Skip to main content

Cursed words and phrases

There appears to be a movement out there in the world of ever changing language to make disability, disorder and other such words out to be "bad words."  I am not living in a world where I'm about to agree with that kind of trouble making.

The reality is that both disability and disorder refer to the impacts that an illness or set of symptoms have on the life of a person.  According to the DSM: A disorder is a functional abnormality or disturbance.

My disabilities get in the way of how I function in the world.  They make simple things harder or impossible.  That is why they are called disabilities.  If your PTSD doesn't get in the way of how your relationships work out, your work flow, how your family functions then and only then will I go with the PTS garbage that folks are trying to put out into the world.  Also, when it's not impacting your function, I won't expect your American Capitalist insurance to pay for the treatment of your not actually diagnostically significant issue any longer.

I guess that I really feel when something is impacting how you function, it should sound like it does.  There is a problem in this world that needs to be worked on for disabled people to be treated as whole and valuable people.  Until they are not consistently treated as less than, I expect the label that is used to define my to reflect that there is a problem.

In a much lesser way, people are trying to say that "self care"  is a bad word.  As the words somehow imply something negative.  I think that the issue is with people who say that anything involving the self is bad.  In a capitalist American society, saying my individual rights and freedoms are so important and I as an individual am not so important makes no sense at all.

My new favorite book recommendation is The More or Less Definitive Guide to Self-Care by Anna Borges. Every page in this book is practically perfect.  The layout is easy to read, the personal stories are a lovely touch, and the facts are undeniable.  The clarity of how to put the book into practice is amazing, and it covers every type of self care possible.  I truly cannot recommend this book enough.  Every therapist should have it in their office, every person who wants to show some kindness to their self should just look at any page.

*I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Pile of dead kids

Yesterday, I said I was thankful for my therapist.  Honestly I am not sure that I am thankful.  EMDR therapy is the right kind for me, it is working in an expansion of what I believe.  Yet I don't want to deal with the past memories that we are going to be looking at.  They suck. I am unsure if it is me holding back or maybe she really sucks. I am so triggered being back in Spokane and in this house.  It feels like I am walking through memories sometimes.  Today I keep thinking about a bunch of dead kids.  They used to be my friends or clients I worked with, but at some point as I kept getting older and they didn't, those friends and clients became kids.  Worse than that, they became dead kids just chilling in my mind.  I say pile of dead kids because it is rare that only one comes up in my mind at a time.   If one starts coming into my memory (even a positive memory) another one comes,  Until I end up with all of these dead k...

Sitting down

I've started this blog entry four times this week. First, I was going to tell you about being shiny with my goals. I was all about tracking and support. Those tools are really helpful and I was doing quite well. I had the post all typed out, then I got fired.  In the rest of the week, things got a little off track. There are days this week where I didn't track my progress. I didn't eat according to the plan each day. I didn't complete my full workout each day.  There was even a day where I didn't take my medications.  Knowing that getting off my medications for a day usually leads to migraines, why would I do that?  Why would I ever skip my exercises when my knees hurt less if I do them?  Why wouldn't I move around every hour knowing that I'm at risk for blood clots and strokes? Why would I eat a tub of french fries to make me feel better? As I got stuck this week, I kept asking myself those whys.  It seems like a labyrinth I'll never escape someti...

Mother's Day

I've disappeared for a few weeks (again).  It's because I was dealing with the real world consequences of being chronically ill and chronically poor. These are two things I link together so tightly I almost didn't put "and" in that sentence. I was being kept at a friend's house for a little over a week because I live alone and they were afraid I was going to die.  No one actually says that,  but the simple reality is that no one is saying, "Geeze you are kinda sick and gonna totes get better so please sleep on my couch." There were other reasons too; the simple life goes on when you're sick, birthdays and funerals. I haven't had hours at work which I'm thankful for because I couldn't conceivably go to work. I had a regular-person doctor's visit which turned into several "lets check if you have cancer" visits.  I don't. Yay for that. I removed one medication and added another. I'm having one medication taken aw...