Shit TAB People Say
February 21, 2012 3 Comments
“X disability is worse than yours.”
Really? And you know this…how?
Let me tell you something: Don’t try to measure the “badness” of shit you have never experienced. Don’t try to tell me how my own experiences measure up against someone else’s experience.
Contrary to what you might think, those of us with disabilites don’t sit around and compare our struggles in some sort of pissing contest.
Don’t you dare try to impose that on us.
We have enough to deal with. We get enough crap from TABs already.
I couldn’t even try to compare my epilepsy with someone else’s disability. Not even if they also had epilepsy-and a friend of mine does. Our experiences are different. Our treatments are different. It has impacted our lives in different ways. None of those differences mean that she has it worse than I do, or that I have it worse than she does.
We’ve bonded because of our mutual understanding, something that an able-bodied person could never have.
You can tell us nothing.
Check your privilege sometime, before I seize all over you.
About Brittany-Ann
A Bookish Beemer 
I get this, too. A lot. I often feel like I’m in some disability competition hosted by people without disabilities. And the interesting thing is that people with disabilities never do that to me. I never know what to say to this. Am I supposed to start proving that my life is as hard or harder than somebody else’s? That would be quite idiotic.
This is very annoying. Thank you for bringing this up in the post.
Thank you for being so candid, and for your reply to one of the posts on my epilepsy blog. You know, I had a weird thing happen (among the millions of weird things that happen to epileptics). I’ve written a book of poems about living with epilepsy, and it has ten reviews on Amazon. One of them actually said that my experience didn’t parallel his/her experience. Well, duh! I had to read that about ten times to make sure I read it right. This was supposedly a reason (s)he gave me a *** review. Everyone else had given ten stars, not that I’m counting. But it seemed a strange reason to me. I’m glad to be in touch with you and will follow your blog.
It seems like it should be so obvious, you know? Especially with triggers–strobe lights and the like don’t bother me, but for some, even a ceiling fan whirring below a light can do it.
You’re quite welcome! I’m glad I found your blog.