[moving stones and happiness]

reading a paper on quality of life among 45-to-70-year-olds with Down syndrome:

I lived in a room and board that failed the burrito test. (”If you’re not allowed to get up in the middle of the night to microwave a burrito, you live in an institution.”) No one stopped me from going to bed, but they did tell me I had to have my lights out by 10, and that I had to be out of the house by 10 the next morning. When I complained to my outpatient program that I needed more help than I was getting, they threatened me with board and care, where my cell phone would be taken away and I would lose contact with the outside world. My case manager sounded so damn smug, like he had caught me out, when he said, “if you’re really as helpless as you say, then you need to be in a board and care.” Like my only options were struggling to do things I couldn’t do, or surrendering my life to an institution.

Here’s the paper:

You all need to be reading Dave Hingsburger’s “Burritos and Cherry Pies.” Hingsburger z'l is the originator of the Burrito Test, referenced upthread. The test is a useful heuristic for determining whether or not one is living in an institution. An institution is a space, according to this framework, where one cannot get up in the middle of the night and microwave a burrito. (Or, as the case may be, have assistance in doing so). People living in hospitals, group homes, residential facilities, prisons, homeless shelters, nursing homes, and other carceral spaces cannot do this. Most children living in their parents’ homes are also, in this framework, institutionalized. Many disabled people nominally living “in the community,” too, are institutionalized, trapped under the thumb of their aides and ‘care'givers who are often unwilling to do the bare minimum to feed and bathe them. This is the norm, not the exception, for people regarded as unproductive and unprofitable.

I would actually go as far as to say that MOST abuse is unintentional. I think most people will go through their lives without ever experiencing intentional abuse. People are abusive because they're selfish, because they're stressed, because they care more about what society thinks they should do than the impacts of their actions on their children and partners, because they think what they're doing is correct, because they've made it make sense in their own heads, because they think they can fix their victims, they think they can fix their relationships, they think they can stop you from leaving, they think they can make you a better partner to them, they think that means you need to do what they want. We've sort of constructed mental illness in a way that doing this shit to other people counts as a form of mental illness because it is anti social behavior in the literal sense— it is behavior that causes social harm.