Hello disables comrades! I hope things are going well.
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Mask up, love one another, and stay alive for one more week.
I am so sick of people expecting me to be a martyr to a cause. I mentioned on lemmygrad that I feel suicidal due to my illness, disability, poverty and impending homelessness, and I get some irritating, virtue-signalling keyboard warrior telling me that suicide is stupid, narrow minded and never justified, and so what if I become homeless, I can just agitate for the cause on the streets! This, to me is no different than capitalism saying, "It doesn't matter if you're too poor to buy a house as long as you can still work." While now my supposed fellow socialists say to me, "It doesn't matter if you're homeless, you can still work for our cause on the streets." Never mind that statistically, nearly a tenth of women getremovedd at least twice a year while homeless. I guess that's just another sacrifice I should willingly make for the cause. Just because I'm disabled and fighting a benefit appeal does not mean I should have to martyr myself for the cause of those two things. I've had other people on here send me repeated demands that I start campaigning for disability rights by publicising my struggle in newspapers and on blogs. Apart from the fact that society doesn't give a shit (evidenced by the fact that even disabled people who've died of starvation or committed suicide after their benefits were stopped get victim blamed in the media), I'm tired and ill. It's already taking every scrap of my energy to keep on top of my medical appointments and benefit appeal, to beg for food on here often enough to avoid days of hunger, not to mention the multiple people who've strung me along with promises of help but don't follow through, so I'm contacting them repeatedly over time before giving up. It takes actual time and energy dealing with all this. I can't deal with more on top. Not only that but I had a recent foot surgery and have two more coming up - apparently it's not big deal for me to be homeless on the streets in winter, with open surgical wounds on my feet, having cancer treatment and recovering from a stroke. I should be using that homeless time to agitate for the cause! I am a human, not a machine put here to achieve a result.
god, this really hits home...
cw: talking in vague terms about suicide
there is definitely something to be said about how lots of "leftists" often don't unpack their individualism and just start prescribing what others should do (individually, in their own time, without bothering me) without even understanding (and not caring about understanding) the full scope of the situation. Imagine blaming an individual suicidal person for feeling suicidal in a society where it's completely normalised and happens all the time, and then precribing them an individualist solution, while their whole problem is that they can't even keep up with sustaining their own life individually
Not only are they being individualistic but obviously haven't unpacked their privilege if they act like a fucking redditor and give condescending surface level advice that's not asked for. Ew
To be fair, the worst one by far was on lemmygrad, not here. He contacted me out of the blue, spent a couple of weeks sending me almost daily 4-paragraph long messages about all the ways he'd thought of helping me, finally sent several promises of food vouchers and then just completely ignored me from then on when I accepted his offer. I sent him a couple of increasingly desperate messages after that, asking if he was having trouble with the food voucher, saying I'd accept help some other way if he was but after 2 weeks of almost daily promises and messages he just never responded to me again. And I could see him on lemmy, posting in threads so I knew he was still around.
Have you had the same experience?
Not exactly the same, but lots of similarly eagerly supportive people have repeatedly told me things like "just let me know if I can do anything" after we connect, but then get cold feet once I actually get into any specifics. It's like they're fully acting out a fantasy in which they're good, helpful people, but it only lasts until the moment that it inconveniences them or isn't 100% about them anymore.
That's it exactly. There are several people here who really have been very good and helpful to me, without whom I would starve and have to go without medical supplies and toiletries. But there are also some who are, as you say, acting out a fantasy in which they're the big kind hero offering help, but when you actually say, "Yes thank you I need help with this," they don't want to know and either you never hear from them again, or they string you along for a while (getting their dopamine hit from acting like a hero) and then when you're getting frantic and desperate, wondering when the help will arrive, they stop contacting you. And you're left wondering whether they just changed their mind or whether they were playing you the whole time. And it's much worse than if nobody had offered help at all because to get that offer of help when you are desperate is such a relief, you check back your messages several times a day with such hope, wondering when you'll finally get to eat, or get whatever you need, and after several days (or even weeks in my previously mentioned case) comes the sinking feeling and realisation that they aren't going to follow through.
I don't know whether these people get off on it, or whether they really are just so unaware of how devastating them changing their minds is. But you've actually made sense of another poster here who I was confused by. When I first started posting here, someone sent me a small donation. They chatted to me a lot, then they said they would be looking out for my future posts, and gave the strong impression that they intended to give more help when I needed. So I was really confused about why they never responded to me again. But now I understand.
It's especially awful on the occasions I've had to make two or three posts over a week or more before getting a response, to have someone finally respond is huge, and then if that person doesn't follow through, it's just crushing.
So real, you describe the feeling very well... Maybe it comes down to people severely devaluing the power of their own words? It's pretty popular to lie on your CV or give out fake it till you make it advice, so maybe people just say things... aspirationally?? I would say more, but it feels like anything I write is going to devolve into vitriolic bullshit and I don't even have the energy for that right now
Another awful thing is when people leave messages in the thread saying they're going to help, and then don't follow through. And I wonder if this is why some of the other people don't follow through. Maybe they make an offer, then see someone else in the thread make an offer and think "Oh this person has been helped now, I needn't bother." And then neither end up following through, and other people who might have helped see the message offering help and think they won't bother now.
All the social cred of being a good person, with none of the work!
I always assume the person still needs help unless the post has been edited to indicate otherwise, but we're all built different I guess