Nope. I am aware that there are varying degrees of severity, that the world is full of people with more severe impairments, more pronounced symptoms, whatever. I am very fortunate; my troubles could be much greater. I can do many things that others-- for various reasons-- cannot; I am neither incapable of caring for myself or others, nor am I currently a violent sociopath. I am grateful for those things. I am grateful that I can walk around on my own, speak something like understandably, do a lot of things that I'm painfully well aware others can't...
...but, frankly, those things describe me pretty darn well. No question about it. The only thing that's up for debate, is whether or not I should view myself as broken, hang my head in shame, and/or take drugs that hurt me and render me less functional simply because they keep me quiet.
OTHERS have told me that those things are written about people who are more affected than I am...
...but those people are generally trying to console me in a spell of self-loathing despair or to get me to do something they want me to do that I believe to be outside my capability. Or they're trying to be polite, because nice people just don't say those things. Or they just don't see the effort put forth to do what I do-- to look like a rough-spoken disheveled redneck mommy with a messy but basically clean house and ragtag but basically clean kids. They think they're seeing me on a bad day, or that having this many kids must be rough ,I must be struggling to make ends meet. They just don't know.
I wish they'd stop, every bit as much as I wish other well-meaning fools would stop reading me my limitations.
_________________
"Alas, our dried voices when we whisper together are quiet and meaningless, as wind in dry grass, or rats' feet over broken glass in our dry cellar." --TS Eliot, "The Hollow Men"
28 Aug 2011, 4:46 pm
