Blogging and balloon drops

This post has nothing to do with balloon drops. It's just that it sounded cool in the title. Well, maybe I'll put one in at the end.

Perhaps it's because I blog as an aside in my life (preparatory to having my coffee, on breaks from my day job, etc.), that I find it fascinating when people take my blog to be what I mean by advocacy. Of course none of them have asked what I do in my day job, nor can I talk about specifics due to confidentiality. But their ableism is kind of showing, whether they have a disability or not, when they assume that blogging is all I do.

This shouldn't surprise me. No one asks what it's like to live with a disability. They tell us. They label us. We're surrounded by others' assumptions and misconceptions. And the scary part is some of them think they're in charge of our lives. Even scarier? They are, unless we empower ourselves.

The experts present charts and give us forms to fill out. They have us delineate every bit of daily living that doesn't conform to what an able bodied body can do and then send us to counseling if we tell them that concentrating on our limits is disempowering. They want us to sign up for segregated transportation and spend hours making appointments, filling out more forms, being a passive "patient" and a recipient of segregated services, rather than just roll onto a regular bus. They have us jump through hoops because it makes providing services easier, not because those hoops have any logical connection to the services we are getting, as those of us who have filled all those forms out know.

You cannot chart a day in the life of a person with a disability.

As I start my day, I can't chart what I'm going to need in terms of physical assistance today. It depends on what happens with my work. And, because I know that, I've developed a way of coping that includes creativity and resourcefulness. I learned that from watching other people with disabilities.

The point is that how we live with our disabilities, how we approach situations, is not something others can be experts on. The learning is in the living.

Yet the need to lecture people with disabilities as if they just don't know what's right for them is so ingrained into our society and structure that it makes it nigh onto impossible to have a dialogue with some folks.

I'd rather go do my work.

So why do I blog? Well I need to do something over my coffee. And maybe, just maybe, someone out there will listen if I speak up.

And now it's time for the balloon drop.