Speak To Me Like A Human Please / Mental Illness Sucks / RE: Sacrificing accessibility...
Yes, this is another post about that article. I recently posted a pretty heated article about another website I now regret the heatedness of. But what bothers me is the fact that instead of presenting counterpoints to me in a gentle manner, people went to the site itself to talk about me. Someone said, paraphrased, in the shoutbox of the site being discussed, "all I can think it's it's a result of severe mental illness". And... is that not, "Clearly you must just be a sad mentally ill person on the internet (whose opinions have no worth because they are mentally ill, being the implied end of that phrase.)" No points of mine about accessibility seemed to have been considered, ignored in favor of focusing on one poorly worded line about my diagnosis. Bear with me here -- I know I was in the wrong too and I get to that -- but it's like.
It's representative of how being mentally ill gets you treated in general, I guess? Have too much emotion and you're just having an episode and aren't worth listening to; don't display enough emotion and you're a monster. It's just your mental illness, and you're something to be pitied. You're just mentally ill. You're just having an episode. I hope you feel better. I hope you're okay.
I find that I tend to get along most with folks who struggle to feel things such as empathy and compassion, because I know they will be honest with me and we have similar feelings, generally, on how other people who are more social (in the clinical aspect of the term) experience emotion and offense. I feel seen when I talk to "sociopaths"--I struggle with anti-social traits myself though I do not have the fullblown disorder, and I trust these people to not judge me for sometimes struggling with lashing out, feeling empathy, or understanding why other people care so much about things that I don't. I may never fully be able to grasp some things. But it's refreshing to be around others who I know won't judge me for it; in this way I have been able to accept those aspects of myself and through that acceptance I am able to work towards being the best, kindest person I can be, even if I do fuck up sometimes.
What I won't do, though, is sit down and whine with my paws covering my eyes. (If you're wondering I am rambling in general here and not about the article specifically; I get back to that later.) You are not doing the mad any favors by treating us like sad or amusing spectacles, nor are you helping us by demonizing the members of our community who are most at risk of medical abuse and violations of personal autonomy. Treat us like human beings--like you would any other person--please.
Places that are meant to be safe havens are rarely such when you're mentally ill. I loved the idea of the indie web when I joined. Yay, having your own site, your own personal home on the web just for you! But if you act too much you on your personal site, you get discussed like a spectacle on public-facing chatrooms! Is there anywhere the mentally ill can express themselves where, if they do genuinely fuck up as I may have, the response is not "lol guys go look at what this crazy person said about this site" but rather a private email explaining your counterarguments in a gentle manner?
What is it about having mental illness that makes people talk past you, as if you don't exist in the same way they do? One argument against me was that I was attempting to "diagnose someone against their will" in my article, when really I had just misread their post and accidentally used the wrong term for their struggles. Would it have been taken in better faith if I was a different kind of person? I don't know. But the jump to assume that every person with psychosis is inherently hostile - rather than just simply making an annoyed vent post on their personal page, complaining about a struggle they have as a marginalized individual - is apparent and it's rough to be reminded that these attitudes I face in every other aspect of my life are still prevalent in the spaces I turn to for fun. Yes, I was unnecessarily harsh in my article in certain places and I regret that wording deeply. But I can't help thinking that if a different blogger posted it, the actual points raised would've been taken more seriously. (Am I doing the same thing, taking that person in bad faith? I don't know, maybe. No one involved here was great.)
I don't know. I wasn't going to post this, but the fact is it does hurt like hell.
Y'know, I was about to make a post about how my tech work has touched people in the way I wished my writing would, and how sometimes we don't ever know the ways in which we'll make a difference. I've already been feeling self-conscious about my writing on here, like I'm making a spectacle of myself by being so candid about my experiences with cPTSD--that I should be ashamed of talking about what happened because no one wants to hear it and I don't want people to pity me. I don't know; at this point I struggle to imagine feeling anything besides pity or exhaustion at it -- even me, myself, about my own work. I sort of just feel embarrassed.
Mostly because you know, the person who wrote that article actually isn't the kind of person I want to be? I struggle to work within confining rules, especially if I don't understand them, so having a post I made edited pissed me off immeasurably when I saw no real reason for the rule in the first place at the time. So yeah, it was a post inspired by my pettiness, and I wish I had written it in a more articulate manner. As I said before though, I still stand by my point that the forum itself is inaccessible. I just could have gone about explaining my viewpoints in a better way, aaaaaaaaaand I just really don't like that I'm the kind of person who gets petty over things like that. I feel bad about the harsh things I said. I never want to be unkind---it goes against who I am as a person---or who I want to and try to be. And ultimately, more spaces on the indieweb for community are a good thing!
At the same time, I struggle to see a world where I write this in the kindest and sweetest way humanly possible and people don't have a similar reaction. But I want to be kind and spread positivity. It's funny, I wrote about this recently on my sillyblog, about how it's hard for me to act within my values because of my mental illness. I really don't want to be a drama starter, or a blemish on the community. I just want people to think about who they are excluding when they make their communities inaccessible to the disabled. You're missing out on some extremely valuable points of view, some really amazing kind and creative people who would be wonderful additions to your community or a faithful reader of your blog if they could actually... read it? You know? Imagine being someone who can't access most of the sites on the web because of their disability. That combined with the fact that many disabled folk rely on the web for most of their enrichment and socialization... it's not Fun for us to be in that position. I implore you to at least try to understand the position I come from here.
So yeah. I think a more stable person could've written a better blog post, but I do wonder if it would've still been met with the same casual "so what?" response, just with less ableism. But part of the reason I got upset today is because people are currently telling me how to run one of my communities and it upset me. How silly, then, of me to turn around and do the same thing! At the end of the day we own our websites and we make the choices on whether or not we want our sites and communities to be accessible to as many people who can benefit from them as possible, if the goal is to be a public-facing and wider community or public figure of course. That's fine if it isn't, and I support you— there are just some perspectives I personally don't understand. Well, 2 each their own, alas.