#keep surviving friends

[medsocionwheels]

The Breaking Period: View from My Wheelchair

My experience entering year 4 of the COVID-19 pandemic as a disabled medical sociologist

To everyone who has ever had to say "no, I really can't use the stairs." I don't know what our path forward is, but I am secure knowing our community has only gotten tighter during COVID.

Today I am exhausted. As we approach the end of the fourth February of the COVID-19 pandemic, I am hopeful, I see change happening, but the length of this journey has absolutely drained me. I’m not alone in this—most of us who have a realistic understanding of COVID-19 risk knew this point was coming.

The breaking point.

Unfortunately, those of us who are COVID-19 realists and were disabled prior to the pandemic also predicted the breaking point would be lengthy. More of a “breaking period” than a point. I am so relieved that non-disabled people are finally starting to take action. At the same time, I want to scream every time a non-disabled COVID-19 realist says something along the lines of “Nobody could have predicted this!”

Because, quite frankly, it’s not true. Disabled people predicted this. Most non-disabled people refused to listen. This includes some very important and powerful people in medicine and public health. Some of those people still refuse to listen, even as they adjust their own behavior and approach to advising others on risk mitigation for COVID-19.

To give some examples, this can include claiming that nobody predicted that people would deny COVID-19 risk and/or normalize it, but it can also include things like blaming anti-vaxxers and people who support former President Donald Trump for this mess. The most common means of ignoring disabled people, though, has been the misunderstanding by many in medicine and public health that their colleagues’ ignorance of COVID-19’s lasting effects on the human body is unintentional, and that their peers’ unwillingness to confront COVID-19 risk head-on has something to do with their fear of patients lashing out and not because they themselves are pretty much over the pandemic.

There are also some takes I find quite humorous, given my own position as a medical sociologist who studies behavior and ideology related to health risks. Some of the COVID-19 realists who were non-disabled prior to COVID-19 seem to think that (1) doctors with long COVID will take action that influences a cultural change in medicine to value disabled bodies, and/or (2) if enough people in medicine and public health get long COVID scientists will be forced to find a cure. If you don’t believe me on point 1, see point 2—if you can’t accept that chronic illness is not curable, you will NEVER influence cultural change in medicine to value disabled bodies. Besides this, any disabled academic can tell you credentials don’t mean shit in a system that has decided you do not belong.

The sad reality is that doctors who catch long COVID will not maintain a level of power that is equal to their colleagues—their opinions will be dismissed, and many of them will be pushed out of medicine for “failing” to “overcome” their illness. Once you are disabled by chronic illness, that disability becomes a master status in context of any medical encounter. It does not matter that you are an MD, a PhD, and MPH, or all three—in that appointment, you are a disabled patient, and that leaves you with very little power to convince non-disabled clinicians to do anything differently. In fact, it leaves you with very little power to even attempt a dialogue.

I think people in medicine have had an especially difficult time coming to grips with the full reality of the COVID-19 crisis because that reality includes that medicine and healthcare in the United States have always operated primarily as businesses catering to wealthy, white, and non-disabled, people. Being truly realistic about COVID-19 includes acknowledging that the pandemic is not something that has happened to healthcare and medical actors, but instead, is something resulting from a long history of intentional actions by powerful actors, including those in medicine, to normalize health risks resulting from or exacerbated by the pursuit of wealth as long as they harmed social undesirables. It doesn’t feel great to admit you were part of the problem that is now harming you, but it feels especially bad to admit you could have prevented the harm you are currently experiencing if you had cared about it when it was harming others. As someone who studies behavior and ideology, I can tell you that most of us consider ourselves to be “good” people. As someone who has studied “deviant” behavior quite extensively, I can also tell you that most of us will try to rationalize a deviant behavior—the rationalization helps ease the cognitive dissonance of “I made a decision I knew was potentially harmful or frowned upon and something bad happened” when “I am a good person.”

So, as we enter the “breaking period” of the pandemic, while I am hopeful, I am also tired, and I know I am not as optimistic about the situation ahead as many of my non-disabled colleagues in health sciences are. Because, while we’ve all seen eugenics before, it has always been quite proximate for the disabled community. Most of my non-disabled colleagues’ most proximate understanding of eugenics are publicized genocidal events, like those that occurred during the height of colonial imperialism or World War II. If so many are ignorant of the several genocidal events occurring after the Holocaust, including ongoing events that pre-date the pandemic, how can we expect a mass reckoning with the eugenics happening with the “let it rip” approach to (not) mitigating the risk of COVID-19? And how the hell can we expect it to take the form of a single breaking “point,” or to occur any time soon?

The answer is, we can’t.

It’s not the answer people want. Because it leaves other questions with much less clear answers.

How do we get enough people with power in the right institutions to recognize the magnitude of the hurdle? And by this, I also mean recognizing what the true hurdle is, or really what the hurdles, plural, are—white supremacy and ableism. If we do achieve this recognition, we are still left with the question of how to address the hurdles. Which is why I feel my stomach turn every time someone claims that COVID-19 will be resolved soon, that COVID-19 will be the end of capitalism, and that we will eventually be forced to reckon with related issues like climate change. Unlike my peers who were non-disabled prior to the pandemic, my hopefulness is dampened by the strong understanding that reckoning with capitalism, etc., is unlikely when so many are unable to grapple with the reality of the hurdle because it would mean also confronting their own role in upholding white supremacy and ableism. That’s not exactly aligned with the understanding by most of us that we are good people.

If you think I’m overblowing the impact of the “I am definitely a good person” mentality, take a look at the ways people in power who have started to take steps to address COVID-19 risk have approached those actions as related to some other risk.

Need to address air quality? No problem, we’ve ignored gas stoves forever, what a convenient alternative to admitting air quality is important for mitigating COVID-19. Kids seem to be getting sick more often and with more severe and/or uncommon illnesses? Well, let’s promote this amazing concept called “immunity debt,” the anti-vaxxers have been talking about it for years so we will have AMAZING support in terms of quantity. V widespread acceptance of immunity debt, we deserve a pat on the back! Too many people unable to work due to long COVID? Too much absenteeism because workers get infected with COVID several times a year? Well, let us tell you about how we can tackle both of those things at the same time! Didn’t you catch the rumor that employees just don’t want to work anymore? Burnout is high and motivation is low, obviously! Too many people catching COVID in the hospital? Well, my goodness, haven’t you heard about the microbiome??? You need to go play in the dirt (cc: immunity debt thesis).

I could go on, but I won’t.

I wish more people understood that people in power aren’t ill informed of the risks of COVID-19, they are willfully ignorant of them. I wish more people understood that this willful ignorance is because they DO NOT WANT TO CHANGE. They do not care about the harm they are causing because they do not value the lives of the people being harmed. Some even think the people being harmed should be eradicated for the “greater good” (of white, abled, people).

Right now, my experiences as a disabled person are overriding any and all others when it comes to understanding the current circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yes, I am tired because this pandemic blows and people keep denying it. This is the tired ALL COVID realists understand. The part that only my peers in the disabled community pre-COVID understand is the overwhelming exhaustion that comes from watching non-disabled and newly disabled people ooze optimism and excitement that there seems to be increasing acceptance of a need to mitigate COVID-19. And it’s not the optimism/excitement itself that is so exhausting, it’s knowing that disagreeing or bringing up disabled experiences will come off as being a total downer. Knowing that I can’t speak about how buffered my optimism is compared to my non-disabled colleagues unless I am speaking to the community of disabled people I interacted with before the pandemic means sitting with a level of discomfort I’m not sure most abled people have experienced, one I’m fairly sure most white abled people have absolutely NOT experienced. A feeling of discomfort that we can theorize about confronting all day, but in reality, is not something people WANT to subject themselves to if they can avoid it. And this is the part where my professional expertise comes back to haunt me—I know the data back up my anecdotal experiences that people will pretty much always try to avoid the discomfort. It’s one of those things that seems obvious but, when talked about, is frequently dismissed. Because good people should have no reason to confront discomfort—after all, good people don’t do things that harm people to where they should need to get uncomfortable with their own actions! And around and around we go.

I want to get off this ride, but I can’t. At the same time, I feel like there is an upper deck of the merry-go-round, and the non-disabled realists are clustered on that part of the ride knowing it will eventually come to an end. If you can get off the ride, why would you care that the lower deck is still spinning?

So, while most of my colleagues are tired from fighting this “uphill” battle, I’m here with the pre-COVID disabled community stuck at the bottom of what are obviously stairs. You don’t notice that the hill has stairs if you can use them, at least not until someone points out “um, I can’t use the stairs…” We sit here, watching you joke to each other about the tough journey, but you can joke because you can visualize an end. I don’t think anyone can really understand the exhaustion of sitting at the bottom of the stairs, stuck, watching people who are on your side in theory miss the part where you haven’t followed them up the stairs.

Lately, existing in society feels a lot like staring down a huge flight of stairs, the only avenue forward, from my wheelchair. Absolutely impossible.

Where is our end?

I created this digital self-portrait in Spring 2022. At the time, I had just learned I would be teaching again in the Fall '22 semester, and that I was unlikely to be approved to teach online. Just under a year later, the only thing that has changed is I now feel that the staircase has grown several flights.

This self-portrait is freehand, so it uses a slightly different technique than others I've posted. Check out the process here:

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

main take aways from Halloween (1978) rewatch:

michael myers is canonically 21??? this bitch should be at the club

*sees tiddies* ***MURDEROUS RAMPAGE NOISES***

that's it that's the movie

outside of the fact that everyone who has sex is murdered by the narrative, this is a surprisingly chill portrayal of female sexuality? these teen girls are horny and actively enjoying Getting It On with their boytoys. no pushy boyfriends sneaking in through their bedroom windows--these ladies are taking the initiative to sneak out and GET SOME. one of them gets laid and then immediately orders her boyfriend to get her a beer. (yes she gets Slashered soon afterward, but so does the boyfriend so honestly, gender equality.) yes the Final Girl is the only one not having sex, but she's not bullied for that, nor are her friends slut shamed except possibly by being murdered by the narrative

actually the only character who is shown being morally condemned on-screen is michael myers. specifically FOR his violent overreaction to other people's sex lives. (people he is spying on). metaphorically, the villain is American Puritanism sticking its judgy nose into other people's business.

aka Michael Myers Is A Republican

but actually the real villain is the doctor. guy's a judgemental, shaming, pathologizing asshole. and he's been in charge of michael's care since he was SIX YEARS OLD? kid never had a chance. i'd go on a killing spree too

also the parents. where are the parents? it's halloween night and all the teenage girls are home babysitting their younger siblings? come to think of it, michael's first victim was his own older sister, whom he killed while she was babysitting him. teen girls are really shouldering a labour burden here. maybe parentification is the true villain

side note: mike commits his first murder wearing a clown costume...which is never referenced again? his 'iconic' costume is a generic mask and wig and jumpsuit, when we coulda had a Killer Clown Michael Myers??? travesty

i like how the Final Girl and her friend casually smoke weed in her car. yeah she's an honor student and her friend is the sheriff's daughter. yeah they smoke weed. so what it's 1978

(to reiterate, mike is 21 and should be at the club. im not saying he shouldn't be rampaging, im saying it's sad that he broke out, tasted freedom for the first time in his life, and immediately snuck back into his childhood home to go rampaging. let's have a remake where he goes to a nightclub and has a few beers. maybe some slutty dancing. then rampage)

oh no he's hot

[sporkberries]

Robin(1993) is a comic where things happen

[captainmaxatx]

Late Mermay idea!

Orca mer Ghost in an aquarium but he is almost always hiding and quite depressed so the aquarium decide to give him a little more enrichment.

With humans lack of mer knowledge they come to the conclusion that because orcas eat seals then surely an orca mer would eat a seal mer. They decide that during closing hours (to avoid guests seeing the blood bath that will surely follow) they will drop a live seal mer into ghosts tank so he has the natural experience of hunting instead of just being fed slabs of meet.

But mer’s don’t eat other mers, regardless of secondary species.

So when seal mer soap is dropped into his tank, ghost just thinks he’s being given a very energetic handsome roommate.

And the humans are confused as to why ghost hasn’t eaten the seal mer yet

[starry-bi-sky]

mmmmmm read a disciple shen yuan/shizun luo binghe fanfic about two days ago where the first chapter was the Immortal Conference arc, and SQQ was the one who had to be pushed into the abyss (he was still the villain) except Luo Binghe was refusing and was like, lowkey losing his mind about SQQ being so close to the edge. SQQ ended up having to be the one to fall in himself because of the system's punishment system. The rest of the fic is leading up to that moment. But like, MMM i've been obsessively thinking about that first chapter for DAYS ever since.

now i've been in svsss for a grand total of *checks watch* a week. but god obsessed with that. I want to write/read a fic where disciple SQQ goes a little nuts down there. Like keep all of the things that make SQQ, SQQ, but just. Throw in a little bit more trauma in there. A little bit of a mental break. Let him go a little nuts as a treat. Just a tad unhinged. I wanna see him go, just a little, "god fuck it, i've tried so hard to change this shitty story's outcome and it feels like everything i've done has been for nothing. I'm going to die in this world no matter what I do, I've been doomed from the start, so might as well die the way I want to." and he just, breaks a little! Under all the stress.

He still retains the traits that makes shen yuan, shen yuan, like his overwhelming kindness. But he's just! yk. A little less patient. Paranoid. Jumpy. Colder. A little more aloof and closed off. A little more Shen Jiu. He's no asshole child abuser, but he was a Number One Hater in his past life and he's leaning into that old habit a little more now.

(On a totally coincidental not-at-all related note, there's not enough SJ-and-SY-are-the-same-people fics out there that i've found. This is totally unrelated...)

The Endless Abyss turns the mind into an over-sharpened blade, and SQQ is both fascinated and perhaps a little excited to explore a place that doesn't have a lot of info on it in the mortal realm, but still terrified out of his mind. And he's no Luo Binghe, he doesn't have the sheer brute strength and power to just bulldoze his way through, so he has to be a lot more sneaky and cunning if he wants to survive.

The fic itself role-swapped LBH and SQQ so that SQQ was the half-demon (which lowkey fucks) and LBH the human, but I'm equally-if-not-more obsessed with the idea that LBH remains the half-heavenly demon and SQQ the human. If only because I keep thinking about SQQ befriending some demons (particularly and specifically a group of succubi) and they grow very attached to this Human Cultivator so through magic plot stuff they create some kind of seal/illusion/talisman that makes SQQ appear as a demon because a human cultivator in the endless abyss may as well be the equivalent of putting a giant neon target on your back.

And iirc Shen Jiu was taught demonic cultivation by that one guy(?? i've only been here a week so im not caught up in ALL of the lore yet) so that could totally happen here.

(On the other end of the realms, poor Shizun Luo Binghe is just. losing his fucking mind over losing his most precious and beloved disciple. About .5 seconds from burning down the peaks himself. somebody sedate him.)

The Endless Abyss sucks and SQQ is having a really terrible time and can feel himself going lowkey mad, but also holy shit look at all this WORLD-BUILDING. look at all this flora and fauna, and oh if he had the equipment for it he'd be writing all of this down. ALL OF IT. He was kinda-sorta-already planning on never leaving the Abyss as some sort of fucked up self-exile and self-preservation thing, but now he might? actually just?? never leave if he can help it, like he lowkey likes it down here.

anyways the next time anyone ever sees SQQ again he's got hair so long its almost touching the ground and he's either in rags and half-feral or he's been completely dolled up by his adoptive succubi sisters and still about three seconds from biting anyone who tries to touch him. (he's also lowkey trying to book it back down to the abyss even if he has desperately missed all of his friends and shizun)

[snekdood]

"if we make america worse and more of a dictatorship that will be even harder to unravel and make it the way we want the country to be, maybe then everyone will join our Glorious Revolution!" bb girl you cant even be in the same room with someone who thinks you should vote, how in tf do you think you're gonna unite people to fight in The Revolution with you? it's gonna be you and your 5 friends, i hate to break it to you.

[tadc-survival-isles]

I need to keep Survival Isles on this blog but I keep forgetting because they are so silly--

Anyway the recent posts about the Wet Cat Trio™ on my main reminded me I had this stupid idea yesterday that I wanted to draw.

( Cryptid Jax belongs to @sunifixation and Remains Jax belongs to @rorydrawsandwrites )

The thing I'm referencing:

[ruler-of-turtle-kind]

Hey, do any of my followers have experience with absconding from their parents' house to a safe place as soon as they're able? Do you have any advice on how to do that? Do you have any advice on what the person they're going to live with should do?

[drawnfamiliarfaces]

Do you think the First Ninja has Survivor Syndrome? if so, how strongly does it manifest itself?

Oh absolutely, my boy is traumatized as fuck. 😬👌

Survivor Syndrome is no joke, and i feel like it's even worse when its not just your comrades in arms, but also family. In my own headcanon version of Norisu Clan, since First was the baby of the family, he did not just lose his siblings (some of who were like his parents), but also teachers, mentors, comrades and more importantly heroes to him. Like, imagine you look up to someone your whole life, who taught you everything you know, and you witness their demise, and you are so freaking devastated and angry and determined to avenge them... but also how in the hell can you even attempt to succeed when all of your heroes failed??? But he has to, there is literally no choice for him, because Sorcerer needed to be stopped and he was the last one standing.

And then he does succeed, and he is still alive. Like, I 100% headcanon First as someone who was prepared to die to finally contain the Sorcerer. And after surviving he wouldn't know how to live not chasing the Sorcerer anymore.

So besides the obvious pain and suffering, the nightmares and being unable to get close to people, I headcanon that the Survivor Syndrome manifested so strongly, that First literally threw aside any remains of his civillian identity, of a possibility of a normal life he could possibly have. Because if his siblings did not get to live their lives, why does he? The only thing that was left is the Ninja, the Norisu Ninja - the culmination if all the sacrifices his Clan made, his siblings made. And his only goal in life would be to ensure that Ninja will survive when they didn't. Even if it will cost him his mortal life and immortal soul. And if Ninja lives, the Norisu clan lives, the village and later Norrisville lives on. That's what pushed First into creating Ninjanomicon, to make sure that some remains of his siblings sacrifice lived on.

And I feel like this self-sacrificial mindset that First adapted, saddens the spiritual remains of his siblings greatly. They would probably prefer that after defeating the Sorcerer, that he forgave himself and tried to live a life, but also, like... they are spirits so there is not much they can do to change his mind? They can only bear witness to his suffering.

[fadeintoyou1993]

i'm comin' out with my hands up

thick skull — paramore

— songs from my nancy playlist

[redbootsindoriath]

Happy Hobbit Day! (I almost forgot and it's technically well into the 23rd where I am right now, but I haven't gone to bed yet since waking up on the 22nd, so we'll say it counts.)

I think if Boromir had survived he should be allowed special permissions to go into the Shire to see his friends in their native habitat after everything is over.

Transcription:

Shire border security guard: "Sir I don't think you can bring those out with you..."

[ethan-acfan]

Desmond was trauma bonded with a lot of the modern assassins and that's why he put up with so much from them

[zoomclown]

My theory is that the reason Peter Lukas and Jonah Magnus have such a strained relationship is that Jonah has been stealing Peters Lonely-Aligned people to work for the institute. Like the wiki says that he deliberately picks people who he knows wouldn't be noticed if they went missing, so people who are already aligned with the lonely are prime candidates. I think it annoys the shit out of Peter that Jonah keeps taking people who are aligned with the lonely and making them work an office job together.

[geospiral]

Did you ever have that one person in your life when you were younger that was so unabashedly kind that even though you personally weren’t good at interacting with others or had a hard time understanding other people, that person never treated you any differently from the rest of the people around you? When you were mentally struggling, did thinking about how effortlessly nice and welcoming that person was make you feel better and even give you some hope for the world if it was able to make something—someone—this good? And maybe that person was actually your friend or someone that you wanted to consider your friend, but the point is that they were kind, and you were kind in turn for the moments you had with them, and that's all that matters.

Anyway, I wasn’t really sure how to get the feeling across any other way, but this is why understanding Sua, Till, and Ivan’s fondness toward Mizi is so easy to me personally; even if how they feel towards her doesn’t perfectly align with the feelings I had towards my person, I get why they care for her so much. Mizi’s a light in the dark.

[stuckinapril]

.

[spoonstrek]

I love hanging out with my extremely mid-30s dog-dadcore friend because I can just scroll through the House MD tag showing him posts and horrifying him with all these high effort fandom posts from just the past week for a primetime procedural medical drama that ended over a decade ago.

I do this every week so he can't deny it's just an extremely active fandom. He hates it so much.