Fire Walk With Me

notyourinspiration:

bittergrapes:

We’re not saints. We’re not here to teach you lessons. We’re not here to inspire you to do better in your own life. We’re here to live our own lives, albeit in a different way owing to our disability.

If we tell you we can’t do something, THAT MEANS WE CAN’T. Most of us aren’t out to con able-bodied/NT folks into doing things for us. It takes a lot of courage to be able to admit you can’t do something; keep that in mind when you want to lambast us for not ‘doing our best’ or ‘trying’ or whatever.

We’re able to be happy sometimes. Our lives are not total doom and gloom all the time. And some of us have wonderful senses of humor that you should indulge in sometimes.

Our disability may sometimes seem like it totally owns our lives, but we’re capable of doing things that don’t involve our disability. They may be colored by our disability, or hampered by it, or somehow related to it, but these things are not totally about disability. Please do not act as if we are only our disability. We are so much more.

We are all different. We all need different things, we have different experiences and different goals and dreams and all that. We come from different places. Respect that. Even if two people have the same disability, they probably have a vastly different perspective and experience of it; please acknowledge this and don’t treat us as interchangeable.

The disability community can be frustrating, but more than anything, it is a family. We are all in this together, to get our rights and respect that we deserve. When you fuck with one member of the disability community, expect the rest of us to come after you. We watch out for each other [I’ve seen this especially with noneptic disabled folks looking out for epileptics] and we WILL protect each other.

Also, don’t tell us how to ID. If we say we’re disabled, then we’re disabled, not persons with disabilities.