"EVERYONE has it rough' buddy!! !"...idiots!! !

Post Reply New Topic

Well... dealing with ignorance is frustrating, but all I can suggest is, keep your personal problems and suffering to yourself as much as possible. It's not that I think you're wrong for telling anyone about your hardships- I'm a member here after all. It's that sharing your troubles generally results in being invalidated, and no amount of explaining will get through to most people. They believe whatever the hell they feel like believing, and ignorance is the order of the day. Most people are naive and oblivious to the challenges that a disability can bring, and assume you're either exaggerating, or you're not trying hard enough. I'd like to list a series of conditions that have been trivialized over the ages...

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
PTSD
Surviving rape
Aspergers and HFA (you think?)
Weight (I suffer from this. Believe it or not, I work like a devil and can't get thin)
Mild retardation
dyslexia
depression
stuttering
dispraxia
schizophrenia
having an abusing childhood
poverty
learning disabilites
brain damage

The list goes on and on. Remember, no matter how educated, people can be stupid stupid stupid. I've even had that problem here a few times. If you share your challenges, be ready for them to give you a stock phrase that basically tells you to suck it up.

i hate people who want an award or heaps of sympathy when they tell their highschool stories or try to insist they had it worse. how do tjhey know?? just the self-involved aspie mind doing it's groove thang. cause yeh everyone did have it bad, so get over it i reckon.

@ Etular

I think it's pointless to try and compare suffering. It doesn't matter how hard or easy some one's life *looks* from *your* perspective. The truth is unless you've lived inside someone else's head you can't possibly have a f*****g clue. People dismiss others because they can't empathize. I can't fault anyone for not being able to understand someone else's plight on an emotional level, but when they refuse to intellectually acknowledge the fact that they *can't* possibly know what someone else is going through, I think that's just lazy. It's a failure to move beyond a simplistic and bigoted perspective.

Some of the people who you perceive as "whiners" could be unknowingly suffering from depression. Depression is a real illness that often leads to suffering in-and-of-itself without any external agent. People may find seemingly trivial things to complain about because they cannot find the real reason for thier unhappiness. This doesn't mean the unhappiness isn't real or that they're just complaining in order to inconvenience others.

I agree that there may be some people who exaggerate problems because they want attention, but they from my experience they are a minority. Jumping to such a judgemental conclusion about others without adequate evidence is not only insensitive, it's intellectually lazy and *illogical*.