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offline, developmentally disabled people who are not intellectually disabled are ableist to DD people who are. they will brag about how they're "one of the smart ones" and get angry when people assume they're ID, because they feel superior to people who are and that any association with ID demeans them

and ID/DD people who are not visibly disabled or visibly different are ableist to ID/DD people who are

and ID/DD people who are not very symptomatic or who don't have certain symptoms are ableist to ID/DD people who are or do

i got bullied by other developmentally disabled kids

i know a lot of other people have said they did too, because they were ID, or they had learning disabilities the other kids didn't, or they were visibly different or had certain symptoms, like incontinence. disabled kids who can read well bully disabled kids who can't. disabled kids who don't have speech issues bully disabled kids who do. disabled kids who don't have motor issues bully kids who do. disabled kids who don't experience involuntary muscle contractions or movements bully kids who do

offline. irl. before tumblr

the more symptomatic or visible your disability is, the more likely it is you will get bullied by disabled people who feel superior to you because they either don't have those things or have them less obviously

that's not a tumblr only thing

and it's not because they're insecure either

i want "developmentally disabled but not gifted" representation, it's always gifted kids in media. when will it ever be kids who weren't. why does every character who either is disabled or is implied to be have to be a genius. sorry, but how many more "metaphor for being autistic but gifted" characters do we need. why are there so many

and there's a real reason, asperger's "little geniuses" vs "useless eaters", white supremacists value intelligence and academic skill, and they see people who are intelligent and academically proficient as morally good and people who aren't as morally bad

so society sees worth and value in the academically skilled but not in people with intellectual disability, learning disabilities, and cognitive disabilities

it's not just that developmentally disabled people who don't have intellectual disability feel superior toward people who do, on their own, out of nowhere

because there are still not enough resources for ID/DD adults and even when we are (fully? is any disabled person fully accommodated? does that ever happen?) accommodated and livably supported we still often die younger than we would have if we had gotten everything we need when we needed it because everything we need to survive needs to be fought for, including medical care and caregiving, and if you have cognitive issues, like a lot of ID/DD people do, you can't fight for it yourself, which means you need a reliable person who can, too, in addition to everything else you need

observing this, it might seem logical to assume that what isn't accounted for in these situations is that

1 developmentally disabled adults grow up but we don't stop being disabled

2 some of us get more disabled and then need more support as an adult, either due to our disabilities themselves, complications related to our disabilities, acquired illnesses we're often more prone to (many chromosomal conditions cause either a compromised immune system or frequent infections of the ear and bladder), or neglect either from a caregiver or from the medical system

but the fact is that when you're disabled capitalism and white supremacy really really really just want you to either "grow up" or die

people with developmental disabilities are not children but we may act in ways you would normally associate with children because that's what developmental means. impairment in skills that are normally acquired during development, like socialization, proprioception and spatial awareness, knowing how to and being able to feed yourself, talking, seeing and hearing, walking, reading and doing math, emotional regulation, learning and being able to understand and retain information, executive functions, and more because of the kind of society we live in and what is expected of adults who live it, like "knowing how to cook", "knowing how to write an email", and "knowing how to do paperwork"

i'm going to tell you something you're going to find disgusting but which has been my life my whole life because nobody takes care of me

i got infested with fleas because i went outside when i hadn't bathed in months and was covered in urine and blood. i hadn't changed my underwear in months, and hadn't changed the pad i was wearing for about a month. i also had my jeans unzipped because skinny jeans hurt my stomach and i don't change my clothes, including my underwear, often because i just can't. i physically and cognitively can, but i don't, because that's how my autism works. my stoma also leaks badly, multiple times a day and in large amounts, that i feel like if i changed my clothes every time i needed to i would constantly be changing my clothes

other people get worms or flies or bedbugs

i had flies in my bathroom twice, probably due to blood, another part of my neglect is that i have been bleeding for years with no care or medical care, and i once had to try to kill an infestation of cockroaches under the wet towels i left on the floor while i was having severe stomach pain because even though i told my parents, who were sleeping, that i was too sick to, they didn't care

i just don't know if people know how often this kind of thing happens to ID/DD people and to severely disabled people also. i'm one ID/DD person out of thousands who is being and has been neglected and abused, emotionally, physically, and medically

and i really want to emphasize that

this is not only ever happening to me

it is a systemic problem

if you're capable of it you may be able to raise funds to get out. my question for myself is, if i did that, how would i stay out? i need help, i can't live alone, the barriers they put in place to "being an adult" are unclimbable for me. i don't have irl friends or family or a partner who can take me. no online friends can take me, they don't have the money or the ability. i am not low maintenance, i can't just go live with someone and buy my own food and clean up my own messes and pay my own bills because i can't work and i have severe dyscalculia; i can't do basic addition and subtraction, i can't count money, i tried to learn, my brain doesn't work like that. what do you do with people like that?

well a lot of us become homeless, but

for the resources that exist, you can only access them if you have the physical and cognitive ability, if you're able to navigate bureaucracy and red tape, understand and fill out forms and make phone calls and play phone and voicemail and appointment tag. and if you can't do those things, then you need to have someone else who is reliable and responsible and wants to and can do them for you, and even then, there's only so much they can do

i don't know of a lot of other things besides adult protective services, assisted living, and group homes

two of those things are expensive. the group home they were looking at for me costed 2,000 dollars a month

i just am really frustrated that there's still nothing

it's institution or "someone in their family will take care of them"

and this was true before covid

i don't know how to express the id/dd experience of "nothing belongs to you and you control nothing", and i have also had a more mild experience of that compared to other id/dd people, which i say to stress that for other people their life is even more restricted and limited than mine

it's just that i am always following someone else and that someone else is always in charge and i need them to be, that's the most important part, but also i wish i had more freedom. that i didn't feel, when i do go anywhere, that i am on a short leash. i can't explore the world. it's not open to me the way it is for everyone else

and in some cases it's society that restricts or removes that freedom and in some cases it's my disability itself that does

this compounds when you have some kind of issue every time you go out, too, so you're only able to go out for a few hours at most, though i want to emphasize that when i say "at most" i mean "at best", because generally 2 hours is too long for me

unaccompanied ID/DD people and even accompanied ID/DD people are seen as potential threats or disruptions

and even when we're not seen that way people are just cruel to us and refuse to try to understand us or accept us

and largely there's no place to sit or rest, few places are wheelchair accessible, etc

i don't think i would say that society is built to keep disabled people out, purposely, but it's not really built to let us in either, and the outcome, plus the way strangers look at you and treat you, is a feeling of discouragement. you don't belong and you're not welcome. accessible entrances in the back near the dumpster, ramps and sidewalks blocked, no one thinks of us

i don't think it's true either that no one thinks of us at all, i think that people very often think disabled people are selfish, entitled, lazy people who could be truly abled if they just tried. that or that we should just live our restricted, deprived, limited life and shut up because that's the lot we've been given. "you don't have to be here" "i guess you just can't go, then" (because i won't make it possible for you to be there, even though i could, because your disability is your problem, not anyone else's)

ID/DD people in particular are expected to either integrate into abled adult society (become abled) or die, or are expected to be taken care of by family (too many of us are neglected and abused and eventually die due to it)

speaking of death

a lot of us don't live as long as we would have if we'd had the accommodations and resources and medical care and medicines and aids that we need to survive, but we have to fight for everything we need or have someone reliable and responsible who's able and willing to fight for us

so the world isn't open to us

it closes and locks us out

and you also have to acknowledge the fact that ID/DD people can have symptoms that annoy YOU or are genuinely harmful to others and those are still symptoms that they can't just overcome. (this doesn't mean you have to forgive them if they hurt you or that it isn't hurtful.) people who have issues with boundaries and theory of mind for instance often do need supervision, for what it's worth, but shouldn't be kept from leaving the house or participating in society and socializing just because they might not understand that your gaming console belongs to you

when you're ID/DD people think you're doing everything you're doing on purpose, forever, and that also you can always control it, and that people who really can't control it should be cut off from the rest of society so they can't hurt anyone

everyone is suspicious of you all the time. they think you will either hurt someone physically or emotionally, break a social rule, be "disruptive" or cause a scene, or eventually need to be taken care of medically. they scrutinize you constantly for signs of faking or exaggerating, especially of attention seeking, because they think you think being sick or disabled gets you attention and they think you think this like a child thinks it, innocently manipulative. they think you use your disability as an excuse to get "special treatment" and that everyone who is nice to you is just coddling you and you need to be treated more harshly to "know what it's like" even when undoubtedly you already "know what it's like". they always think you want something. they ask you if you're lost or if you need help when you're unaccompanied. if you're somewhere they think you're not permitted to be, or doing something they think you're not permitted to be doing, they assume you're "misbehaving", like a child or an animal getting into something, and will go let whoever they perceive to be in charge know

the 2 different times i have seen an ID/DD person bodily removed from a room because they committed the crime of touching someone's belongings without asking or touching my hair without asking. the way the abled people in the room suddenly went quiet and acted like these children were a bomb they needed to defuse. the fact that they treat ID/DD children and adults like they're dangerous to begin with. i grew up feeling like i have to treat everyone like they're made of glass

i wonder why intellectually disabled people and developmentally disabled people often have PTSD

ID/DD people in horrifically neglectful and abusive situations who just genuinely can't do anything about it, someone else has to or you don't get out