hey, if you aren’t chronically ill, read this. its important to me

ora00911invalidcharacter:

tw: ableism, death mention

i have thought a lot about the phrase “get well soon” as it is used in the united states. before, i thought i just had an issue with it when it was said in its shortened form as a command, but that i was fine with it when it was said as “i hope you get well soon ”. now i see they are both fucked up catch-phrases that you unsick people use to absolve yourselves and to be lazy. the more i think about it, the more all this other shit comes up, and i have never been so angry. my anger and my rant is extremely relevant.

listen up. i will not educate you on this for free again. i’m not open to discuss this and i don’t care about your opinion. i guess i can’t stop you from reblogging with commentary or your opinions in the tags but just dont. you can like this to save it to read again later, but don’t like for other reasons. you can do a clean reblog. you, as always, have permission to ask me how you can make my life easier, and right now, that’s it.

before we get to my anger though, i’ll help you get acclimated. notice how telling someone to “get well” assumes a universal wellness, and places value on that wellness over sickness. it doesnt mean well if that well includes burdensome unemployment or dependence on you. employment is valued by you the well-meaning well-wisher as the most important kind of labor – the kind you hope we can get back to! our old positive and productive, low-maintenance self!– as opposed to the unpaid labor we will do every day as sick people, including staying alive labor and healing labor and learning labor and teaching labor.

its clearly unimaginable to you that we could value or enjoy our life as much if we don’t get well. get well soon… or what? the answer must be obviously obvious to go without saying. when you use the imperative “get well soon” you assign the sick person a relationship with our illness without our consent (much like when allistic people say “she suffers from autism ” and are projecting suffering on to her, whoever she is, because you hate autistic people and want to breed us out of humanity, and in order to maintain that state of hatred while seeming moral and believing you are moral, you must couch it in terms of concern).

yep, hallmark card language can be violent. when you say “get well soon” and “i hope you get well soon” you violently place responsibility on the person who is sick to get well as soon as possible for your convenience. you want us to care for ourselves or disappear. you are making sick people, who have no ability to alter the course of our illnesses by trying harder, feel we do–must–should have that ability, and feel guilty if we take a long time to get “well” or know we never will get “well”. this expectation can influence us to push our bodies unsustainably, to tear up our mental health, to chronically burn out into an early death.

by verbally transmitting this (partial) responsibility to sick people, you, the unsick person, who actually /does/ have ability to alter the course of sick peoples’ illnesses by trying harder than you do, are ridding yourself of that responsibility. (show me a chronically ill person who isn’t strung extremely thin, who doesn’t have chronic pain or anxiety that could be relieved if one of our unsick friends, instead of telling us they hope we feel better every few weeks, or helping us only in crisis, /always/ did our grocery shopping).

when you say you hope we will get better or hope we feel well soon, you are saying that our pain and depression and anxiety are out of your hands. if you say “feel well” or some other imperative clause, you are saying that our pain and depression and anxiety are out of your hands, and also they are in ours.

“get well soon” and “i hope you get well soon” are both speech acts that carry your intent to demonstrate care and remorse. part of the problem with speech acts that carry an intent to air remorse, or be themselves an act of care, is that they seem like an end. they work as a lazy stand-in for support by placating your passing instinct to materially assist a person who you hold a privilege over. and coming from many people, this compounds in the case of sickness to make the chronically sick people who are struggling to survive and being various degrees of neglected feel that we /should/ feel cared for, and feel that our anger and feeling of being abandoned and neglected must be overreactions.

this is because this is always how power works on a macro level and abuse on a micro level. the disempowered cannot believe they are being exploited in an avoidable way, or the abused that they deserve and can attain a better relationship, so they cannot be allowed to think in terms of labor and power relations. the structure has to be clouded up with idealogical red herrings so that we cannot make it out. in this case, people must be made to believe in “caring” which is conveniently all about intent and about verbalizing concern and love, and not about labor. not about the material.

because you design a world that discludes us, sick people do not have community centers and are spread far across space. and you put, or benefit from the putting of, all kinds of barriers to our mobility including across countries. there is no other place we can go that will have us as a citizen because our labor is not assigned value. you create places where sick people /do/ spend time in numbers, like hospitals, and design them in ways that keep us apart.

so our politicization becomes rare and us few cannot reach other. we stay separated and apolitical, usually not thinking of our relationships with unsick people and doctors as power relations. we cannot be there for each other or make systemic change, and you, unaware you are benefitting from this, are not there for us in the slightest as you believe you are charitably “helping” us. you invariably neglect us to different degrees and then (sometimes) mildly but (usually) persistently gaslight us about it, with the aid of mental health professionals.

if we have the privileges (such as not being black, latino, a sex worker, transgender, undocumented, crazy, an addict, orphaned or disowned) to avoid prison and the financial privilege to afford it, we will be funneled through other institutions, where unsick professionals that are elected by you will make our despair individualized through diagnosis. unsick therapists will keep us coming back and giving them money by insisting that we have control over our despair and drawing our attention away from the conditions that bring about that despair. we’ll learn how to use “i feel” statements and police our own tone when expressing our despair to you that benefit from our oppression. the persistent fear of abandonment that you “healthy” people put in us will be called a personality disorder.

you the unsick are our oppressor, not our bodies or minds for reacting to our bodies or our minds for reacting to you. your charities kill us. runs for the cure kill us. doctors are as “helpful” as cops. they create the need for themselves to “help” by having a monopoly on “protecting” us. they enforce our oppression and you are the class they are actually protecting. you won’t find a death toll because they have us sign a paper.

i’m sure you have never witnessed a chronically ill person publicly demand your labor, talk about energy as a resource that you are cruelly denying them while exploitively having it in excess. you are the reason the labor we do goes unpaid. you won’t witness us talk about all of the passive abuse you are complicit in all the time.

when you arent singing the praises of having charities or one’s biological family take care of them, you looove to talk about self-care. your language of self-care is violent in the same way “i hope you get well” is. regardless of intent, you use it to place the responsibility of being healthy on the individual, which hurts sick people greatly and lets you indulge in your negligence. it excuses nearly anything and personally, it has been used multiple times as an excuse to be abusive to me. and many more times, likely, you have used it out loud or to yourself as a rationalization for your behavior and more disturbing lack of behavior.

you’ll never witness sick people say anything like this: you, going to the gym, when you could be working your arms by doing my laundry and pushing my wheelchair, is greedy. mysteriously, no one has the energy to assist us but pays to run on a treadmill, and this is seen as normal. you won’t witness sick people or any radicals drawing parallels between maximizing fun/pleasure and hoarding money. and you will probably never have a chronically ill person hold you all to make good on your casual speech act, your claim to be doing care by saying it, all the while being neglectful.

acts of neglect are acts of violence.

you push me out of spaces before i can make it in the door.

acts of neglect are acts of violence.

in the last few years enough people didn’t support me enough for me to survive so i had to move back in with my abusive mom and am so so isolated in this town. you personally are responsible for this.

acts of neglect are acts of violence.

you quarantine us– whether in our houses or hospitals or jails–

you live and breathe eugenics.

you are killing us, accidentally on purpose.

do you understand?

if you don’t i cant be surprised. you too, are invested in not knowing it. and i can’t be surprised that chronically ill people, who are very invested in knowing it don’t know or say it more. for one thing, every chronically ill person i have met lives in some degree of fear of losing the care we /do/ get from people we depend upon. if for some reason we don’t, you make a point to correct that. for another, so many of us have survived socializing with crowds of people like you who politely enforce eugenics, and a mental health system that invalidates and sublimates our anger (turning it inward into anxiety and hyper-vigilance).

i have never /once/ witnessed an unsick person even let me know they are aware that they benefit from the privilege they have over me. expressing remorse is not the same thing. saying that the sick people you know have it hard, or are less privileged, or even acknowledging that the difficulties in their lives are partially because of systems of oppression, is not the same thing as admitting you have it easier because of those systems. let alone committing yourself to betray your group and fight for ours in ways that don’t serve you. don’t fool yourself into believing you can be neutral. there is only being an accomplice or an oppressor.

i’ve never met an unsick accomplice to sick people. i’ve met a few non-women accomplices to women who feel comfortable calling themselves a feminist or feminist ally. but any kind of movement is so beyond our collective imagination, and accomplices to sick people so nonexistent… no wonder there’s no parallel word for that.

(via systemic-cosmos)