Do you ever feel like your the charity case?

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This is an interesting article which deals with the power relationships people get into when help and friendship get confused with each other (especially with disabled children). Very interesting read.

Yeah.

When I was in a residential facility, this girl went out of her way to make friends with me, she was always genuinely nice to me. And then my psychologist told me that there was no way she would ever be real friends with me, that I was not the sort of person that she would be friends with if she was not living in the same house as me, and that basically she would be embarrassed by my lack of social skills in the "real world" and would never take me out dancing or anything else she might like to do with her "real" friends.

But she never treated me like a charity case, this psychologist just tried to convince me that I would never have friends who were really my friends and not just pitying me.

But I've had the experience so many times of being the person people drag along with them.

I even once got told that someone else didn't want me to come with them (as a group, on a trip for fun) because my behavior was too weird.

I've often been the "Do we have to take her?" person.

And I loathe that position. I loathe the idea that I'm just some pitiable thing or object that everyone passes around as a 'responsibility' but not as a person they like as an equal.

One time a person had acted like she was my friend, and it turned out she wanted to rescue me. And everyone had known this but me. And her friends had told her she shouldn't 'rescue any more broken baby birds' by which they meant me. And it turned out the entire thing was a sham, an act put on because they pitied me. I'd known something wasn't right, but nobody told me about it until they got incredibly angry at me for, as far as I could tell, discussing my life at the time (which included various aspects of poverty that I'd come to see as ordinary and non-alarming) in a frank manner that shook up their attempts at living in a pristine middle-class bubble or something. And they didn't get that the rescuing thing was condescending even when I explained I didn't need a rescuer and was not broken.

They even told me that I shouldn't react like this after "all they'd done for me," and it turned out "all they'd done for me" meant that they'd accepted me to socialize with them the same way they socialized with each other, despite the fact that I was poor and autistic and had a psych history. I'm sorry but to consider simply treating someone equal as "all you've done for them" and like they owe you gratitude for it, blech ick yuck, that's not equality it's totally fake.

I am lucky I do have real friends. But most of them are either autistic or disabled in some other way, because they're the ones who tend to understand where I'm coming from. It's not that I want mostly autistic friends, or that I don't have non-autistic friends, but it's just turned out I mostly get accepted (with no strings attached) by autistic people or other disabled people who like me for who I am, not because they feel guilty for not including me, and not because they see me as an inferior who needs rescuing.

I also remember someone dragging me to a couple of parties once. Those events frightened me thoroughly, and I could tell I was included as an afterthought. I even heard people discussing me like I wasn't there, saying mean things about me, or pitying charity-like things. And I remember a lot of situations where it has seemed like people passed me around as a burden or a duty someone had to deal with, but not as someone they really wanted there.

And it is kind of disgusting how the word charity, which used to mean love, is now corrupted into something that's often the opposite of love.

I can't stand being seen as pathetic, broken, incomplete, or not a whole person.

But what frightens me more than that, is this: I have really looked up to some people I've known or read their writings. Not like on a pedestal, but just looked up to them as mentors and role models. These are people I view as strong, whole, complete, and so on.

And... the scary part... is then that I see these people being treated as pitiful, pathetic, broken, weak, and useless. And that somehow scares me even more than being treated that way myself. Because that is so much not who they are, and it's so obvious to me, but people just walk on by and treat them like they're beneath even their notice, or simple objects of charity, but always as objects, not people.

And then I wonder, if these really strong people get this crap too... what on earth is going on? Why can't people see them the way I do? As people -- with certainly flaws but in no way pathetic or weak (except maybe physically weak but that's not what I mean). I hope this makes sense.

No, on the contrary. I wish someone ever, for once in my life, cut me some slack and didn't accuse me of my AS as a crime I commit on purpose against humanity.