Some Elephants with Pride Flags for @solreefs!

can you do an elephant holding the plural flag?

-🐱💜

On the one hand, people often get "tired" of someone having an ongoing disability. To paraphrase another post, "Your friends will take you to the ER the first time you shit blood, but the 20th time, that's TMI." Plenty of people with ongoing conditions and have experienced the people around them eventually running out of sympathy, eventually expecting them to "get over it" and be abled, even if that's never going to happen. These onlookers can't comprehend chronic disabilities, or illnesses that don't just go away eventually. They believe in the power of Proper Treatment™ even if there isn't any such treatment for what you have.

On the other hand, people also seem incapable of understanding that you can be temporarily disabled, or that treatments can help you become less disabled. Look at how people accuse people with DID of "faking" if they're not miserable, or if they've learned to manage/accommodate/decrease their symptoms. To them, it doesn't matter if you've been in therapy for years, known for decades, or anything – apparently, knowing anything about how to deal with your disorder means you don't actually have it. Or, if you have a situation like "I was hearing impaired before, but the source of my impairment was curable, so I'm not now.", people seem to take that as evidence that your hearing impairment wasn't that bad or never actually mattered.

Yellow-headed Water Monitor or Mindinao Monitor (Varanus cumingi), family Varanidae, endemic to Mindanao Island in the Philippines

when someone tags your post "#unreality" and you screenshot the tags and say "what are you talking about? this is real" because you consider the post easy to discern as not real and find this joke funny you're actually just causing paranoia for people who now feel like they can't trust the unreality tag. not everyone has the same reality discernment skills as you. what's "obviously" a fictional story to you may not be obvious to other people.

Thanks for reading,

This is the 10th Anniversary Edition of "It's Not A Race." Originally released in August, this version is months late because the prospect of adding pages to what is easily my most read works was particularly daunting.

This homeless person is making me uncomfortable. Should I call [a man with a gun]?

My neighbor is having a loud party. Should I get [a man with a gun] involved?

There are some teenagers skateboarding. Do you think [a man with a gun] would get rid of them for me?