A message to the world

A message to the world that thinks they treat people with disabilities "equally" and as important human beings.

Imagine yourself as you are today with no impairments, no disabilities, no mental challenges, and no emotional struggles of any kind.

Now imagine a horrible car accident caused by some unforeseen event.

Now imagine yourself lying in the hospital bed.  You're now missing your vision due to injuries sustained in the accident. You have difficulty understanding simple phrases and thoughts from the brain injury you suffered.  You have difficulty putting together sentences correctly because the signals just don't seem to travel correctly from your brain to your mouth. 

All is a flurry around you.  The room is full of people that "care" about you and professionals that are "working" to help you. 

You hear topics like "difficult to care for" and "will be a great challenge to help him" and "strain on the family".  You sense emotional discomfort from everyone that speaks around you.  Oh wait!  That's the difference you are feeling the most!  They are speaking around you, not to you. 

You have questions to ask, comments to make, sadness to convey, frustrations to vent, pain to treat, and fear to conquer but what you feel going on all around you is some sort of organized chaos full of well intended people making decisions about you and for you.....but never with you.

Did they think you were dead?  Did they not realize you are right there with full knowledge of what's going on around you?  Did they not think to talk to you or inquire about your wishes?  Why are you not being consulted here?  Why are you being treated like an obsolete third party?  Why do you feel like your life is now in the hands of other people that are not thinking of you, but only of what ways they can or cannot accommodate you?

Everything is different now.  Everything takes 10 times longer to think about, process and act on.  Everything takes 10 times longer to do physically. 

Now you are surrounded by professionals 24/7 that know nothing of how you are feeling about your new state of being.  Now all ideas of what you knew as normalcy are gone.  Now you are dependent on how others view you and how they view your abilities or disabilities.  Now you are at the mercy of every other human beings' sense of humanity or lack thereof.  Now you are either an object of the many crusaders or an object of extreme social discomfort.  You are no longer just you.  You are no longer a non-topic.  You are no longer a regular non-issue person just mottling through life like everyone else.  You are now either a poster child for disabled people's rights or a model of the worlds many inequalities.  You are not just the person you were minus some abilities you had before.  You are not any of the things you were before............at least not to them. 

You still see the same value to your life as you did before, you just need modifications.  The problem is, no one is understanding or willing to make the modifications that you need.  Every one is busy modifying what THEY think you need rather that what you actually need.  Really, aren't they just modifying things to make their caring for you easier on them?  In fact, some are modifying things just because some "LAW" was passed years ago to force them to do so. 

This is your life now............now tell me...........how equal do you feel?

from the author of  "Autism and Assholes"