Weekly Check In July 22 - 28
The theme for Disability Awareness this week is Stigma - Check out the Events
Do you ever feel uncomfortable talking about your Disability?
What causes that and what would have to change to make you comfortable?
How is this week going? What's going great? What's a challenge?
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@AffyAvo Yes I feel uncomfortable and ashamed to talk about my disabilty because people think thay it is a joke.I'm not sure how to handle this,so I just stopped discussing it.
@adventurousBranch3786 I'm sorry to hear that people haven't taken your disability seriously. I hope that if you do open up here you find people are supportive.
@AffyAvo thanks for your kind words
@AffyAvo
Hello, first check-in I've done here.
I feel it depends on who I'm talking to when it comes to my comfort of talking about my disabilities. I relate a lot to others here who have posted the "but you don't look sick" comment they've gotten from, I assume, strangers/family/friends.
I found it took me longer to get help for my disabilities actually because of the stigma. Even family didn't help much on that aspect and I can also agree that makes things really lonely.
Personally, I'm an author/writer (but not making an income from it) and I found that this gives me some sense of purpose. Before, when I was still living with my parents (which was not a healthy environment) I worked as much as I could at my two jobs. One fulltime, the other parttime. I deteriorated so rapidly and made all my disabilities so much worse that, since then, I can't work.
I mean I literally ended up in the hospital for almost a week.
Then I tried going back to college. I made it to the last year before ending up in the hospital again. So it was two years this time instead of one. (So, so far I've found my body can do roughly. Two years of desk work or one year of manual labour.)
I think it's because of the stigma that I actually keep pushing myself past my limits. I constantly feel like I need to be doing more and more.
So I'm wondering. Does anyone else find this too? That the stigma pushes you to accidentally make yourself worse?
@LunaLittleWolf Welcome!
I definitely have pushed myself more than I should have, I would say it was only partially due to the stigma of not looking sick. When I have had a more visual aspect to being sick, like a peripheral IV line sticking out of my arm, I have found it easier to get and accept help, not go out, etc (although it also helped that with the placement I couldn't easily get that arm into a jacket sleeve).
My issue moreso with pushing myself is the diangosis aspect. If I just feel like crap, hey there's nothing wrong with pushing myself. When I found out that what I had was actually life-threatening though, I had a specific name and knew that what I had was actually a medical emergency beyond just making me feel horrible I had 'permission' to back off.
I would put some of that into self-stigma. Feeling super horrible, but still being 'safe' and able to just recover at home doesn't make pushing oneself so symptoms get quite bad ok. I've grown up with that attitude that you just deal with the symptoms though, as long as they aren't serious avoidance of triggers and appropriate pacing aren't necessary.