Tag Archives: disabled people

A Poem Called “It’s Not About Inspiration”

It’s Not About Inspiration,

by theamazinJ

Jerks, Assholes, Taunters, Real,
Inspiration?
We can all be jerks,
we can all be assholes,
we can all be taunters,
We are all real,
but we are all not inspirations.
I am not your inspiration,
and you are no body’s inspiration.
Inspiration is being a jerk,
inspiration is a being an ass,
inspiration is being a bully,
inspiration taunts us,
inspiration is not being real,
inspiration is being anything but real.
Disabled people are not your inspiration.
Autistic people are not your inspiration.
Inspiration is real, yes, but
we need to think of it as something within us,
not from outside of us.
Inspiration, yes?
No, inspiration, no.
Everyone is a jerk at some point during the day.
Everyone spins what they want others to understand about life.
So, why pity someone for who they are?
So, why not act like everyone is a person, disabled or non-disabled alike?
Disabled people are jerks just as much as able-bodied people are!
Disabled people are citizens just as much as you are.
I am disabled, but I am a citizen.
It does not matter what impairments or how severe the impairments can be,
no matter who you meet, everyone is a citizen.
The more we think this, the more we act it,
the more we remember being a citizen has many attributes,
whether able-bodied or disabled.
As a disabled person who can be an asshole or be a understanding person,
or as a able-bodied person who can be the same,
disability does not mean lacking humanity or being more than humanity,
disability is humanity.
Disability has varying degrees of impairments,
and impairments can be expensive to support depending on what is impaired
and how severe the impairment.
When thinking of being human, let’s think of all the variables of being human,
there are times when people are smart,
there are times when people can act stupid,
there are times when people can be an ass,
there are times when people can be a moron,
there are times when we people don’t think things through,
there are times when everyone plans out everything,
everyone takes disability too seriously and tragically,
when disability can affect anyone at any time in their life,
depending on when it strikes, what it strikes, and how it strikes,
depends on how the person reacts to disability.
There is no more putting down disability,
there is no more thinking disability is more than life,
there is no more disability is the end of life as we know it,
because disability is what makes life interesting,
it’s what makes life real,
it’s what makes human life being human
and being mortal and being imperfect
in a world that is constantly changing,
in a world that is rapidly transitioning,
and in a world that needs to normalize disability
as being the norm of humanity.
So, in universally designing society
we need to design structures and events
to allow however a person moves,
however a person communicates,
and however a person learns
to allow a person to applaud and flapplaud simultaneously
and allow a person to sign, talk, and use assistative technology
with ease without lurking, without staring, and without belittling or teasing,
because in the end,
universal design is about recognizing everyone however they are,
and not enabling them to be martyrs,
without enabling them to be inspirations,
and just letting everyone live the life they want to live
with their families, with their friends, and with their communities,
with the self-determination they want to self-direct their life with
even if it is choosing to live in the community
or choosing to live in a congregate setting.
Finally, its the choices that we learn from
that makes up our humanity.

FOCUS On The Present & How to Focus on Your Life

The 8 ways to Focus on the Present and How to Focus on your Life:::

1) How do you relate to people

2) How do you function in the world

3) How do you do your work

4) How do you interact and react to other people

5) Nothing about us, without us!!!

6) How I look physically

7) How Hygiene helps

8) How to focus on safety and security

These 8 practices are for everyone to remember and practice. Please always remind yourself of this and help others to know this too if they are struggling!

Find the connections you need to live your life the way YOU want to!!!

OUT, J

Every Day We Need to give Thanks and Give Back

I have been through the worst, I’ve been through the pains, I’ve even been through many heart aches in my life with people in general. People have failed me, people have been disappointing me, but most importantly I need to remember what I do in my life and what I have in my life of the people who support me. Sometimes I feel my voice, my intelligence, and my way of being are not acknowledged and listened to. Or, is that what it may seem like to me sometimes? I know there are many people who support me in my network including my family.

Thanksgiving is a day that was started that turned around over many years. It first started as a racist holiday against indigenous people. I suppose now people are trying to save Thanksgiving because they are turning it into a day to be grateful for everything we have and will have or had already. However, Thanksgiving should not be a day just to be grateful because we should always be grateful. Thanksgiving instead should be a day for everyone as a community in the world to come together to rejoice, rejuvenate, laugh, smile, and cry together. Sometimes it can be hard to, but we need to try to be around people to show who we are.

It’s a day that the whole community enjoys each other’s company and becomes fulfilled with life. It’s a day we should cherish regardless of it’s racist roots in history because we need to imagine ourselves always being the loving person most of our families tried to push us to become including mine. Love is something we all need. We all love, we all may need kisses, we all may need hugs, and we all need someone to connect to, to be a human being striving for our success.

Traditionally on Thanksgiving, people make huge feasts of food which includes grilling, baking, or frying turkeys. For every food we have, for every drink we drink, for every food and drink leftover, let’s think about the people who don’t have food during this holiday season. What happened to these people? Are they forgotten? Are they lost? Are they gone? The people I am talking about are still human who are not forgotten, not lost, and not gone, they are just here because for whatever reason no one understood them.

Love your family no matter what. Love the incredible things you get from the people around you. Yes, sometimes people in your family may disagree with us even when both sides of the argument think they are right. No matter what there is no right answer to an argument. People differ on issues because of everyone’s life experiences, philosophies, and observations of the world. The problem is that when someone is Disabled, many Non-Disabled people just don’t understand the life of a person who is Disabled. They only guess about what difficulties the disability community feels, and there could be back and forth calling names to each other, but this does not solve solve anything except a bigger battle. We need to accept that everyone has different viewpoints and every one has different things they have to say. No one needs to be silenced while they listen to one side of a story, instead everyone needs to understand the whole side of every story.

There is a lot of unrest in the world right now because of racism, because of ableism, because of ageism, because of sexism, because of heterosexism, because of classism, because of so many other ways of discrimination in the world. Yet, we need to forget about our egos, forget about who does what to who, and just remember that we are a community. A community who loves, a community of amazing individuals in the Human race, who cherishes everything we can ever do in the world. Sometimes it can be hard to drop our guards of anger and drop our fears we may have, but it is a necessary part of being human to be able to let it go to be free and happy.

I hope you love, I hope you are smiling, I hope if you are crying you have someone to hold onto, and if you are angry you can let it go to feel joy. Sometimes it’s hard, sometimes it’s messy, and sometimes we feel we cannot let go, however regardless of what we think we can’t do, we can always make our own choices. If we choose love, we don’t fear. If we choose fear, we become hateful. Most importantly, if we choose fear and anger, then we need to take a deep breath in, to allow are happiness in, to remember what humanity is all about; having community.

I know that many parents fear for their children who may have disabilities. It can be hard, it can be rough, it can be really difficult trying to figure out how to help their Disabled child. People need to remember to look at the many Disabled people who have been successful with the many aspects of their life as a means to ask questions and reach out for support. Disabled people need to listen to these parents so that they can give advice that matters. These parents need to listen to the advice instead of seeming to ignore the words of the disability community speaking up. Disability cultures exist which includes Autistic culture.

More importantly, this happens a lot in the autism community way too much. Parents look to researchers and other professionals for help instead of looking to Autistic people for the help they need. Researchers and other professionals need to work with us by listening to the Autistic people who can really give a better understanding of what it means to be on the autistic spectrum. One can only guess what it’s like if they are not on the spectrum themselves.

We need to be grateful that some researchers and other professionals have started doing this, but everyone also needs to slow down and breathe too. All in all, everyone who isn’t listening and learning to the Disabled including Autistic people, need to start now. In return, everyone can learn about about each other if only they listen to the things to be taught from those who are different from them. Then, only then, people everywhere will understand and accept a cultural difference that is different from who they are.

Hope everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving!!! Please listen, learn, and love the support network you have with the family that loves you no matter what. #lovenotfear

by the way…

This year is #GivingTuesday on December 2! This Giving Tuesday I hope you support The Autistic Self-Advocacy Network because A.S.A.N. really means to me the importance of community and accepting each other’s differences especially the cultural differences of Disability culture and Autistic culture. A.S.A.N. really is a breakthrough in the world because it really means that everyone who is Autistic or have other disabilities can express their voice or feelings of how they feel without being criticized. A.S.A.N. is about teaching the world what it means to understand each other’s cultural differences regardless of what they may be. It teaches everyone to be accepting even when it’s difficult to accept. Most importantly A.S.A.N. really teaches to love and educate people no matter who they are. The more people are educated, the more they will love, the less fearful and angry they become.

There are other organizations too that support Autistic people too. For example, they are Autism Women’s Network (AWN), Ollibean, Thinking Person’s Guide To Autism (TPGA), Association for Autistic Community, Autistic Community for Equality Facebook page, and G.R.A.S.P. (Global and Regional Autism Spectrum Partnership). When we think about cultures like Autistic culture, we need to think about supporting everyone without feeling like we are better than anyone else. We are all Human. We are all different and we are all learning from each other. The Autistic Rights movement only started about less 30 years ago, but we still have a long way to go.

I also trying to seek out funding for graduate school at CUNY. I started this crowdsourcing, to try to open up some doors. If anyone has any ideas for scholarship, please let me know!


OUT, J

Know your Voice, Know your Identities, Know your supports, and Live a Self-Determined Life

An Open Letter to the many primary and secondary educators as well as the many professionals who try to create tokens to Autistic and other Disabled people who they don’t give proper education to own their identities and opinions,

It’s important to create a better way for the Autistic/Disabled children and adolescents of the future adults of the Disability community and the broader community in the world. It’s important as well to create a system where the adults in the Disability community today finally know their voice and their identities count too. People need to develop their own self without any one especially Non-Autistic/Non-Disabled people influencing them that they can’t do much in society. This leads to many of the children eventually living in group homes like many of the Autistic/Disabled adult peers who struggled with the teachers in the school system as well growing up without a chance to learn.

School is an important project for every child growing up. No one should be denied a proper education because many teachers don’t want to develop more patience and spend more time with their students to get them through 12 years of schooling and go to college. When I watch the amount of people entering into the caretaker world for Autistic/Disabled adults I noticed many of the Non-disabled people who work with them even some parents, don’t preserve self-determination. Sadly, I start realizing how the whole primary and secondary education system pretty much sucks in the United States. I am not just talking about the public schools, but the fact that these children are also going to Residential Treatment program schools as well that really are segregative and do suck!! It’s not even just the Disability community which is denied proper education, but many other cultures of people too who don’t get the education they need. This all leads to mental health issues and addiction.

Many educators seem to only care about the most gifted people who are usually non-Disabled or non-Autistic people to finish high school and go to college. It’s only if any student becomes a good advocate for themselves during public high school that they actually do succeed to lead their own life through college eventually earning a decent living. Instead many Autistic/Disabled people wind up going to Adult day hab centers and group homes because society gave up on them. It is a very sad situation that many of these educators and other professionals do not help my many young peers in the Autistic/Disability community to learn responsibility in order to live a self-determined life.

When these people eventually do go to group homes, day hab, and even work in sheltered workshops earning a dollar an hour in some cases, they are treated like children, and act out like children, always acting out negatively. They are considered to be ‘behavior problems’ in society because no one taught them any better about responsibilities while attending their school years from kindergarten through 12th grade. And yet, most of these people have sensory meltdowns too that were always misunderstood as tantrums instead.

Society graduated many of these people with a IEP diploma which just states that they attended school without earning grades. Moreover, these people are told to learn social skills in adult classes when these types of skills should have been taught in public elementary school with the Non-disabled students. Most of these people can’t read or do not even know what it means to understand what they read, to write an essay, to do simple math, to sign their name, or to even know how they want to represent themselves in society.

Our society created a system where Non-Autistic/Non-Disabled people will speak for many of them in the Disability community no matter what the situation entails including telling the world how they should be identified as. Many of these students in the Disability community are never given real choices because many people do not want them to be educated in school and earn a decent wage that can allow them to have independence too. Their education is pushed away from them while they are pushed to agency businesses to take care of them for the rest of their lives. Yes, many of us in the Disability community do need supports, and sometimes agencies help with these supports, but the supports should be given to us as an accommodation to live a self-determined life. We live in an Interdependent world, none of us are totally independent.

There are some people, but not many who’ve been considered lucky to not let this happen to them. However, luck was more of a determination to advocate for ourselves including some non-verbal self-advocates who fought for their rights for supports and independence. Many reached out and others continue to reach out to advocate against a system that society really pushes many Autistic and other Disabled people into: not having their own voice and identities. It’s important to always educate, teach self-advocacy, teach social skills, and teach that it’s okay to identify ourselves the way any one wants to throughout school and adulthood. Most importantly, it’s important to teach social skills in elementary school as well as teaching sexuality and gender identities to everyone no matter if the student is disabled or not. Society is so afraid of teaching any one who is not the so-called normal person in society.

We are all gifted, we can all live our life the way we want and need to, and we can all learn to be responsible self-determined adults with the supports we need along the way. Society needs to accommodate the Disability community with the many sensory and physical things that we need to be accommodated for so that we can live our life like any other person can. In the professional world, Social Workers read in their code of ethics about self-determination all the time, but many Social Workers do not practice this code of ethics unless it is to get a Autistic/Disabled person to obtain their benefits from society as a whole. Benefits are good and are needed for us including myself, but self-determination must always be preserved too. There needs to be balance between the benefits the Disability community receives or will receive, and self-determination.

When society sees a person like myself advocating for myself and working toward my goals of self-determination, they only want to create a token so that this person will speak like Non-Disabled people yet will still be considered Disabled by society. If society wants to really listen to the Disability community, they will need to allow us to speak our minds the way we feel and want to represent ourselves with our identities. It is unfair for the Disability community and most importantly it is an unfair education system for the many people who have been and are in the elementary and secondary school systems. It’s probably why bullying persists in our schools. Society needs to change. Society needs to create an education system where everyone has a chance to live a decent life and learn the responsibilities to live our lives eventually with wages that aren’t sub-minimum.

Don’t wait until they become adults because then it may already be too late! Please do all you can to educate everyone no matter who they are. We need to make the United States better than it is right now. For those educators who have begun this already, I say thank you to you, but help me create any teacher in every school to maintain any student to live their adult life with supports and self-determination.

A few people have tried to make me a token in the past, but it’s important to fight for our own voice to be heard not to be a token. I teach self-advocacy at a part time job, and will continue to teach these basic self-advocacy skills so everyone eventually will know their voice, their own opinions, and their own identities which will always be cherished.

Thank you for reading and hope everyone understands what I say!

OUT, J

Self-Determination is Important and Healthy for a Person’s Life

People live stronger and healthier when living with self-determination. Self-determination is moving toward independence with the support network we all need. However, many people who don’t have a strong support network need to find the inner strength to do it on their own finding people who can help them. No one needs to feel like any person with ableist attitudes will teach them that they are incapable, incompetent, and feel unwanted. Every one is capable, competent, and wanted with a mission to achieve anything they want in their life. Whether you already have a strong support network or you are trying to build one for yourself, it’s important to know that everyone in society is interdependent.

One way of gaining this support network and building your life is through self-directed services from your state developmental disability office. A lot of times self-directed services from each state’s developmental disabilities department helps create situations for people needing a way to live on their own, but with support. This program needs to be encouraged more so people with a developmental disability including those individuals graduating from high school or have been an adult struggling for a long time to receive these services themselves. It helps because as people reach adulthood, everyone lives in the community interdependently, experiencing responsibilities and respect from everyone around them.

The world needs to change by accepting disabilities in life because it’s all a part of humanity! So, when is the countries that are not accepting disability going to take the lead the United States is trying to do right now? I do know there are many Americans that are not accepting disability too. However, many Americans are leading in the fight for disability rights trying to create an inclusive community for Autistics and other Disabled folks.

Individuals in society achieve successes each day as an interdependent person no matter if you have a disability or not. So, why do many people still treat Disabled people either with an invisible disability and/or a visible disability like we are third world citizens who don’t belong with the rest of the community? Many people in the Disability and Mental Health communities live in institutions segregated away from their families and segregated away from the rest of the community without the respect from others. Many people outside of the Disability community throughout the world need to understand disability is a part of the human experience and does not need to be hidden. It’s important to improve the lives of every person in society and give support to the people who need it so no one is left in an institution for the rest of their lives. The most important aspect of our life is to create a situation where each community in society supports the individuals who are in that community.

Additionally, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the United States just reported yesterday that 1:68 people are Autistic in the United States. The media reported this as if Autism is a disease, however only 1 in out of every 68 people are being represented as Autistic. This is getting better, but we need more Autistic voices to represent themselves as Autistic. There is still too many people who hide Autistic people from society. Instead people need to allow Autistics to seek their own identity as Autistic, not being afraid of themselves especially the part that is autistic. Being Autistic is just as important as any other part of a person’s identity. Once we accept this as an identity, we will see the numbers increase more. Everyone in the community is here to help everyone around them. That’s a part of humanity, that’s a part of love for others, and that’s a part of the structure of the Human race. Humanity is a spectrum!! Everyone needs to accept and understand people without fearing the unknown races, religions, and cultures in their society. Thus, fear leads to much hatred, so why fear when you can love.

It’s time to give responsibility, respect, and immediate action to the Disability community young and old to be able to do things on their own by exploring their identity and working out their life with the support network when they need it to fulfill their life. This is important because it gives any person a chance to describe an identity that fits them. It’s essential for any one to have their own way of defining themselves. It also helps with fulfilling a person’s own mission to make a difference. We can all learn from each other by living in the community. There are many ways we can be supportive without doing and speaking for others, by giving choices to everyone.

Remember: Nothing about us, without us!

From The Grateful Dead’s “Uncle John’s Band”:

Well the first days are the hardest days, don’t you worry any more,
‘Cause when life looks like Easy Street, there is danger at your door.
Think this through with me, let me know your mind,
Wo, oh, what I want to know, is are you kind?

Be kind and respect everyone the way they want to be identified as. No one can be disrespected and hurt a long the way. Every one has their chance to live and be a part of the community at large 🙂

As Autism Acceptance Month approaches next Tuesday, Let’s build a strong United Community in the World!

OUT, J