brave the monsters and come home to me

[ID: an illustration of a white and gold unicorn and dragon. The unicorn is running to the right, with a cloud in the colors of the trans flag behind it, and the dragon is flying to the left breathing rainbow fire. Text reads "respect our existence or expect our resistance". End.]

And abusive shit can be a lot of things. It can be a bigoted boss that resents their very presence at work. It can be a romantic partner that speaks only in violence and control. It can be a family member that refuses to acknowledge boundaries and feels entitled to their everything.

Abuse has a multitude of shapes and it takes a lot of courage for someone who is enduring it, to not only acknowledge it for what it is, but to reach out and TELL someone. They might not even be at the stage where they're asking for help, they just want someone to look at their reality, the true reality of it, and acknowledge that... yeah that's abuse.

And if you, yourself, have never experienced abuse - first of all, I am so glad, genuinely, that you've been blessed with such good luck - you might find the next steps in your friend's process to be deeply upsetting. Annoying, even. Because you say "yes, that's abuse" and they reply "okay" and then immediately go back to it. Even after you helpfully point out that they need to get the fuck out of there.

They keep going back.

And you're going to look at their actions and the conversations you've had and you're going to come to the conclusion that they're enabling the abuse. That they are actively participating in it, by not getting out as soon as they recognized the abuse for what it was.

And you're going to look at your friend and feel the urge to tell them that they need to stop "tolerating" it, because they have agency and they're clearly partaking in the abuse, by consistently coming back. Your friend might have even shared with you that the abusive situation has forced them to act in ways that, to your discerning eye, sound abusive themselves, which combined with their refusal to drop everything and go, means you might end up tempted to label your friend as a toxic person inherently, and decide to end the friendship entirely.

I am here looking at you in the eye to tell you all of that is the devil talking.

All of it.

While I understand the temptation to give "agency back" to survivors of abuse, no victim of abuse is ever complicit/enabling/participant in their abuse. Because they didn't choose to be abused. They didn't sign up for it. They didn't cause it. If you're wondering, we have a name for this urge people keep failing to repress, no matter how unsightly it is whenever they express it: blaming the victim.

So don't do that.

But also don't just tell a victim of abuse that they should leave and then be exasperated when they don't do so immediately. Do you understand what it means to leave? I suspect you don't.

Go check out HealingByTheNumebrs on Youtube, here on a very convenient playlist for you. Dr. Ruth chronicles HER own escape out of a 10 year abusive marriage. She talks about WHY she decides to leave, and then goes day by day on a 7 month journey to put together a reenactment of her escape plan.

It should help you understand why "just leave!" is not helpful. It's not even advice. It's borderline cruel, even. Are YOU offering to help them along with your loud proclamations that they should go? Are you opening your home to them, to have a place to GO? Are you offering to pay for costs?

Telling someone to leave is easy, particularly when you're not offering to help someone figure out how.

So please. PLEASE. If someone confides in you, do not listen to the devil, listen to your friend. Actually listen to them. And the be a fucking friend, and honor the trust placed in you by not being a fucking repugnant shitstain that betrays that trust immediately and starts parroting the devil's bullshit.

Like this applies to all “invisible” disabilities in the sense that just bc you can’t see what’s wrong doesn’t mean nothing is wrong or they aren’t disabled but it’s especially the case for chronic migraines

Migraines are NOT just headaches. It’s not just “oof ow my head hurt :(”, Migraines are WHOLE body affair. It’s getting weepy and irritable hours before the pain hits, it’s starting to get clumsy and feeling body aches just before the pain starts, it’s getting stiff because of the aches and sensitive to light and sound because of how heightened senses get.

And when the pain gets, sometimes it is the general image of someone locked in a dark room in bed, which is genuinely awful bc you can’t do anything. You just have to lay there and stew in your pain and no medicine touches it and everything hurts, worst of all your head and there is nothing to focus on other than the pain because any light hurts and any sound hurts.

But sometimes the pain isn’t bad enough for that, or sometimes you have to work or go to school with nails in your head and it’s impossible to focus. Your depth perception gets wonky, you’re clumsy, you slur or stumble over your words because so much of your brain is occupied only by pain. You can’t miss another day of work, you can’t miss the money, but you’re messing up orders or you’re misunderstanding instructions.

And then there’s the after. Postdrome, the migraine hangover. Where the emotional and irritability returns, and you have issues with your stomach, very often leaving you unable to eat or drink without puking. Your neck is stiff, your head feels heavy, your brain is so fogged up that you can barely string together a coherent sentence. Your body aches much worse than before, and you’re exhausted, fatigued to hell and back, and that lasts for 1-3 days after the actual migraine.

Migraines are a multi-day condition that affects EVERY aspect of your fucking life. And medicines that treat the pain very often only lessen the symptoms that occur before and after.

you have hopefully gotten your college acceptance letters and have decided where you're going next semester. if you have an accommodation that you absolutely must have by the beginning of classes it is time to schedule an appointment with the department that manages your accommodations now.

at the beginning of the fall semester there is a rush to get accommodations that can push appointments back for weeks. if, say, you can't understand your lectures without an interpreter you need to make sure that accommodation is planned out by day one.

be prepared with the documentation for your disability at your appointment. it will save you time and additional appointments.

Email template:

Hello,

I am an incoming freshman at (college) who needs to set up accommodations for the fall semester. I have (disabilities) and I need (accommodations) before the start of the semester in order to access my classes. I was hoping to set up a meeting to discuss getting these accommodations.

Thank you,

(Name)

I used to work as a live-in nanny for a pediatrician.

Now, the thing about hospitals in my country is that they are massively understaffed and massively underfunded. This is especially true outside the major cities. The staff are worked to the bone and receive little to no help in things like finding accommodation or childcare, making working in rural areas a very uninviting prospect; staff come out here, get lumped with the work of three people (because there's nobody else to do it), burn out under the workload and leave, meaning that those remaining have even more work because that person is gone. It's unsustainable and the medical staff are doing their best to sustain it, because people die if they don't, so to the higher-ups it looks like everything's getting done and therefore everything is fine.

My friend (and boss) worked one week on, one week off, swapping out with another pediatrician. This was necessary because it would not be physically possible for one person to handle the workload for longer periods of time. The one single pediatrician had to hold up the entire pediatrics ward, which was not only the only public hospital pediatrics ward in our town, but also the one that served all the towns around us for a few hours' drive in all directions. I regularly saw her go to work sick, aching, tired, or with a debilitating 'I can barely make words or see' level migraine, because if she took a day off, twenty children didn't get healthcare that day, and some of these kids' appointments were scheduled weeks in advance. She'd work long hours in the day and then be called in a couple of times overnight for an hour or two at a time (she was on-call at night too, because somebody had to be), and then go in the next day. Sometimes she would be forced to take a day off because she physically could not stay awake for longer than a few minutes at a time, meaning she couldn't drive to work.

Cue my niece's second birthday coming up in Melbourne. I'd been working for her for about 3 years, and she (and the hospital) had plenty of advance warning that I (and therefore she) needed one (1) Friday off. That's fine, we'll find someone to work that Friday, the hospital said. Right up until the last week where they're like "oh, we can't find a replacement; you can come in, can't you?"

No, she tells them; I don't have anyone to watch my kid that day.

Oh, surely you can hire a babysitter for this one day, they say. Think of the children! We really really need you to work that day. I know we said it'd be fine but we need you now, there's no one else to do it.

There are no other babysitters, she told them. Unless you can find one?

That's not our responsibility, they said.

But I'm not changing my plans, she's got plans by now as well, the hospital knew about this one day weeks in advance, and with absolutely no reserve staff they're forced to reschedule all pediatrics appointments for that Friday. Not a huge deal, it happens on the 'physically too overworked to get out of bed' days too. I go to Melbourne, she goes back to her home in Adelaide for her recovery week, all should be on track.

My niece gives me Covid.

This was way back in the first wave of the pandemic, and there were no Covid vaccines yet. The rules were isolate, mask up, hope. I had Covid in the house, and it would've been madness for my friend and her toddler to come back into the Covid house instead of staying in Adelaide. There was absolutely no way that a pediatrician could live with someone in quarantine due to Covid and go to work in the hospital with sick children every day. And no support existed for finding another babysitter, or temporary accommodation, so the hospital was down a pediatrician.

The other pediatrician wasn't available to do a three-week stint. They were also trapped in Adelaide on their well-earned week off.

Meaning that the only major pediatrics ward within a several-hour radius had no pediatricians. They had to shut down and send all urgent cases to Adelaide for the week. To the complete absence of surprise of any of the doctors or nurses; of course this would happen, this was bound to happen, it presumably keeps happening. But probably to the surprise of the higher-ups. After all, the hospital was doing fine, right? Of course all the staff were complaining of overwork and a lack of resources in every meeting, but they could always be fobbed off with the promise of more help sometime in the future; the work was mostly getting done, so the issue couldn't be too urgent.

Don't stretch yourselves to the breaking point to keep doing as much as possible, and don't cut corners where customers/clients/patients/patrons won't notice. Say out loud, "Due to low funding/staffing, we can no longer do X," where X is something visible but not mission-critical.

In the library world, this is usually a small reduction in hours: we lose an employee position, we stop being open on Sundays, or we close an hour earlier every day. (And we put up signs saying exactly why, and to whom patrons can complain.)

If you say "this isn't enough resources/we're understaffed/we can't go on like this," but then you continue to go on like this? You've just proved that you can indeed go on like this.

Of course, not everyone is in a position where you can make decisions like this--reducing hours, or suspending a particular service; the reason we learn this in library school is that we usually have a clear bright line between operational management and funding. However, you can still ask. Management says, "For now this store is going to have to get by with 6 employees instead of 7," you say, "Okay; what are we going to stop doing, to make that work?"

And if the answer is, "Nothing," you just...let the problems happen. Someone gets sick, and they really need you to come on your day off? Sorry, but you made plans that you can't break (even if those plans are "lay in bed and eat ice cream"). But they can't open the store if you don't come in? Sounds like the store isn't going to be open. Hopefully we'll be able to get up to full staffing before this problem comes up again!

In the story above, the COVID quarantine situation was, of course, unpredictable, but if management had taken the lesson any of the times when appointments had to be cancelled because a doctor called off due to physical exhaustion, perhaps they would have had some options when both of their pediatricians were unavailable due to a global health emergency; who can say?