Hi disabled community! I’m so sorry the megathread is late this week. I hope everyone’s new year is going well so far!
As always, we ask that in order to participate in the weekly megathread, one self-identifies as some form of disabled, which is broadly defined in the community sidebar:
“Disability” is an umbrella term which encompasses physical disabilities, emotional/psychiatric disabilities, neurodivergence, intellectual/developmental disabilities, sensory disabilities, invisible disabilities, and more. You do not have to have an official diagnosis to consider yourself disabled.
Mask up, love one another, and stay alive for one more week.
My dad says he relates to my AuDHD diagnostic report but surely “everyone feels like that.”
The unfortunate combination of abdh and me/cfs: a body that needs me to lie down and rest every hour or it will cry out of pain the next day, and a mind that can’t accept a rigid schedule and will wander and forget about resting and if resting it will forget about getting up again.
Ventpost? Ventpost.
I’m feeling totally worthless.
No matter how many jobs I apply to I can’t ever land a single one, and I haven’t even started an actual career I’ve just been in freefall since I graduated college because the best I can get is seasonal, minimum wage jobs.
I’m a humanities guy in a world where humanities is completely irrelevant and literally everyone and their mother knows libraries more than I ever will. Every employer only wants STEM, every other gen Z has the spark of STEM except for me.
I have to waste my life bedrotting because no one wants to hire me and I’m stuck watching social media on how everyone is having so much fun without me.
I have no idea what I even want to do with my life and never did. Nothing appeals to me at all, so any job I’ll hate and any hobby I will inevitably get bored of. I’m not like normal people who can just be obsessed with their jobs and their hobbies and do literally nothing else and then just die.
I don’t know how much of it is autism, but why is everything so equally appealing and unappealing at the same time? Like at the end of the day, I just want to be happy, have a job that lets me express myself, some friends, a partner, and a hobby. But I’m not even allowed to even have one of those things.
If it’s any consolation, the STEM job market is brutal too. I graduated 8 years ago and it took me almost 7 years to land a programming job that I was fired from a year later. The whole market is trash. At this point, imo college was a huge waste of time and money.
I don’t know how much of it is autism, but why is everything so equally appealing and unappealing at the same time?
You probably got the ASD + depression combo. I feel this a lot.
Since we did a book club on Unmasking Autism … recently(?) [checks notes … a year ago
] I figured I’d try to catch up. I’m only half a chapter in but it’s seems pretty good.I wonder what percentage of benefit payments ultimately goes to landlords. Has to be more than 50%. For me and probably most other Californians it’s been 70-80%.
It is quite a lot! I believe Russell goes into this in Capitalism and Disability in the very first chapter, even. It turns out the disabled are a very, very lucrative front to funneling government funds back into real estate, healthcare…
Is anyone else just infuriated and so upset by all the online discussions making out that being disabled is great and all disabled people are fakers anyway? Just seen yet another reddit thread (I really have to stop reading reddit) where these horrible people are saying that all disabled people are faking it to get benefits, motability cars and blue badges, and that being “disabled” must be wonderful because you get free money, special treatment and get to sit around all day. Being disabled for me has meant a life of poverty, endless stressful benefit appeals, no financial or housing security, all my friends abandoning me, no chance of any kind of worthwhile life, endless pain and sickness, horrible life-ruining medical treatments, stress and having to beg for food. But hey, I get a free disabled person’s bus pass and if I win my benefit appeal I will get a pittance to live on for a while. Those able bodied people have so much to be jealous of!
It also angers me that they act like every disabled person has never worked. I worked and paid tax and national insurance for 16 years! They also ignore the fact that many people on disability benefits are in full-time work, and the disability benefits enable them to keep working.
The UK government plans to slash the number of people getting disability benefits. It’s already so hard to get them, many disabled people have died after their benefits were stopped. This just means they’re going to slowly starve and freeze more of us to death, drive more of us to suicide, to make a small saving while still wasting huge amounts of money on other nonsense. I’m tired of us always being the scapegoats and blamed for every problem the country has just because we can’t easily defend ourselves.
Its the same way those fuckers talk about homeless people “theyre faking it and then actually have a semi detached house” fuuuuuuuuuck yoooooou. I think people think this was cos they feel guilty, guilty because they know the social murder of the poor and disabled is a function of their inaction (and therefore their comfort), and convert that guilt into hatred of being reminded the underclass exist
Yes and they’re the kind of people who put spikes on benches and the pavement so that the homeless can’t sleep there.
lol i had a boss once that said all homeless people had homes and were just drug addicts wandering the streets.
me and my coworker he was talking to literally just stared at him agape for like a minute before he laughed it off. man that job sucked lmao
i literally just blocked reddit because i realized i was using it as self harm, lol
but yea, being disabled sucks ass. i used to work! i was even one of them stem people that redditors love so much. i was a lot happier with a job where i actually did stuff rather than now, where i just sit around all day being depressed. and you know, i probably could continue to work if there were actually accessible job options, but there really aren’t and if they are they’re more competetive and i dont have any selling points above non-disabled people who don’t have huge gaps in their resume. not to mention the mere act of applying to jobs causes so much dysfunction bc of how ableist it is. you want me to network? how? i can barely leave my house
god those people are infuriating
I spent 16 years working, mostly as a carer for the elderly but also had some other jobs on the side like telesales, waitressing and even spent 18 months working in a gym. I paid in all that time when when I need to draw out, I’m left to literally beg strangers for help.
people in the imperial core have such a “fuck you, got mine” mentality, it’s sickening
I took a fake sickness leave even if its just the second day of work after my 10-day holidays because I couldn’t get out of bed. I feel like a total loser, but working at the office is both anxiety inducing, tires me for the rest of the day (which doesn’t go away with sleep) and very boring because of frequent waiting times due to the nature of my job and the long (45 mins x 2) commute. If I could play a game or something in the lunch break it could be more tolerable but having to stay in work mode for 8 hours is too much for me it seems.
I used to have four remote days per week as accommodations instead of the usual two, but the bastard higher-ups took them from me for morale, innovation and discipline reasons. I challenged the guy’s arguments and he didn’t even acknowledge what burnout is even though the company has a ton of bullshit mental health and burnout seminars. I fucking hate this job but it is my first one and I only have worked there for 8 months. Can I even find another one?
I don’t know if AuDHD + OCD is even a valid reason to feel like this, I feel like a total brat for not working without complaints and remote days. How the fuck did my parents which are possibly neurodivergent as well do it for 30 years after all. Was it that they had children to feed? Or am I that useless? I don’t know and it is eating me from within
First things first, your feelings are valid, just as much as anyone elses, and you don’t have to feel like an imposter for complaining about work. Period.
Second, AuDHD and OCD are extremely valid reasons to feel this upset about a toxic work environment. Let’s be real, it is, they took away something that was promised to you to make work easier. They’re assholes for taking away the two extra remote days from you. You have a right to be upset just as anyone else is. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve worked there, criticism or anger because of these things is legit. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise (including yourself!)
Lastly, and only as a suggestion: You mentioned your parents might just have neurodivergent traits as well and worked for decades in the same job. Depending on how your relationship with your parents is, have you considered asking them on how they coped? I don’t assume this will yield much helpful info, no, but maybe they can tell you some things that help you cope with stressful situations that otherwise might overwhelm you. It’s just a thought, don’t feel obliged to follow the suggestion.
In either case, I hope you’ll be doing alright soon, friend, and can find some peace of mind, as dim as the hope may be
Thank you for the kind words. My parent has pure autism I think and he had some social difficulties at various workplaces but I think my case is most similar to my mother who possibly has ADHD + mild OCD. Her job (elementary school teacher) she pretty much wings and she procrastinates a lot so this wouldn’t apply to my laptop toucher job. Also for the anxiety she just does chores all day even when not needed in order to not think (her words). This was actually pretty intense when I grew up because she would always find some messy detail in my home and would shout to us over it
You’re welcome ❤️
And I see why their experiences would not help you with your predicament. Did you by any chance have some coping mechanisms that worked in school that could be applied your job as well? I know it’s hard to compare the two but sometimes these strategies can be transfered to new contexts.
I hope you find something to make it easier.
School was easy enough so I didn’t have problems. For morale in uni pretty much having friends that struggle through the same thing helped. I haven’t bonded with my coworkers because while they don’t seem like bad people, I don’t have much in common with them to be able to communicate effectively. Also in uni I pretty much studied with the rate of 0.5 pages/hour due to OCD+ADHD so it’s not like it was better then. I am pretty burnt out by the whole period after graduating (meaning 6 months of job searching + 8 months of work)
https://chuffed.org/project/121032-iraqi-trans-woman-seeking-asylum
https://hexbear.net/post/4248022
please help an Iraqi trans woman seek asylum in Canada!
what do people do all day… im so bored all the time…
Read (a lot), talk to people online, play video games, occasionally work on a craft if I’m feeling it. It’s not so bad.
Kind of depends on how much energy I have. I do some behind the scenes organising (practical planning, financial stuff and connecting people) from my bed whenever there’s anything I can contribute with. This is mostly where I get my energy and joy from. If there’s no work for me I try to get out of bed to do creative things like making banners or signs or decorating my room. Most of my days are spent sleeping, doing chores and resting from doing chores. Very boring and a bit depressing.
various art projects. i feel incredibly lucky that i have always had visual art to rely on. if i have more energy and can manage it, i also like to work on clothing diys (sewing, making patches, modifying clothes, etc. — it’s really not as intimidating as it sounds) and play piano. also, i talk to people and i try to help out with organizing bits and bobs as i can.
Fill my brain with worthless philosophy. Try to become enlightened. Clean and make stuff.
oh boy finally off work, now i can relax with my favorite activity: arguing with assholes on the internet
for real though i’m glad i’m almost home. hope you all had/have a nice day
So almost three weeks ago I asked my boss about an accommodation at work (I didn’t phrase it this way but they immediately knew that’s what it is). It’s a totally reasonable request imo and has a minuscule cost. Boss says they are fine with it and will talk to HR. Fast forward to today and I see the HR rep for the first time since then. I follow up with them about it and my boss never even brought it up with the rep 🫠
Apparently I need to wait another couple weeks due to logistical stuff. I guess it needs to go through the business owner too which has completely tanked any confidence I had in this, because this person is super ableist and has stood in the way of my efforts here several times before (even when it literally didn’t affect them at all). Just feeling really pessimistic.
I didnt used to do much outside of school/work and now that I am doing more, I’m remembering why I didn’t do much before.
Being disabled put so many limits on my life that I got so used to, I stopped noticing they were there because i never did anything. Now that my depression is better, I’m dealing with a body that just can’t do what everyone else’s can
It’s pretty disappointing how the r slur is commonplace in many “leftist” spaces.
Work talk: So for some fucking reason, I’m doing good at my job. The problem is that it’s not a career job. There are no benefits and no savings option. They just fired a bunch of drivers that weren’t doing great and kept me on even though I was supposed to just be temp. I guess it’s something. Solidarity for those that got let go.
Story time: I accidentally ratted on a co-worker years ago and got him fired over a dumb joke and ever since I’ve made it a workplace mantra to just not rat out people. They can be the shittiest workers but I won’t say shit. I feel really bad for that guy getting canned and not just because he was my pill guy. So, solidarity. We all need to eat.
Switching gears. I got 2 days off starting today but I also work 4 days this week. I told my boss at the beginning that I only wanted 3. I’m not making a big deal about it now because the extra day makes up for only getting 2 days last week. I’m gonna tell bossmain that I only want 3 days going forward unless he absolutely needs me for a 4th. Like if we are short people or someone quits/gets fired, I can pick up an extra shift. I’m old and my body can’t take 4 days.
Ok, ulterior motive is that I’m working on my web stuff, I am onboarded for a volunteer open source mobile app project, and I am working on starting my PSL branch which now includes a book club. All that on top of parental duties and house chores has now filled up all my time. So 3 days for now seems right.
Tism Talk:
I went to a Lego convention with my partner, kids, and in-laws and got so overwhelmed with the amount of people there that I left 20 minutes in and sat in the car crying, listing to stimmy music, and trying to calm down. Never cried for over-stimulation before so that was new.
I’m sorry to hear the overstimulation hit you this hard. From what you’re writing, it sounds like you got a lot on your plate already, so I think I get it. I hope you can unwind more somewhere between work and projects and other duties. Take care, friend!
I’m currently trying to feel out when I’m heading towards meltdown or shutdown and trying to mitigate that. After realizing I was going through burnout since college, I’ve been working on trying to be productive yet taking it easy during my downtime me days like today. I have a few things I want to get done but if I don’t get to them all it’s fine. I have tomorrow.
I am sick of how difficult it is becoming to access medical treatment in the UK. I’ve spoken on here before about how, as a result of my cancer treatment, I have developed foot problems, open ulcers and infections. I’ve had one minor surgery to clear some of the infection as it hasn’t responded to other treatment, and I have another appointment for a further surgery on 23rd Jan. Over the past couple of days, it’s gotten worse. Today I woke up to find three of my toes on one foot are now extremely red, swollen up and I can hardly move that part of my foot. It feels tingly too. I’m actually scared. It’s Saturday so neither the podiatrist clinic, who have been dealing with this, nor the GP, are open. In fact it’s impossible to see the GP anyway, no matter what is wrong now you can’t get an appointment, they’d just tell me to wait for a podiatrist appointment. I know when I phone the podiatrist when they open on Monday I’ll probably have to wait ages for an emergency appointment. The only other option is going to the emergency department, but I doubt they would take this seriously either. I have enough experience to know what they’re like, I’ll sit there all day waiting to be seen, and then they’ll just refer me back to the podiatrist.
I am so exhausted by how difficult accessing medical treatment is. Nothing is taken seriously. It took them 3.5 years to diagnose my cancer because they refused to do any tests because they thought I was just being a hypochaondriac. When I was having a stroke they left me in the emergency department, waiting to be seen, for hours. I am so tired of all this.
