It’s dark. I’m still coughing. Another morning of feeling a little sick and a lot uninspired.I started to feel badly on Joe’s birthday.
Poor man. It was his 64th birthday and I had to cancel everything planned and simply go to bed.
We were in Edmonton and I had lectures to give, and even though the organizers offered to let me cancel one of them to go rest, I made it through. Got home and it went from bad to worse, we both developed horrible coughs and have since been resting as much as we can and simply trying to get better.
I’ve written through colds and coughs before but this time I simply couldn’t. I found myself just tired.
I found myself just not wanting to write another story about –
The couple who sat at the table behind us loudly discussing my weight, my disability and making jokes about who they assumed I was and how they assumed I lived my life.
The attempt to go into a place that I’d been looking forward to, a place that lists themselves as accessible and
finding that they had both a single step into the building and even if they didn’t an interior so stuffed with stuff that I’d never get through.
The mother who used me as a bad example for her son who was insisting on having a candy bar.
The drunk who made a big deal out of me sitting in a bar, wanting to ‘include’ me by making me even more visible by his behaviour.
Just couldn’t do it. Told so many of those stories before that I just couldn’t do it again.
There is, I realized while sick, such a repetitiveness to the daily doses of discrimination that disabled or different people experience.
A numbing kind of wearing down of self esteem and self worth and the development of sensitive touch spots on your soul that comes with the drip, drip, drip of ableist bullshit.
I came to the computer a couple of times to write and thought ‘why bother’ and ‘what’s the point’ and ‘how does this help’ and then got up and left.
I’m still there a bit.
I don’t know why doing this matters or if it matters or how it matters.
I love the community around this blog, without question, but am I helping that community or simply using it to feel less alone?
So, I’m not over my cough.
And I’m not over my malaise.
But there you have it, my first post in days.
