Today my therapist introduced me to a concept surrounding disability that she called "hLep".
Which is when you - in this case, you are a disabled person - ask someone for help ("I can't drink almond milk so can you get me some whole milk?", or "Please call Donna and ask her to pick up the car for me."), and they say yes, and then they do something that is not what you asked for but is what they think you should have asked for ("I know you said you wanted whole, but I got you skim milk because it's better for you!", "I didn't want to ruin Donna's day by asking her that, so I spent your money on an expensive towing service!") And then if you get annoyed at them for ignoring what you actually asked for - and often it has already happened repeatedly - they get angry because they "were just helping you! You should be grateful!!"
And my therapist pointed out that this is not "help", it's "hLep".
Sure, it looks like help; it kind of sounds like help too; and if it was adjusted just a little bit, it could be help. But it's not help. It's hLep.
At its best, it is patronizing and makes a person feel unvalued and un-listened-to. Always, it reinforces the false idea that disabled people can't be trusted with our own care. And at its worst, it results in disabled people losing our freedom and control over our lives, and also being unable to actually access what we need to survive.
So please, when a disabled person asks you for help on something, don't be a hLeper, be a helper! In other words: they know better than you what they need, and the best way you can honor the trust they've put in you is to believe that!
Also, I want to be very clear that the "getting angry at a disabled person's attempts to point out harmful behavior" part of this makes the whole thing WAY worse. Like it'd be one thing if my roommate bought me some passive-aggressive skim milk, but then they heard what I had to say, and they apologized and did better in the future - our relationship could bounce back from that. But it is very much another thing to have a crying shouting match with someone who is furious at you for saying something they did was ableist. Like, Christ, Jessica, remind me to never ask for your support ever again! You make me feel like if I asked you to call 911, you'd order a pizza because you know I'll feel better once I eat something!!
Edit: crediting my therapist by name with her permission - this term was coined by Nahime Aguirre Mtanous!
Edit again: I made an optional follow-up to this post after seeing the responses. Might help somebody. CW for me frankly talking about how dangerous hLep really is.
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fabian’s insistence on calling someone to tell them about lucy & yolanda because he thought people just deserved to know, out of respect. both deeply sweet & incredibly gutting. (bill seacaster move over that’s MY darling boy)
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someone probably said this already but in spiderverse i think it's interesting how when pavitr was first introduced everyone thought something bad was gonna happen to him bc of how confident and optimistic he was. and then in the actual movie we see that something bad was supposed to happen to him (police chief dying!) but it doesn't! miles stops it! and miguel berates miles for this, says it's going to cause the universe to collapse or whatever.
there's this idea that tragedy is inherent to spidermans growth, and while it's true that some spiderpeople learn important lessons through loss, no one stops to ask, is it really necessary? yeah, maybe the chief was supposed to die. but why does spiderman have to be formed through tragedy? why do we (as heroes) have to let people die? pavitr didn't lose anyone, and he's still a good spiderman! maybe, if he doesn't suffer, he'll end up better off for it!
so while miguel is arguing for all this big picture stuff about saving the multiverse he's lost sight of what it really means to be a spiderman, he's not looking out for the real individual people. yeah it's just one person who would die, but that one person means something to someone. shrugging and saying "stuff just sucks sometimes, we can't do anything about it" is the opposite of what superheroes do. pretty obviously, miles arc is also a reflection of the struggles people face in real life, working within unequal systems, where it's easy to shrug and say "that's just the way it is" and not ask "but why does it need be this way? can't we do something about it?"
miguel is arguing that you can't have your cake and eat it too. presumably, miles and co. are going to find a way to get around that and change things for the better (and maybe that's why miles has that line about two cakes in the advisors office!)
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When Danny enters the Fenton portal for the very first time, he still trips and shocks himself but at the same time damages the inside of the portal enough that it can’t sustain itself past the point of changing Danny’s molecules.
The electricity and damage done to both Danny and the portal isn’t something Danny, Sam, and Tucker can cover up and his parents find out immediately. They’re more concerned about their son then the portal (they have the blueprints for the portal and can rebuild it later but can’t replace their son if something happened to him) and go through a lot of things emotions regarding the existence of ghost human hybrids.
Danny’s new biology could easily be passed as meta human traits. Unfortunately President Lex Luther had just recently passed laws against meta humans. Meaning they can’t risk people find out about Danny’s new powers, at all. The Fentons decide that Danny should live with one of Maddie or Jacks relatives off grid until he can control his new abilities better.
luckily Jacks sister, Martha, and her husband have experience with a super powered child and after their son moved to the city could probably use a hand on their farm. All Jack needed to do was call.
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i also just want to point out the qsmp members' commitment to like never letting the inactive members die. like dantdm logged on twice and is canonically dead and everyone continues to blame mysterious happenstance on him. spreen is canonically dead and yet people are still like namedropping him even tho the house façade he built has been demolished and also probably consumed by a mountain. they meme on kameto who's barely been on except that time he was a fed spy that was iconic as hell. they just immortalize their members and they're always so happy to see old faces come back and it lowkey makes me emotional lmfaoo like missa barely logged on for a while but goddamn nobody forgot his name bc philza can't go one day without mentioning him and mariana barely logs on but every time fit saw the homeless mariana in roier's city no matter what he'd stop dead and tell it "come home" and when slime came back to the server for elections after having logged off for the last like two months everyone was still excited to meet him bc the others had kept his memories on the server fresh and alive, maxo died canonically in the nuke and pierre pasted his face all over the server, luzu vanished for months and we never forgot him either thanks to the computers and foolish's wack ass family tree. like when purgatory teams were chosen and team red constantly joked about how it would be so over for the other teams once germán logged on despite the fact that germán had only ever logged on ONCE, the way they cheered when they snatched rubius in the split of green despite the fact that rubius hadn't logged on more than twice since march. they just keep the names alive all the time and it's like
it just makes me really happy to see. like it makes me really happy. like the admin team and the members alike are like 'no way in HELL are we letting your memory go' like damn once ur on isla quesadilla you really are stuck as an islander forever :D
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Ra's definitely one of those father-in-laws devastated to realize that Bruce's breakup with his daughter also meant no more sports nights or fishing weekends for them.
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Writing Accessibility PSA
Please avoid using long strings of characters as line breaks in your writing - these are not screen reader/TTS friendly!
Every ‘°’ will be read as ‘degree’ - can you imagine how long it takes to read out a string of 25? Let alone more complicated combinations of characters (eg. imagine listening to TTS read out ~*~ |°| ~*~ multiple times per line break)?
A good rule of thumb is to stick with short, 2-3 character line breaks (eg. I don’t find — or *** too egregious to listen to). Your readers can tell there’s been a scene change whether you use two or twenty em-dashes, but if you use twenty, some of us might have to listen for 30 seconds to read the next scene. If you’re more concerned about aesthetics, you can insert an image of your aesthetically pleasing line break with alt text simply reading ‘line break’ for accessibility.
Don’t feel bad if this is something you’ve never thought about before - now you know better and can make your writing more accessible moving forward!
I would like to invite any other screenreader users to add their own thoughts or preferences to this post. We’re not a monolith and there’s a variety to how different softwares interact with repeating character strings and images with alt text, so there’s bound to be some conflicting opinions on what I’ve suggested above. Let’s try to make the stories we share accessible for everyone :]
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The farmer and people from Pelican Town :)
(part 2)
I love to fit the farmer into their environment and try to imagine how they interact with the rest of the village
(will probably do a part 2 at some point)
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