How I deal with internalised ableism (feeling useless)
Transcript:
Today I'm going to talk to you about how I've managed some of my own internalized ableism. If you're unfamiliar with the term, ableism is the discrimination in favor of able-bodied people or against disabled people. And the gist of the strategy is basically, I stopped trying to do things that I can't do and do things that I can do. And I'm going to give you a really specific example because ableism is like an ocean of trash that you have to wade through the disabled person. So, this is only like a tiny piece of a management strategy but like, I don't want to overwhelm people so Essentially a few years ago, I was freelancing and feeling pretty useless at it. So, I was basically doing a lot of jobs, that required my body to be at a specific place at a specific time, doing a specific job, which is how most jobs in this world work. But unfortunately, some days, my body is like, totally chill with leaving the house and doing something and then other days, it is not. It wants me to stay in bed, but then also, when it's there, it does not want to work from there either. And I was just feeling like I was the most unreliable and trash worker and that it made me like a pretty useless member of society. And that, that is internalized ableism and the problem with my thinking at the time was that I was like, so much thinking about like I need to change these things about me so that I can be useful instead of Thinking, okay, what can I do? And what kinds of jobs might let me do those things. So it was things like looking for a job that had flexible hours. So that if my body did a nope one morning, I could then just shuffle my work to the weekend. So nothing like an events job, right? That means that you got to be like functional on a specific day at a specific time and something where I could work from home, so that I would minimize Joint damage on bad joint days and things like that. And just thinking about the things that I could do really like, whittled down the list of the kinds of jobs I was going to apply for and eventually I did find one and I've been doing it for like 2 years now and surprise surprise, I'm not useless. I was just trying to do things that were not well suited to me. So yeah, that is sort of like part 1 of how I deal with the ocean of internalized ableism that ends up in your head when you're a disabled person living in a world but basically just thinks your shit and feels sorry for you. But I am not shit... Just in case anybody was wondering: Not shit. Can do stuff.