#tumblr isn’t much better but at least we’re smaller in number and mentally ill enough to be interesting

[tevos]

////

[adventures-in-asexuality]

‘Home’ Alone

You may have heard that Boris Johnson has recently become the leader of the Conservative Party in the UK, and, as such, the Prime Minister. This wasn’t an election open to the general public; party leaders are elected by the members of that party, and it’s no real surprise that the Conservative Party members like conservative candidates.

This isn’t a post about that, per se; there are plenty of other people detailing all of his failings and horrifying attitudes and behaviours. It’s just an illustration of how the political situation in this country is devolving faster and faster. I started talking about this in 2014, just a couple of years after I first got on tumblr at all, and I’ve been talking about it ever since, whenever I have the mental fortitude to do so - which, right now, isn’t often. 

But, hey, what’s another list of my deepest fears? 

I wrote a post a year or two ago with some of the things that we’re facing here, in the UK. I’ll link the entire post, but here is the most important paragraph:

‘But. I have been saying this. I said it when reports came out of the huge number of people dying within a few weeks of their disability claims being denied or revoked. I said it when a coroner went so far as to name the DWP as the cause of death on a death certificate for a disabled person. I said it when we started seeing stats of the huge proportion of cases of denied benefits that were winning at appeal or tribunal (and the huge barriers to even getting to appeal or tribunal in the first place). I said it when we heard about the suicide baiting in disability assessments. I said it when we heard that, even if you could get them, disability benefits were leaving people cold and hungry.’

These aren’t stopping.

Back in 2015, the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities announced that they were going to investigate how the UK was treating disabled people. The report came out in 2016, and, as summarised here, found ‘‘grave and systematic’ violations of the rights of disabled people’. There’s no enforcement method for this, though, and the government were free to disagree and to carry on exactly as they were. Which they did. 

In 2016, the Brexit referendum happened. One of the topics that I remember very clearly from that time was the Conservative promises that they could write a new Human Rights Bill, since we would no longer be bound by the EU’s rulings on human rights. This was, of course, presented as a good thing, though I’m not even sure entirely how. All I remember was thinking about all the rights that we already knew were being violated, about how it was so obvious that a UN Committee was investigating it, and thinking: Why would a government ever write their brand new human rights bill to enshrine rights that they are already violating?

The answer, of course, is that they won’t. 

We haven’t heard anything more about the supposed brand new human rights bill since then - hell, we haven’t even left the EU yet - but this is always at the back of my mind, casting a shadow over my day-to-day life.

Because what this means for me is that my country does not want me. I can never be at home here because I am not wanted here; because my country would rather people like me die quietly, preferably in a way that doesn’t impact on their statistics, and leave the abled people alone. 

What does this have to do with asexuality, then? Well, I am ace and arospec and a lesbian, and there are two very obvious consequences of this.

Firstly, I don’t have a family. Anyone who’s been following me for a while will know this already, but here’s the bottom line: I am estranged from my family for many reasons, including that I am queer. This is a story everyone knows, I’m sure - it’s easier to list queer people of my acquaintance who do have a family - but it does remove one of the common support networks that people have. 

Secondly, I don’t expect to be in any kind of significant relationship any time soon. Don’t feel sorry for me or tell me to meet more people; it’s just a natural consequence of liking very few people and also being a bundle of trauma and disability. I’m used to it. The real problem is that this removes the other common support network, and most people in life assume that you have either one or the other. 

Coyote wrote a piece recently, On “single”, that’s relevant here. The whole post is well worth reading, but in it, ey comments on one of the conversations we’ve repeatedly had with each other: the issues with emergency contacts. You’re supposed to have someone who would drop everything to come help you. And, realistically, people expect this person to be either your partner or your immediate family. After all, those are the people that you can count on, right?

(Wrong. But we all know that.)

Coyote commented on how untenable this is in ir post, and I’m just going to quote the relevant part here. 

‘Ever since I left my family, I’ve been intensely aware of how, if I were to go for too long between jobs, or if I were to get severely sick, there’s practically no one close at hand to intervene or take care of me. And that weighs on me. That makes my life feel tenuous and unstable in a way that’s more far-reaching for me than simply not having a romantic partner. It would be different if I had solid career prospects and enough savings to coast on indefinitely, but I don’t.’

I want to underline that this is how the state of being singled affects us all. Not just the traumatised ones, not just the disabled ones, not just the ones who face other difficulties and marginalisations. All of us. This is always only survivable by the lucky ones. 

So where does this leave me? I have a bunch of progressive disabilities. I’m barely managing to hold down a job at the moment; I’ve given up having hobbies, seeing friends more than a couple of times a year, leaving the house at all except for essential errands, and I’m still constantly exhausted and in severe pain. All I do is work and rest for the next day’s work, and I’m still ill too often for my employer. I drag myself to work in so much pain that I’m propping myself upright, typing one-handed and slowly collapsing over my desk, and people still assume that I’m malingering, that I should just stop complaining and do my job better. 

And these are progressive disabilities. They are only ever going to get worse.

You can see, now, why the gutting of social safety nets is a very personal issue for me. 

Let’s recap. The government is aggressively uninterested in supporting disabled people, so when (and it will be when) I can’t manage to hold down a job no matter how much I injure myself in the process, I won’t be able to rely on them for such extravagant things as a roof over my head and semi-regular meals. People who support such cuts often say that people on disability benefits are just malingering, that real disabled people would have their family or partner care for them, but even setting aside what an awful situation that puts carers in even if it works as planned (and it is an awful situation), I don’t have either of those support networks. I’m on my own now, and, barring some extremely unlikely events, I’ll stay that way even when I can no longer support myself. 

This means that I don’t have a home. 

That’s a little overdramatic: I have somewhere to live at the moment. I’m even lucky enough, now, that I can live by myself; I have lived with strangers before, and it didn’t work well. I don’t want to repeat the habit. I can shape my space around me to some extent, and I do have a roof over my head, and both of these are important; I don’t want to trivialise that. 

What I don’t have, though, is any sense of security or welcome. I live here, and I have possessions here, and, bit by bit, I’ve even acquired nonessential items (even if every time I acquire something that wouldn’t fit in a suitcase packed in the dead of night, I panic a little bit). I’m always aware, though, that this place is only mine for as long as I manage to keep up full-time employment; as soon as I’m forced out of that sphere, I’ll need to be elsewhere, and I won’t have elsewhere to be. 

My welcome in this country, in this city, in this house is measured only by my participation in the capitalist workforce, and as soon as I involuntarily exit it, I will be unwelcome everywhere. 

Home is supposed to be the place that you’re always welcome, right?

Yeah, I don’t see that happening any time soon. 

This is the point where people start talking about wider communities, like the ace community. It’s an understandable impulse; if the normal support networks fail people, we want to think that there are backups. That smaller communities are still there to help us. 

I’ve talked before about not feeling welcome in the ace community for a variety of reasons, but that’s not entirely relevant; sure, I’m not at home here, but even if I was, there’s a bigger barrier here: we don’t have resources for this. (I feel like I should be talking more explicitly about the aro community here - because, at least to some extent, this would seem to be a more common aro-specific issue than an ace-specific issue - but I find it hard to think that it would be appropriate, since I'm not meaningfully involved in the aro community, largely because it's pretty clear I am unwelcome.) Most ace community resources are focused on dealing with people’s journey to recognise themselves as ace and how they can navigate their relationships afterwards - and even though that can be a large part of people’s lives, it’s not the be-all and end-all, and isn’t even on the radar for some of us.

This isn’t to say that this entire issue is just due to a failing of the ace community; this is a large and systemic problem, and it feels pretty self-defeating to throw any amount of effort at it at all. We also don’t talk about it, much, though, and that, I think, is the greatest disservice. It can feel like so much of ace community resources are devoted to reassuring aces that they are okay as they are and, from that basis, helping aces find partners, or at most reassuring unpartnered aces that just because they’re single now won’t mean that they’re single forever, that we ignore almost completely the logistical challenges of going through life without the societally expected support networks. 

We can’t solve this entire problem by ourselves - that would require completely rewriting society. But maybe we can include it in our directory of problems, understanding that this is an ace issue and finding or creating resources for it accordingly.