untitled
by ?
Tuesday February 14, 2024 09:23
A graphic I made in 2022. Marx would mask.
TW passive suicidality related to covid transmission, discussion of disability
(09:23) Ok. There is some stuff to process so we are going to process it in real time here. How to talk to your loved ones about covid. I will summarize and process what I read from that resource here. I'd recommend reading it yourself, but it is a bit hefty, which is why I haven't been able to really get through it since I've known about it for months. I feel alone and exhausted but I have to protect myself and the people I live with. I would like to protect the people I love, but if the people I love cannot get onboard with taking precautions, I may have to protect us from them. That is a scary but very real possibility.
So the challenge is how do I bridge the gap between the realities we are currently living in? I'm living in a terrible reality, where I and the people I live with are in danger almost every day. We are invisibly disabled so it may be easy/easier for others to look at us and dismiss us, to think that we are just exaggerating or are weak and need to get over ourselves. But we struggle to take care of ourselves every day and the three of us are precariously leaning on each other like sticks forming a tripod without actually being glued on. When one of us falls, we will all have to pick ourselves back up. Which is an analogy to say we buy food for each other and do chores as we each have energy to. When I was living alone I could only eat one meal a day and my dishes were washed maybe once a week or once every two weeks and I got used to fruit flies and the smell of rotting food. Dishes get done by someone here. I can do dishes over a couple days, my roommate can do dishes over a couple days. If spoons allow, we alternate. If not, it's ok, we trust.
But all that to say, if one of us gets sick and becomes further disabled, it will add a lot more pressure to our system of care. If one of us gets sick and we all catch it... Well. I have trouble even thinking of that.
I was passively suicidal when I was living alone, and very bitter at everyone around me. I was isolated and really only went out to meet with friends, and would unmask around them, and then isolate for 2 weeks after each meet up. I had no idea what their protocols were and decided if I get sick from them, I hope I die so they can start taking it seriously. Which is laughable, really. Why would I not just talk to them about it so they can take it seriously? And the only conclusion I have is that I wanted to die, but I didn't want to do it myself.
That's part of what makes thinking about this so hard I guess. Taking part in this conversation means I want to live. Even if I frame it as just for my roommates, it's also me taking responsibility for my own life and... It almost feels like begging people to help keep me alive. It feels humiliating. It shouldn't be, but it does. Maybe because I'd be asking them to acknowledge the difficulty I've been living in, and to commit to trying to preserve that, at least to not make it worse. It'd be saying that this could be a reality for them due to being infected, because an infection, no matter how mild, does have lingering negative effects on all parts of the body, and can reduce one's quality of life.
I've always been Black and Southeast Asian, trans, queer, and treated as a girl/woman in this world. Which means I've always been subject to racism, transphobia, queerphobia, and misogyny. These are traumatic things, and trauma puts people at risk for aquiring disability. Oppression is debilitating. I've also always had AuDHD, which are disabling alone, and can be comorbid with a lot of other disabilities, including EDS and POTS, which I suspect I may have. I've had agoraphobia my entire life. That's debilitating lol. I also have suspected since 13 that I may have PCOS, endometriosis, and/or PMDD. Just... some kind of shit related to menstruation, which has been dismissed and not treated for over a decade now and has gotten worse. I have passed out and slept through whole days because of the pain, that's how bad it is, and it is constant. I also have PTSD, which I aquired at 15, and which I would point to as the main thing that disabled me. And then in 2017, I further aquired disability due to multiple respiratory infections, which resulted in pneumonia, and which took me 6 months to recover from. I had to leave school for a year. And my condition has progressively worsened since then, and even more rapidly after an acute respiratory infection in 2022. I suspect it was covid, because the daycare I was working at, each kid had gotten it multiple times, and a 5 year old was in the emergency room for a week needing assistance breathing. So this is the reality I am in.
I watch the people I love continue to eat out at restaurants, travel, hold gatherings, go to bars and clubs, and just generally go out unmasked. And I am jealous, honestly. I'm jealous that even now, in this state of the world, they can go out and do these things without fear. I have never been able to. Especially not now. But I also worry because one infection could give them the world I'm in, constantly in pain, constantly fatigued, not able to work or do the things I love, but not even able to go to the doctor to treat it. I would call it hell. And I would be in the position of telling them to accept that hell as reality and ask them to adjust their lives to take precautions. Of course people would reject that, especially when the government is trying to bury it all and say "no no, everything is normal, everything is ok!!!"
How can I tell them everything they know is a lie? That they could be abandoned by society in an instant? That their lives were never seen as valuable? How could I force them to deal with that? ...But they are already living in that reality, and I guess I could be someone who could help them through it, could help them find the mutual aid networks and liberation groups that I have spent years looking for. I could help them process as someone who understands. They don't have to be alone.
why was i left alone
It's not a situation I'm unfamiliar with. When I was 16, people starting coming to me for advice about toxic relationships and asking if they potentially dealt with SA. I didn't even tell them about mine, I guess I just had a differnt aura to me, one that said I could understand and help them through whatever they were going through. And I did. And I do. But I still had to go through mine alone.
That's a terrible thing to process. That I went through horrible things alone and now I am in a position where I can hold others' hands through theirs. And it's terrible that I don't want to. And it's terrible that I don't want to and yet I do. But it's right that I do.
And so I guess that's the purpose of this blog right now. To let me work through this bitterness so I don't hold it against anyone.
And here I am running out of spoons... So I will take a break. (10:27)