don’t deal with your neuroses in a body positive way uwu” the point is that no matter how cool you are with fat people on like, a personal level, you’ve been (like the rest of us) bombarded with fatphobic thought patterns your entire life basically, both directly fatphobic things and reactions to this fatphobia. maybe spoken to you directly, maybe not. maybe about you maybe about other people. you live in a society that places moral values into looks and health, and also pushes some deeply rooted falsehoods about how those things tie into each other. you have a disorder defined by obsessive behaviors. maybe, just maybe, deconstructing the logic that those obsessives behaviors are based upon will help you deal with this disorder. and recover or reduce harm.
basically, anorexia isn’t “getting skinny disorder” it’s “obsession disorder”, obsession with looking attractive, or pleasing your family, or going back to being a kid, or being healthy, or being fit, or being driven and capable, or being worth saving, or having your suffering known, or having control over something, or whatever. the fatphobia that is omnipresent (and i repeat, omnipresent, nobody is singling you out as a bad fatphobic meanie, or even talking about your behavior towards other people around you) in our society picks the direction in which many many people will express that disorder.
of course if you live in a society that tells you “being fat is morally bad” at every turn, when you start developping an obssessive pathological need to control things, without another factor weighting in, most people’s default reaction will be anorexia. food is a regular fixture of everybody’s life, everyone wants to be morally good, and even if we know/understand/believe to an extent the flaws of that “fat = bad” logic we know the world around us still believes it, and nobody wants to be treated like shit. we can think it’s stupid and fight against fatphobia and work to treat fat ppl better in our lives and support body positivity, but in any case, one always judges oneself on different metrics than they judge others, cuz we control our self-improvement. that’s natural. just it doesn’t mesh well with a pathologically obssessive need for control above self-preservation.
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there's this thing where you can't say certain words or phrases or breathe a certain way or touch something for too long or nudge the book that's been collecting dust on your bedside for two years because anything and everything could turn the world against you
i can't sleep at night because my breathing doesn’t feel right and the prayer i said five times in row doesn’t feel right so i have to get up open the door turn the lights on retrace my steps until my feet start aching from how bad i need it all to make sense to fall into place to not hurt the people i care about because guilt makes your heart sink like stone and i still haven't learned how to swim
fox reads me poetry until fox is all i think about until the world isn't so scary and the static in my brain is quiet i tell fox good night i say i love you but it's rarely there so i say it again over and over because repetition speaks things into existence until it piles up on top of each other until i can gather it all in my hand and squish it together like putty and use it to close up everywhere the hurt is leaking through
exposure therapy sucks. it's not that i can't touch door knobs or cross the threshold or have to wash my hands so many times or that i have to click the lock and turn the bathroom lights on and the bedroom lights off and the doorway lights on and the people around me have to say good night with an inflection that tells me i won't die tomorrow because i don't know what my brain wants more often than not
words have so much weight and i haven't told anyone i love them and meant it because i’m scared if i do i will doom them to my fate of picking at nails and skin so i use loopholes like my life depends on them. i say it with breaks in between. the pauses are periods so it's a string of words not a curse set into motion it'd be nice to breathe without having to think about what i can or cannot say
instead i send poetry, i say read the orange by wendy cope listen to 400 lux by lorde it's not a love language because language was made to share love babel was a death sentence there are many words i want to say but can't say but roland barthes says, i've got nothing to say to you but it's to you i want to say this nothing
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