Why, Fandom, Why?

I have never seen another allergy that has been so viscerally hated and mocked by people working in education like nut allergies. I’ve seen fellow teachers cringe that their classroom was the “nut free” classroom that year. Support staff that are trained and willfully don’t follow cross contamination protocol in the lunchroom because it’s too “tedious” or “time-consuming”. Full preschools + childcare centers that refuse to accommodate nut allergies. Schools where the only free lunch is a PB&J. Before/after school programs and summer programs whose food curriculum has nuts and doesn’t provide an alternative activity.

Allergy discrimination is so so insidious and prevalent. It’s happening behind their back and it is everything from the exposure joke to possibly causing someone to go into anaphylaxis from willful ignorance.

I was not downplaying this. The stigma is real, and people are 100% willing to let people with allergies die.

When my mom tried to enroll me in preschool, the school principal refused any basic accommodations like asking everyone to wash their hands after lunch before re-entering the classroom, not bringing straight up peanuts to snack time, etc. There was no such thing as a nut free classroom at the time. The principal told my mom and me (I was 4 at the time and definitely in the room when this happened) “if she’s so sick, she belongs in a bubble, not at school.” THE FUCKING PRINCIPAL! My mom had to threaten legal action under the ADA to get them to comply.

Look, I was on a 504 accommodation plan under the ADA for the entirety of my formative education (elementary thru high school). That’s all 12 years!!! And yet I have had teachers hand me items I’m allergic to as a “reward”. I have had other kids intentionally try to send me into anaphylaxis. One girl in 3rd grade asked me why I “wasn’t dead yet” when she had put on a lotion with almonds in it and then held my hand. I’ve had other parents write letters to the school saying what a terrible inconvenience it was to them to not be able to send their kiddo to school with PB&J, demanding I be Removed to a special education only class if my “needs” were such a “burden” to others. During elementary school “parties” held in the classroom on holidays and for student birthdays, I was always sent to sit out in the hallway or go to the library, because even though parents were only supposed to bring safe foods into the room (they had a list of all my allergies) they never once got it right. Administrators fought me tooth and nail for the right to carry my epi pen and other meds on my person at all times. Why they thought I would start dealing benadryl on the playground, I do not know. At lunch, I was always sat at a specific segregated table labeled the “Nut Free Table” alone because who the fuck is going to sit there with the literally segregated outcast? But ONCE notably I was sat on one side of a line of blue masking tape down the table top with the rest of my class on the other. One side was the NUTS side!!! As if allergens would respect that tape barrier. (Spoiler alert: they do NOT!)

Literally from preschool to my senior year of high school, I was “the peanut kid”. Other parents gave my mom books about how to “cure your child’s food allergies from HOME” by micro dosing with things they are allergic to (please never ever ever even attempt anything like a food challenge with a known allergen outside of the care and supervision of a medical professional, holy shit that’s so dangerous). My mom joined the PTA in my last year of high school so that I could maybe participate in all the senior-focused events like pool parties and breakfast at school on the first Friday of the month. The number of times another parent either (a) decided it wasn’t worth it to care or (b) intentionally brought peanut products to an event to spite either me or my mom??? I literally could not count. It happened constantly.

College was better, but I still occasionally had people BALK when I asked them to please not eat a Nature Valley bar with whole nuts in it right the fuck next to me in lecture, thanks. Work parties and catered lunches were always impossible. A few conferences I went to as an undergrad were SUPPOSED to be nut-free, but always fucked up the catering. At one, they set up snack tables by every exit of the conference auditorium so that when people left after the talk, they all congregated around the exits and opened macadamia nut cookies and granola bars. When I had subsequently had a massive allergic reaction and needed help getting home (I’d walked) after taking like 200mg of benadryl, the staff offered me a stack of napkins and a lukewarm apology.

Food allergy is a disability which touches literally every aspect of a person’s life. Everytime I share with someone new about what it was like growing up with my allergies, they have never heard anything like it in their lives. They’re always like “holy shit, seriously??? People did that??? Kids tried to kill you??? Parents wanted you kicked out of the classroom????” Yeah, man. Yeah. My own brother (who doesn’t have any allergies at all) doesn’t understand why I don’t “eat more adventurously” and why I won’t travel internationally. So, saying it REALLY LOUDLY for people in the back:

When on the flight Amy was fed bread that contained multiple things she was allergic to. The packaging was completely unlabled and she was never offered an allergy warning before or during the 13 hour flight. She had an allergic reaction and had a very hard time breathing and had to take the ONE epipen she had access to for this whole trip that day. She would not be able to get a new one. The flight attendants did not give a singular fuck about what happened to her and the position she was put in because of their carelessness.

Fast forward to the end of the trip. Luckily Amy had no further incidents during the trip. We get on the plane for the flight home and Amy asks about the food for the flight and if she can have the ingredients list. She also makes it clear to the flight attendants that this is really important because she has already had an incident and no longer has her epipen.

Do you want to know what the flight attendants did?

They kicked her off the plane. They kicked a seventeen year old off a plane and left her behind in an unfamiliar city because they would rather not deal with her disability. She delayed the flight for several minutes begging and crying for them to not leave her there. She told them she had no way of accessing a new epipen here, but they said she couldn’t fly without it. Me and my friend who were sitting next to her held her and argued with the flight attendant to keep her on the plane. She sobbed as she said she could just not eat anything, or that she could eat what she brought aboard. They still kicked her off. Bless the chaperone that chose to stay behind with her so she wouldn’t be alone.

You want to know the most fucked up part after that? The flight attendant who kicked her off was amused about the whole thing like it was some funny joke. Another one complained that “In all his years of working this job he had never been so disrespected.”

Amy and the chaperone ended up sleeping at that airport over night before they could get on another flight. I don’t remember if she was able to get another epipen for the flight home but I think she was.

I’m a child of indian immigrants in the west and I thought I understood casteism because we definitely brought that shit over with us to the new country, but I don’t think I really understood it until my dad was talking about his childhood.

we were talking about his childhood in the first place because he’s having some issues with his brothers right now (he’s the youngest kid and his brothers can’t accept that he’s a grown man that makes his own decisions (he’s 60)) and he was talking about how they used to be so close and their childhood was so good and blessed but then he was like ‘but maybe it was always rotten, maybe there was always this seed of judgement in us’

he was talking about how they, an upper mid caste family in a tiny farming village, would hire low caste workers to help out during the harvest. as part of their wages, they would get meals from the family. but because they were low caste, they weren’t allowed to use the same plates and cutlery as my family. it was thought that them using the dishes would permanently contaminate them. they weren’t even allowed to keep their own ‘contaminated’ plates in the house. instead, they would take their meals on banana leaf plates. and I was like ‘ok that’s fucked up but banana leaf plates are commonly used by all castes’

then my dad explained ‘if we were to give them sambar, they would dig a small hole in the ground and line it with leaves, and we would ladle the sambar into that. if they wanted water, we would ladle handfuls of it into their hands and they would drink it all and silently ask for the next ladle. this was part of my daily chores as a child, to feed grown men in such a degrading way. something about it felt wrong to me, but I was a child who couldn’t understand why.’

I was already shocked at that but then he continued ‘once, there were no banana leaves, so I went to give him the plate I was holding. the man wouldn’t even take it from me, knowing how the rest of my family would react. when he accidentally brushed against it, I was surprised and dropped the plate. he then picked up the plate and built a small fire from the branches nearby and threw the plate in. these were steel plates, so they could survive that. he then used a different leaf to pick up the plate once it had cooled enough to give it back to me. not once had I even spoken or asked him to do this, but he knew that the plate needed to be purified before it entered our house. I think I was eight years old.’

I think this was coming up for him because he was already realizing that his family weren’t always good people based on their interactions with him and this made him see their actions through a new light. my dad left the village and eventually the country fairly young so I think he hadn’t interrogated his fond childhood memories like that. honestly, it made me think less of my family.

I’ve heard some people compare castes to different sects of christianity and I don’t think that’s a good comparison. that’s bias based on thinking you’re the best. casteism is having a hierarchy and knowing exactly where you stand in that hierarchy and knowing that you can’t change that no matter what. that you are dirty and that you were born dirty and that you will never be clean.

It's really in depth, cites research and is probably valuable to anyone who wants to learn more about the history, but still explains everything in a very accessible way. Basically everything in it was news to me, so if you know very little like me you'll definitely get very much out of it.

I can work through most of my migraine and pain triggers, though I probably shouldn't. I have learned to breathe through my anxiety and OCD triggers. My delusions were triggered BAD last night and I am surviving, even if I kinda wish I wasn't.