People who are offended by the very idea that somebody might not want their unsolicited advice really do tell you who they are.
(this is a vibe, not a targeted subtweet)
"you must not want to know what's making you sick if you don't want unsolicited advice."
Fuck. You.
I cannot stress enough that the difference between an anecdote about You, An Internet Stranger Who Was Actively Seeking Advice and Me, Who Explicitly Was Not Seeking Advice is that one of those situations is consentual and ONE OF THEM IS NOT.
And to be honest and a little bit Not Humble, I get a lot of feedback from people that they've made diagnostic or treatment progress because of my tweets.
So the idea that unsolicited advice is necessary to help people navigate illness is demonstrably wrong.
The Unsolicited Advice Brigade is correct that many/most people spend a long time struggling to figure out what's going on.
But most people struggling are actively looking for answers, so consider making your info findable instead of indescriminately badgering people with it.
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hi friends just here to say that I’m still doing my normal twitter void stuff (just slowly because life has been 🫠) at this point, but there are other places to find us if/when you decide to leave and/or the lights go out.
I’ve spent a lot of time on twitter & I’ve never had any illusions that twitter the corporation gave a shit about me & losing the space we have built here will/would be devastating.
but I’m in like pretty extreme isolation so it’s not like I’m going to put my phone down.
disability twitter predates me of course, and I’m resting on the shoulders of many people I admire.
I’ve been thinking/talking about the history of the hashtag a lot lately & I guess I want to emphasize that part of the reason I made it was to become findable to undiagnosed folk
the thing people are refusing to understand is that ableism is already present in basically any conversation about human behavior because it relates to the social & structural enforcement of what a “normal” bodymind “should” be able to do
sometimes [telling a person offering you free food that you can’t eat it for medical reasons] gets about the same response as [telling someone who’s pretending the pandemic is over that you wear a mask for medical reasons]: ableist hostility
that’s how ableism entered the convo
“I can’t believe disabled people are calmly discussing their real world preferences for receiving support & care when they have learned that intentions often don’t map well to impact in these sorts of situations”
I wouldn’t be *offended* if my neighbor spontaneously cooked me food, but I’m not going to log on to twitter dot com at this of all times and pretend that people aren’t regularly hostile as fuck if I breach whatever story they’re telling about what their generosity means
the conversation I personally most want to be having about disability & labor is how to build communities & systems that normalize asynchronous remote participation & let sick people be sick for as long as they need to be w/o coercing independence during times of unstable health
“When you saw only one set of footprints, it was then that I told you to toughen up & build character.”
(this isn’t a subtweet criticizing the jorts discourse, I have been an active participant in the jorts discourse, I wish I’d never had to put those words together, but my point is that LC is a critical labor issue & everybody should be prioritizing the above in their organizing)
because almost every time the first thing happens, there will be a wave of disabled people who do not face the kind of ableism being discussed, who still think their disability qualifies them to weigh in on how NOT ABLEIST something is, which is just… lateral ableism.
[death, starvation]
like literally in the chronic illness community prior to covid (and still), one of the biggest risks for sick people living alone is malnutrition & starvation because we literally get too sick to shop/cook/swallow.
like I didn’t want to wake up today and get angry about a series of things a fictional parasocial cat said on the internet, I had planned to be angry at something totally different
I get that it can be really hard to understand feedback on a surprise topic at the trolly scale of twitter but I also think that people’s feedback & accountability practices in small conflicts tell you a lot about who they do & do not consider themselves to be in community with.
and it’s never just the original questionable comment, it’s the refusal to acknowledge that the predicted wave of hate/disbelief invited by the comments has shown up right on schedule, and I honestly don’t think it was on purpose but that’s PART OF THE PROBLEM.