While I Live, I Thrive

A shout-out to those:

Who have gained weight because of their chronic illnesses.

Who have gained weight because of their medications.

Who have gained weight because of surgical procedures.

Who are unable to exercise because of their chronic illnesses.

You are a wonderful human worthy of love and care. I know you berate yourself every day. But know you're not alone and it's not your fault. You're beautiful just the way you are!

(Notes to self)

We've had the whole thing with plastic straw bans and the environmental impact of asthma inhalers, and now apparently we've moved on to contact lenses, because the ableds just can't leave us alone.

Why is it that people seem to feel the need to point out the environmental impact of things disabled people need, while just ignoring the impact of things they use but don't need.

There are plenty of other things (fireworks, balloons, etc, although now that I think about it some people use balloons for breathing exercises) that aren't necessities that I haven't seen anyone really talk about.

I'm sure many of the people bitching about straws and inhalers are the same people who have Christmas lights up right now unnecessarily using electricity and potentially endangering people with photosensitive conditions (and honestly I don't know how much electricity they use but even if it's a tiny amount, plastic straws only make up a tiny amount of plastic waste in the oceans).

I've even seen ableds complaining about mobility aids being wasteful, because "the hospital wouldn't take them so we had to throw them away" instead of, you know, donating them to charities or even selling them on when they no longer needed them (most of these instances were people who'd had an acute injury and needed to use crutches, or had a disabled family member who'd passed away).

Yes.

Many of you don’t seem to believe that it exists so here are a few statistics and please keep in mind this is a very short list and doesn’t get into anything even as “trivial” as representation in the media or as specific as how high these numbers go when you include intersections of race and sexuality and anything besides binary gender

Being disabled in public was illegal in the United States until the mid-1970s (x)

Segregation of the disabled still exists; from designated parking spaces to refusal of hiring disabled people in visible jobs to denial of basic education (x)

Disabled people are still legally allowed to be paid slave wages, as little as $0.22 an hour (x)

To receive disability benefits, which can be around $700 a month, a United States resident can be required to not have any savings, to own any property, to never inherit money or property, to never have more than $2,000 in their checking account, to never work for anything above the aforementioned slave wages, as well as many other restrictions (x)

Disabled people, even simply the seeing or hearing impaired, often have their children taken away from them by social services for no reason (x)

Disabled women are twice as likely to victims of domestic violence as abled women (x)

Disabled women are less likely to seek help for their abuse, and oftentimes the little help the receive is not appropriate (x)

Disabled women are more likely to experience abuse over a longer period of time and suffer more severe injuries as a result (x)

Reports of sexual violence against disabled women range between 51% and 79% (x)

Forced sterilization was legal in the United States until 2014 and was most often performed on the disabled and/or women of color (x)

85% of disabled women have experienced domestic violence (x)

80% of women with intellectual disabilities have been sexually assaulted, and 50% of those women had been assaulted more than 10 times. (x) 

Half of the people murdered by police officers are disabled (x)

Have I not suffered enough