Friday 3 March 2023

FFS Friday - Neurodon't

Hello beautiful people. How are you all? Has your week been okay?

So what do I want to whinge about this week? It's not really a whinge, just an opinion. In this age of social media and ridiculously high expectations, so often we see posts and comments where people are told to educate themselves. Usually in the same post they're also told that it's not the job of the person who's telling people to educate themselves, to educate people. 
 
Let me try to explain what I'm talking about. When Chai was diagnosed with his many conditions I spent a lot of time (I still do) reading twitter feeds, facebook posts, blogs, books and speaking to professionals about his conditions to educate myself. I did everything I could to try to educate myself. I wanted to learn from adults with the same conditions so I followed as many of them as I could find. As much as I wanted to ask questions, only once did I ask a question. The reason I didn't ask questions is because so many times I'd see people telling others to "do better" or "educate yourself" and "if you want to know about that condition you need to learn from adults who have it" then in the same feed/post they'd say, "it's not our job to educate you" or "it's rude to expect us to give you our time for free".
So what I want to know is, if you can't ask questions and you don't have the money to pay for someone's time, how are you supposed to educate yourself? 
Also, say you did want to pay a random person on twitter for advice, how do you approach them about it? It'd seem a bit strange if a person dm'd you and asked if they could pay you for advice. 
 
I do understand where they're coming from, when you have a condition/illness etc you often don't have the spoons/energy to talk so helping people could be quite taxing, but that's the great thing about social media, you can engage on your own terms, when you want to engage. If you don't want to talk to people about your condition/disability, don't. Simple as that.
 
Now let's talk about the post that triggered me to write this. The person has a condition that I have never heard of. They were accusing people of not being inclusive to disabled people. How can we be inclusive of things we know nothing about? How are people supposed to educate themselves about everything? It's not possible. 
 
I feel like we expect so much of people, but in truth we're all doing the best that we can. You don't know what you don't know and if you can't ask questions how are you going to learn? 
 
Telling people to educate themselves isn't helpful. We're all struggling, we're all overloaded and we're all doing the best that we can in a very trying world. We're going to make mistakes no matter how hard we try. There is no way people can educate themselves about every single issue in the world. It's not possible. We all want to be kind, understanding, inclusive and accepting. We're going to get it wrong. We will get it wrong over and over again. But with each mistake we'll learn and we'll do better. When you know better you do better. 

So how about instead of telling people they should know better and to educate themselves, we just gently point out their mistake and kindly suggest how it could have been done differently? Wouldn't that be better than attacking and criticising? For all we know they might have no idea that they aren't being inclusive.

If you're wondering about the one time I did ask a question, I'll tell you. It was on twitter and the poster was saying that people should ask neurodivergent adults if they want advice about their neurodivergent child. I replied that I'd love to but so often see people attacked for asking questions so I don't. The poster referred me to a facebook group that has been invaluable. I'm really grateful to the person on twitter for referring me to that group.

Funnily enough, I would never ask a question in that facebook group because the neurotypical people on there who ask questions often get very harsh responses and are told that if they find the replies offensive/upsetting then they're tone policing which is not okay. 

On that note, I am constantly wondering if I'm neurodivergent. Chances are Tiger or I are, I wouldn't be surprised if we both are. I've been told I'm weird my whole life so maybe it's me. Then again, with some of the things Tiger does I strongly suspect he is. 

That's all for now. Have a wonderful weekend.
 

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