i know it's been said on here and said again but people do so desperately need to genuinely do intentional work to build distress tolerance and start figuring out how to recognize the differences between danger, discomfort, and when a situation that is merely uncomfortable is triggering an emotional flashback in your bodies because it resembles a past situation that actually was dangerous which makes it difficult to realize/believe that this moment is merely uncomfortable.
i spoke to an allistic person who said their autistic classmate had a meltdown in class, during which the autistic classmate collapsed to the floor in the middle of the room, screaming and crying. they said it was "terrifying" and they were arguing for the autistic student to be removed permanently from the program.
when i asked whether their autistic classmate's meltdown was dangerous or merely uncomfortable, they said, "i felt like i was in danger!"
i understand that. but that's not what i asked.
"i shouldn't have to experience that."
yes you should, actually. that's life. upsetting things happen. no one should have to experience any discomfort. but we do. we get stung by bees and sunburns and headaches. we live in bodies in the world.
autistic people are human beings who have the right to exist in society, including during meltdowns. having one class of your entire semester interrupted by a singular meltdown is not anymore of an infringement upon your entitlement to education than having your class interrupted by a fire alarm or cancelled for a snow storm.
one of my peers once experienced a cardiac event 10 minutes into class. it was terrifying. it was desperately upsetting. i was contacted by the school and offered counseling afterward because i happened to be the one who managed the situation until paramedics arrived. no one should have to experience their classmate being hauled off in an ambulance, but it happens. everyone was worried about my classmate first and foremost, and then about me. no one blamed anyone, and certainly when my classmate happily recovered and returned to school, no one thought they should be removed from the program.
the difference being that people believe a disabled personal, especially with cognitive disabilities, in crisis are not experiencing something outside of our control, but instead that we doing something. that we are in fact making a choice to cause a scene, out of malice.
"they were arguing for the removal of the autistic student" multiple times in my life i've seen visibly symptomatic ID/DD people either be physically removed or removed from/bullied out of a chatroom
especially for the comfort of "well behaved" ID/DD people
the time when i was young and a girl came up to me and started playing with my hair so i started crying and all the abled adults went quiet and started acting like she was a bomb they had to defuse and eventually literally swept her up like she was a load of laundry and carried her out
i've seen 2 disabled people manhandled out of a room for "misbehaving", and been the one manhandled out myself too
there's a part in the ugly laws: disability in public by susan schweik about seizures which makes a point i want to add onto:
"consider this account, written by charles henderson in 1906, of what happens if a member of the public sees an epileptic seizure:
(quote:) in sociable intercourse the epileptic is an object of dread, and no one who has witnessed the person in a convulsion can quite escape from the haunting memory of the spectacle and entirely free his mind from terror or disgust. hence there cannot be that free, unconstrained, and natural converse which gives pleasure to society. (end quote)
[...]
this kind of thinking, to which the ugly laws have obvious links, often goes along with a certain kind of understanding of the public sphere. public space, in this model, is pedagogic space; what you allow in public is what children learn is allowed in public. if you allow unsightliness a foothold, the next generation will be even uglier. to display something publicly is to spread it."
the amount of times i've seen autistic people discourse about "when you meet someone who is more autistic than you", making justifications for their intolerance: "it's because you're afraid they'll get you in trouble, or get in trouble. your discomfort is a trauma response. it's not ableism". aspie supremacy. "it can't be autism it has to be something else". the equation of being unable to "overcome" autism (and disability in general) with deliberate, malicious carelessness, moral laziness, weaponized incompetence (or seeing "unmasked" disability as a deliberate anti-authoritarian performance of freedom), to justify discomfort or disgust or annoyance or a feeling of invalidation. to sever association. "they're not like me, i'm not with them, i choose to behave, so i'm good, and i think they choose not to behave, so they're bad"
