#invisible disabilities are real

[songbird-oracle]

Vent post, TW Seizures:

It’s so frustrating being chronically ill, being disabled, and being told that nothing can be done about it.

“If you seize for over five minutes, call 911”

I constantly seize for over 5 minutes. After having 3 back to back seizures all over 30 minutes, and two other seizures later that day without warning, I went to the ER who told me “take your anti-depressants. Everything looks fine”.

I get that I’m not epileptic, I get that my seizures are non-epileptic. But they’re long and painful and disabling. I lose my memory, I aspirate, I contort and convulse. Anti-depressants aren’t going to help that. Especially when I feel perfectly fine, I’m just sending a text and then I fall and seize for 37 minutes!

I try not to complain. I try to grin and bear it. I know that’s all I can do. But it’s frustrating. I was doing better. I was getting better. And now suddenly I’m worse than ever before. It’s so discouraging. And I ask my neurologists for opinions and they say “take the anti-depressants, call us back, go to the ER”. The ER says, “your labs are fine, go home.”. All I’m asking is “can I go back to work this week or not?”

The anti depressants aren’t helping the seizures either. Tried that.

I’m tired of being told I can’t do anything. I’m tired of getting better and then getting worse. I’m tired of not being listened to. I’m tired.

Anyways, I’ll hop off my soapbox.

To anyone else who feels trapped by their chronic illnesses and disabilities, I see you. I understand you. I’m so sorry you have to go through what you’re going through. You’re not alone.

Stay strong.

#spoonie #spoonie witch #chronically ill #fnd #pots #pnes #hEDS #disabled #invisible disabilities are real #invisible disability #fuck chronic illness #fuck chronic pain

[colourmeastonished]

Body swap movie where one of them has invisible disabilities and when the other one lands in their body they immediately collapse catatonic on the floor from the pain and fatigue and the first one is like 'oh damn guess I don't have to worry that I'm faking it anymore'

#i have this fantasy of one my able bodied friends and or coworkers occupying my body for like an hour #just to get a real sense of how much i am truly weathering hellfire every day of my life #sometimes i take stock and im like holy crap ive gotten so used to so much #im a frog in a pot and ive convinced myself the bubbling is just fun ambience #my thoughts #invisible disability #chronic illness #chronic pain

[im-suchanicegirl]

I appreciate and care so much for this lady at work who takes care of her son with disabilities, but this morning during an activity where we had to name our pet peeves she said people using the handicapped spot in parking which, yes you’re right.

But then she said ‘you see the people coming out of the car with the handicaped sign and they don’t look like they need it’ and i swear all the love and admiration i had for her evaporated.

My dad has an invisible disability. He ‘doesn’t look’ sick.

UGH.

#invisible disabilities are real

[chroniclesofchronicillness]

It’s all real.

#chronic illness #chronically ill #chroniclesofchronicillness #chronic pain #invisible illness #invisible disability #spoonie #mental health #pots #svt #trigeminal neuralgia #potsandspoonies #it’s all real

[lyrimi]

Hmmm…

Frankly indescribable how difficult attending university is when you’re disabled tbh .

Even with a laundry list of accommodations and hundreds of dollars in mobility/other aids, I can hardly keep my head above the water, and my pain and fatigue is off the charts.

Anyways ,, if you’re able-bodied and use resources deliberately put in place/necessary for physically disabled students you actually suck soooo hard and I promise you’re making someone’s already impossible day even more difficult.

Cut it out!

<3

#this one goes out to: #the profs smoking on the wheelchair ramp #everyone fixing their makeup or taking a fat dump in one or both of 2 accessible gender-neutral washrooms in my building #the person in my class who decided my reserved ergonomic chair belonged to her #(and yes invisible phsyical disabilities are real and valid obv) #plz don’t make me dissect that nuance #disabled #actually disabled #mobility aid #mobility issues #physical disability #chronic pain #accessibility #cpunk #cripple punk

[crazycatsiren]

Physical exam: normal. Full blood panel: normal. Me and primary care doc: well we both know all is not "normal".

#it's funny because it's true #the struggle is real #disabled #spoonie #cripple punk #chronic illness warrior #invisible disabilities

[uncanny-tranny]

I think the thing that makes masking disability very complex is that often, masking is done to protect one's self, but you still don't know exactly how you'll be perceived by other people, and if you're safe in the ways you want to be. Something I've learned more and more is that... you often can't "fully mask" in the sense that there are certain blindspots you may miss. My flat, monotonous affect stems from autism, and while I can (and do) mask other traits, I can never mask that trait. But, the thing is that I don't detect that I am monotonous, and I only learned that because other people perceived me that way and actually told me. That's what I mean by masking only goes so far, often.

#disability #autism #for me the things that disable me are 'invisible' and in theory i could mask it #but that's the thing about theories... they don't always apply in the real world #this is not me saying that i have it worse but that i think this conversation is nuanced and can easily be different from person to person #i truly thought i DIDN'T have a monotonous voice around people i like. because i percoeved myself as more expressive... #...HOWEVER that isn't picked up on by other people #i think this is a mild example which feels a bit less personal so i'm willing to share it to Make A Point #again i'm not saying i've got the One And Only Experience Ever - just that masking is really nuanced and messy #and many people cannot mask ever and that brings its own unique challenges! and that's a conversation WORTH having too #but i leave it to people who actually have those experiences because while i follow no-masking people i still don't always Get It

[databent]

why the fuck is it that some people cant seem to acknowledge that people can just... be disabled. not through any fault of their own, not because something "happened" to them, just because, you know, sometimes people have disabilities. like, come on

#.pdf #rd #kd #just a warning these tags are long. like. really incredibly long. i had thoughts. #sorry for the vague ass post i'm just upset about some stupid shit my dad said yesterday. #namely: outright telling me that he doesn't believe i have non-24 (circadian rhythm disorder). #and that even if i do he doesn't believe it's possible for it to actually be a lifelong and disabling condition. #*also: this post isn't meant to imply that disabilities that did have some inciting incident are more accepted or anything. #it's just that i'm frustrated with the “you're disabled? why? what happened?” sentiment a lot of people seem to have. #nothing happened to cause my disability. i'm just like this. no i can't change it. what the fuck do you want me to tell you? #i'd guess it probably has to do with society's focus on work and productivity and career-mindedness above all else. #and when someone comes along that doesn't fit in with the way things are structured it just doesn't compute. #because the idea of people who can't dedicate their entire lives to working is so fundamentally contradictory to their view of... i don't- #-know. meaning in life? fulfillment? that they feel a need to reject the possibility altogether. #this is mainly when dealing with invisible disabilities from what i've seen. because i think there's a tendency to view visibly disabled- #-people as belonging to a different category altogether. which of course is its own issue but i'm not visibly disabled so i don't feel- #-like it's necessarily my place to speak on that. #anyway. i just want my struggles to be acknowledged as real. because they are. and i need people to understand that I Have A Disability. #albeit one many people don't even believe could be real because there's a sort of belief that circadian rhythms are purely a product of- #-external forces like sunlight so “you can't possibly have yours be different and have you tried just going outside more?” sigh. #sorry i also just remembered my dad telling me he doesn't believe i can have something so rare because the chances of having it are too low. #which is some ridiculous logic to me. rare doesn't mean it's impossible. some amount of people have to wind up with it regardless. #i just lucked out i guess. #n24 tag

[songbird-oracle]

Small little rant/vent

I hate when I’m out with my service dog and people ask, and then they say “she will make someone very happy”.

She makes me very happy. She’s my service dog. Which I’ve already stated.

Look, I know I don’t look disabled, but invisible disabilities are still disabilities……

#spoonie witch #spoonie #pnes #pots awareness #potsie #pots #eds #heds #invisible disabilities are real #invisible disability #invisible illness

[sepostscreencaps]

Panel from Soul Eater post chapter 25

#soul eater #soul eater post #manga panel #comic panel #screencap #kim diehl #chapter 25 #more disturbing than all the haloween themed ones if you think about it #watching youtube shit in the background while wasting away while too sick to do anything like a real job be like #invisible disability #invisible illness #kinda #it really do be like that sometimes

[mercyandme007]

My service dog gets down time too- service dog education post two

When you see a service dog working for its handler in a heel, do you think that the dog never gets any down time? Anytime the dog is in public it must be wearing its service dog vest and be attentive of its handler. That the dog is never just aloud to walk ahead and be a dog. This is not true, service dogs get down time, you have probably seen an off duty service dog and not even realized it because they behave like a well behaved pet. I have gone out more times with my service dog off duty then on duty. My service dog will alert to my needs whether or not she is on duty, however what does change is if you can pet her. I personally will allow people to pet her when she is not wearing her service dog vest, and guess what i allow her to pull on the leash. I know crazy right, allowing my dog to express opinon about what she wants to do while off the clock. I even put her on a flexi leash and harness and let her walk and sniff on trails and such. Now I could go into why a dog needs to sniff and all that, but I think I will save it for another post. Over all my service dog gets more down time then working time. We also need to look into the time that they spend at home with there handlers, is the dog going to be in a heel at it own house, no its not its going to curl up on the dog bed in front of the fire place and take a nap, this is all my dog does when she is not demanding attention from me while we are at the house. She is allowed to be a dog and not have to worry about taking cues from me to do stuff. So i hope this helped you understand that service dogs are not always just robots to there humans, they are living creatures who need breaks and time to just be a creature. Because of all of the free time she has on sniffy walks and hang out time at the house, that is the reason that she is okay with going into public and working for a few hours at a time, cause she knows that she is going to get rewarded with 5 hours of nap time and a 1 hour sniffy walk maybe longer or shorter depending on how im feeling.

go follow my insta

@mercy_and.me

go to ada.gov to learn about service dogs and disability rights

#positive reinforcement #service dog harness #dog #service dog #service dog in training #lima dog training #drawing #force free dog training #dog training #servic dog #servic dog meme #medical alert service dog #service dog meme #service dog gear #dogday #dog news #service dogblr #dogblr #puppies #cute animals #puppy #doggo #bungou stray dogs #physically disabled #disabled #the solutions to issues from being disabled & chronically ill always being prevented by another issue is getting real annoying #invisible disability #actually disabled #young and disabled #physical disability

[walksamongstrain]

I'm tired. There are days when I wish my illness wasn't a chemical imbalance but rather a missing limb. There are days I wish I could force people to live in my shoes for a week every time they dismiss what I'm going through.

Then again, I don't want anyone to suffer like I do, in silence, my illness and struggles invisible to everyone around me, but the symptoms are clear as day, there for them to throw away as laziness and excuses.

I already feel like an outsider in my own skin. Unable to control when, where, or how my body will decide to short change me, and send me into that dark space again. I see the looks of disbelief, I feel the eyes rolling even though I don't see them whenever I have to cancel plans due to my health.

Maybe if it wasn't so invisible, they would actually be able to see, to understand...

Hospitalization for cancer or amputation doesn't hold a stigma when it comes to employment if you can do the job... but it does if the illness isn't visible and is in the head.

But at the same time, I'm so ashamed of my mental health issues. Of the burden I am on others. I fear that if it were any more visible, my desire to exist would dwindle to nothing from shame alone. And for those who have the marks to show for the struggles and pain, they're judged just as harshly.

Where as an amputee or cancer patient is taken seriously when they tell you they're tired or struggling, I'm instead doubted if it's not seen, and shamed if it is.

I'm constantly told I'm the problem by those who never even try to understand, while told I'm not a problem, I'm not alone, and it's not always my fault by those who do.

So where does the truth lie?

I'm told I'm not alone. I'm told people support me. But when I look around... there's no one there. Being told you're not the only one suffering in silence from an illness no one can see isn't much of a comfort. It's like being told you're not alone by a passing boater as you tread water in the ocean with hundreds of others, trying not to drown.

How does it help knowing I'm not the only one struggling if we're all trying not to drown? No solution, just that I'm not alone?

And then you see people you looked up to, those who helped you get through your darkest times, those older than you, who lose the same battle... and you sit there and begin to wonder: does it ever get better?

#mental health #bipolar disorder #mental illness #bipolar type ii #bipolar depression #mental ill health #mens mental health #struggling #the strugge is real #invisible disability #invisible illness

[fuumiku]

Wip. I do want to finish this, i really enjoy doing even digital art of Metal, digital which is usually painstaking for me to do, and I’ve got sooo many angst art pieces of him in the works lol

But this is vent art. And I’m thinking it can be a nice opportunity to give an update on myself? And have a talk about flowergore, machines, sketches and disability, because I’m in that kinda mood

I didn’t want to put a read more split on this post but it became too long to comfortably fit on my blog, so alas... Life doesn’t often go as planned, yeah?

Cw for the next paragraph, just skip if these make you uncomfortable, or if you want to go straight to the flowergore & metal convo: discussion of chronic illness & disability, with references to disordered eating. I’ve been diagnosed a bit less than a month ago with a chronic autoimmune disease that has been severely impacting my life for a long time without my knowledge: coeliac disease. Basically, my intestines see gluten as something to defend the body against, and that not only causes painful indigestions but also damages the intestines over time, so much so that the body starts having trouble digesting other things and getting nutrients from food. This has caused chronic pain, a miriad of ungodly symptoms like hair loss and skin rash, but honestly, more impacting? Chronic fatigue. I cannot express just how much psychological and emotional damage it has done to me, to have that decline of energy come in waves, but also steadily going down over years right up to now, where I spend most my days laying in bed, where sitting up in bed and booting up my computer is a “good day”, where I’m either sleepy, exhausted, bored out of my mind or frustrated that I can’t just be making the creative content I want to do. The self-esteem utter destruction, having to work through with myself that it’s okay to be idle and abandon all ambitions, to prioritize physical survival and keeping the will to live even as you stop eating to protect yourself from pain, struggle to keep up with your daily schedule and even thinking takes so much energy. My ipad, my accessibility tool that allows me to do something even as I can’t do anything irl, has become super old and dysfunctional. It gets overwhelmed easily and works slowly, closes randomly, corrupts art files and loads apps uncorrectly. Doing anything with it is either incredibly frustrating, time-consuming and difficult, or straight up impossible or a risk to lose work. I have a Metal Sonic artwork I’ve lost and redone twice, I’m currently taking a break from redoing it a third time. It’s been rough. But tbh, in another way, I relate to it? Massive brainfog energy, lmao. When I have to remind myself that machines are faillible too, I end up humanizing it and validate its struggles, even tho it isn’t alive and it just malfunctions because it is what it is. It has taught me patience and the ability to build back up work that I have lost. But hey, there ain’t no reason to add another layer of inaccessibility to my pile, and I ordered a replacement for it just today! I’ll be so much more productive and happy with material that works smoothly and allows for more. But anyways, back to flowergore.

Flowergore is vividly poetic, but I only realized why it has always appealed to me as a comfort/vent and cathartic aesthetic while drawing this: There’s an innate stillness and loss of control to flowergore. Pretty, but tragic. Illness stops being an evil, and becomes a simple product of life that does its thing regardless of the will of the soil it grows in. You have to tend to the plants, whether you trim them to get them under control or must care after them to coexist.  No matter if you find the flowers pretty or not, it doesn’t change anything. The flowers aren’t an innate good nor a moral wrong, they don’t even have an opinion about growing on you. They don’t care, they can’t, they’re just flowers. And yet there’s something so comforting about it, something that can be sad but that can just be peaceful, too. It’s about living through the effects, and dealing with the weeds as they come and go. Resigning yourself, or the process of getting there. It’s about acceptance, and compromise. I think flowergore has innate ties with disability and illness that can’t be denied, nor broken honestly, when you think about it. I also think it can represent/relate with dysmorphia a lot, bodily or otherwise. In my case, I have various skin and sensory issues that give me dysmorphia, and an otherwise “I hate my body and my body hates me” feeling.  The stillness of flowergore often resonates as fatigue, sadness or anguish. It personifies the illness in a way that you can better reflect on your relationship with it, and your relationship with your body & yourself, in a way that allows you to better vent about them. It’s very healing.

These sort of things are the kind of thing that sometimes, you kind of have to personify to distance it from your identity and properly cope with them, you know? Or it’ll just consume you. Even way before I developed my disease, or was regularly fatigued, I loved flowergore, and I think it’s just... A really nice way to frame things weighing you down, that you just kinda have to deal with and process through. Even vague or “normal”/”light” things, like fatigue or negative thoughts, feelings or insecurities.

And don’t get me STARTED on the metaphors and feelings of plants sprouting from an inorganic machine. It’s the classic “sprout growing from a crack in concrete” dystopia trope, except with a negative punchline hah. I’ve always loved to humanize the dehumanized: robots, antagonists and otherwise. I love having characters that feel like they’re on a high pedestral of innate difference and superiority away from others, but that makes them unreachable by default, deeply lonely and misunderstood for it, wether they’re truly an exceptional being or not. I love characters thinking that they’re above physical or emotional weakness getting a slap in the face and having to acknowledge their vulnerability and neglected/suppressed needs head on. I love the delusional, emotionally repressed with anger issues robot having a moment of clarity where he allows himself to be honest to himself for a bit, and resigns himself to the pain of his past and future, before returning to their regular schedule or self-destruction, or not. Ignoring is often the only option you can manage to choose when you don’t have the strenght to make a change or admit to something you didn’t want to about yourself, but ignoring is a lot harder when the proof grows ever bigger and more out of control everywhere on your body. It shouldn’t. It shouldn’t grow on you, impossible. But it does. So what are you going to do about it?

I think I finally get the appeal of hanahaki stuff too. I never understood before, but now I can see it in that same vein. Unreciprocated love causes flowers to sprout wildly, causing, at best, only body horror and/or wounds, when weeding them out or otherwise, and at worst proves to be fatal, most often by suffocating. Except that instead of illness or things like that, the thing you experience a lack of control over and feel some sort of detached destructive blame or resentment for is feelings. Feelings of love, like falling deeply in love, without your own consent, and the pain that being unloved brings. Your love, like a damaging parasitic disease.

Yeah, this isn’t gonna be my last flowergore content.

I didn’t end up talking about sketches, I don’t have the energy to and I don’t think it fits in with the rest anyway, but basically? It’s been an healing journey to allow simple, unclean sketches to be “enough”. To not be shameful, to represent progress and be pretty in their own right and a valid art format. And so, with all of this, I post my messiest sketch on social media to date. One of my very rare public wips. Freedom, baby. You get what you get, and that’s fine. Low standards art is part of my disability recovery arc ✨

#sonic #metal sonic #fuumiku art #my content #Fumi rambles #flowergore #metal sonic angst #angst #vent art #disability #invisible illness #chronic illness #flowergore art #personal update #wip #just bc it's a wip doesn't mean you're allowed to draw over it or copy thanks #is it flowergore if the body horror is robotic? my son is a real boy wdym #feeling like i'm taking too much space on my literal blog but it's fineee /hj

[vampire-nyx]

I do think there is a very real issue and a conversation that needs to be had about this phenomena in disabled spaces where things quickly become disabled people with physical disabilities vs disabled people without physical disabilities (but even that isn't quite right, since that concept almost immediately always becomes visibly physically disabled people vs invisibly disabled people, physicality being irrelevant for the latter group)

#there should be solidarity not competition #and there will never be solidarity if each group cannot understand the problems of the other #solidarity will never happen if physically disabled folks refuse to acknowledge that wishing one's invisible disabilities were visible is a #very real and valid feeling invisibly disabled people often have #and if invisibly disabled people (esp those without physical disabilities) refuse to acknowledge that they can traverse the world easier #than people who are visibly physically disabled #and that they need to be there to back up visibly disabled folks when there are accessibility issues and discrimination #that they dont personally experience because they're not visibly disabled and/or physically disabled #I want to be involved in disability conversations in cri/ppl/epu/nk and m/adpu/nk spaces but both are so shitty to each other all the time #^typed so strangely because I do Not need this to be in those tags and hopefully that'll achieve that #and neither feels safe for me as someone who fits in both and is capable of compassion for people who are not exactly as disabled as me #sunny speaks #obviously neither are safe for me as a radqueer either but yknow. that goes without saying #there is very nearly no space ever anywhere that will be safe for me as a radqueer

[sterlingsnail]

Im in this multicultural ethics class (for clinical psych) and I Hate It

My professor is an old white cishet man and the class was so painfully made for people who are not marginalized in anyway or maybe have like. One minority identity.

The class is set up in a way where if you Do happen to have Multiple Marginalized Identites, it immediately feels like you have become the class guinea pig because now you are forced to disclose what can feel like super personal information (personal history with discrimination, even being expected to out yourself or discuss personal medical issues) by the prof in other students to facilitate "discussion"

There are also tons of questions that expect you to have privalege over your clients, and so there are times as someone who fits under almost all of the minority categories the class defines I have to pretend I Could Oppress Someone In A Majority Identity. Such as having to make up a bullshit statement I could oppress a cishet white man as a nonbinary bisexual white person because I have bias against them due to past discrimination. I can only imagine how much worse this class is for disabled neurodivergent queer BIPOC...

Every day I interact with this class I Wish To Scream. You have nothing to teach me old man and I have so much I could teach you

Its week 3 and the word intersectionality hasnt even come up!! This is a graduate level course!! I only have like 4 classes left until I graduate and THIS is one of the upper level classes??? I got better in my undergrad general ed ethnic studies course!!!

#so angy #when i ranted to my partner about this they said this class should be something you should be able to test out of #like its such basic youve never heard of intersectionality before kind of shit #just real real basic toe dip in the water kind of discussions about oppression #also why is it that classes that discuss discrimination always tend to assume there is no one in the class of minority? #like especially the more invisible identities like disability neurodivergence sexuality etc

[applesandpavenders]

The daily mail has written a horrible article recently that invalidates anyone with an invisible illness or disability. The writer, Emma James, straight up calls them liars and attention seekers.

The comments section on this article when I opened it up to say something made me close it immediately. Gross and awful. This article belongs so far in the past it’s not even funny.

Please sign this petition to take the article down.

#daily mail #gross #invisible illness #hidden disability #ablism #petition #please sign this petition #genuinely can’t believe this article is real #wtf