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Disabled Community Megathread from May 1, 2025 to May 11, 2025

Sorry for the (pretty late) mega y'all, getting back on track with this one

Not much else going on with me to be honest. Semester's coming to a close soon, which is nice, the classes weren't the best this time around. Hopefully I'll be able to wrap it up without too many issues.

Of course, I also hope you all do well this week! Well, this week and a half


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.

60 comments
  • 62, living in public housing; non-binary, disabled, AuDhD... recently left my entire family behind because they have been abusive to me all my life. The damage is done; I have been in and out of therapy my entire adult life; went from girlfriend to girlfriend, job to job, state to state, city to city trying to fit in somewhere. That never happened. I am completely and utterly alone here in public housing; unable to afford any better place, unable to work, and if I did have to work who would hire me? I haven't worked in over a decade. All my contacts are lost to me, I can't keep records. I'm boned if I am forced to go back to work, it will probably have to be day labor. I'll wreck my body again, it was just starting to heal up from decades of labor work; one day my body just refused to work any more and I have been basically resting ever since. With some exercise to make sure I don't turn into jello but yeah I rest a lot.

    I'm scared as hell right now but one day at a time right? Today I have everything I need. I sometimes fear I will go mad from the isolation though. I haven't met one single person in this city (deep south) that wants to hang out and talk about anything leftist other than theory; I want to talk about my work with the homeless in the area; I recycle things I find in the community by cleaning them and giving them to the homeless in the camp. It keeps me busy scavenging; yesterday I found 2 t-shirts both like new, brought them home and washed them immediately and already handed them back out to a couple of guys across the street at the smoke shop.

     
             Our hospital / police turn these people loose from the ER or from jail with the clothes they were admitted in, sometimes nothing more than underwear, if that. So they go into the hood looking for something to wear, anything. The smoke shop sells individual cheap t-shirts wrapped in plastic, used shoes, I don't know what else I haven't looked that closely yet-- 
    
      

    I can't seem to meet anyone in this town that I'd hang out with or that wants to hang out with me, so I just walk around the 'hood every day greeting people, smiling at everyone I meet, scavenging the sidewalk for nuts and bolts and washers and other interesting things one finds on a walk in the city;

    It's lonely and I feel like someone cut adrift in space - I feel I must get to some place where there is a resistance group forming or formed but where? And to give up my cheap housing would be hard for me. It's the first place I've lived where family can't stalk me! There's a security guard who never leaves the front door. And I have a great view of downtown; one mile from downtown so I can walk to events there. Or a coffee shop. Were I able to stomach going in a coffee shop these days. I'm afraid of what I might hear people talking about and want to slap them with a dead fish across the face to wake them up.

    I feel all I can do right now is to be - as Gabor Mate put it- an 'Empathetic Witness'

  • It is kinda fucked how when I signed up for medicaid I basically had to hand write a letter saying "pwease help me my teeth hurt"

    bottom emoji included. Been taking advantage of it but I always fear with the cuts coming that I won't be able to anymore. Annoyed how no one told me to basically say my household size is 1 (just me) and 0 income like glad it covers some stuff but for years I'd been signing up with my family and we kept being denied despite being under the threshold for a family of 4.

    Right now I'm real happy my sibling has been getting the help they needed, they got pretty sick and lost a lot of years and their mobility for like a decade all from not being able to get medication and a simple procedure. Got them on medicaid too since this really helpful nurse showed me how to do it and then I showed them. Trying to speedrun their treatment before shit gets cut and it seems to be working.

    • I lost a lot of time and money to the incomprehensibility of the "household" question, too. There are all those studies about how much benefit money goes "unclaimed" even in states with better outreach campaigns, so I have to wonder what percentage of that is from people not realizing the "How many people do you live with?" question is not to be taken literally even though you're threatened with perjury penalties if someone's decided they don't like how you fill out that form.

      • Right it's fucked, even when taking into account their thresholds you still get denied. All these loops we gotta jump through are awful. The onus feels on my part for not signing up earlier but also not understanding what they wanted idk just leads to more frustration and heartache 😭

      • ...it's not meant to be taken literally?

        can you explain that a bit more because i don't really get it lol

    • I'm addicted to energy drinks. Looks like my body needs an addiction to feel good.
    • I don't know if I told you about it here, but I stopped taking the antidepressant. Mental health professionals tell me they're going to check my case; in any case, I don't mind having the psychotic label, what I want is to get my medication down, because it causes me a lot of sleep and apathy. Since I'm taking the right dose of antipsychotic fit for stabilization, they can't change my dose unless my diagnosis changes.
    • Another thing I've changed has been my physical activity. I almost never left the house: I've been like this for years. At the moment, I've been walking for a whole month at least 1 hour a day. Although I haven't lost weight, I feel mentally better.

    And that's all I remember.

    • Make sure you taper off when it comes to antidepressants. You don't want to cause brain damage from going cold turkey. Have you tried other medications? Buproprion, for example, has the opposite effect and will make you wide awake.

  • The day is finally here. I'm doing literally fuckall today until I need to get my kids. My brain is fried and I need a fucking break. If you need me, I will be stuffing my face full of vegan cheese sauce and playing No Man's Sky.

    Oh, also does anyone else have that thing where sometimes they read a thing like a comment/reply like 5 times in a row and cannot parse what it is saying but they come back 20 mins later or the next day and reread it and it suddenly makes sense? Is that an autism thing? Because I have that like a motherfucker.

    • Is that an autism thing?

      Probably. Could also be an ADHD thing since they're comorbid. I don't personally get that just having autism and not ADHD, but this happens to my friend with AuDHD very frequently. So I'm not sure which it is lol

  • Being trapped indoors like a prisoner, for the first time in years I am feeling actual sadness. Normally I just feel anxiety, anger or frustration. But now I feel really, really sad. I've been trapped indoors for months now because of my foot surgeries, but that was tolerable because I knew there was an end date, it would heal up. But now with my inflamed tendon, there is no end date. And it's getting worse, not better. I feel like I've been sentenced to an indeterminate time in prison. In fact I never realised until now just what a hard sentence prison actually is. And the weather is beautiful outside and I live by the seaside, this is exactly the time I should be able to wander around outside. I feel so sad that all this beautiful scenery is out there and I can't enjoy it and I don't know if or when I will be able to again. It's not like I even have any friends left in real life (no-one wants to bother with a sick disabled person), I can't even invite a friend over for some companionship. Whenever one problem seems almost fixed, another worse one comes along. It feels like the universe is actively trying to drive me to despair.

    And this is on top of all the usual shit. And this month I had even less response than usual to my food aid post. Someone did, thankfully come through with a food voucher for which I am immensely grateful but it looks like I might have to make another post before the month is up. I always try to wait a month so people don't get sick of me. But my food expenses are higher due to being trapped indoors, I have to order groceries for delivery which costs more.

    And the hemiplegic migraine from hell that put me in hospital and has lasted over a week keeps flaring up, just a bit less each time. I've had more than enough, I want to join dignitas but I need to print off a form for that and we don't have a printer here, I need to go to the library but I can't walk there yet.

  • Been coaching my sibling as much as I can about making phone calls, it's draining for both of us but some times making a script or whatever helps. Made some right now and only have a slight headache.

  • People are coming over for organizing stuff. A lot of people. I will not freak out. I will not freak out. I will not freak out...

    Joking aside, they are all comrades but I'm gonna need decompression time like a mofo after.

  • It got deleted but the askchapo thread looking for information about a banned user brought up a surprising amount of feelings from being an autistic kid in school. I appreciate the poster asking the question, 'cause I wanted to know but am too anxious to make posts, and it instantly turned into intentionally wrong answers, inside jokes, and debate about the user while never answering the original question which is context we need to understand any of the rest these posts

    Just let me understand you neurotypical fucks

  • idk if this counts but I just ruined my sleep schedule, pulling an all nighter only to crash in the late afternoon on Saturday to design a fucking Minecraft redstone farm. I knew what I was doing but eventually the hours just started sloughing away and I realized I was going a bit delirious and the mental static was surreal. There were like 2 songs playing in my head simultaneously, and if I really let the thoughts "decohere", I could get it up to 3-4 overlaying each other in a sort of weird mashup. I could also mentally pull up the second monitor content I'd been listening to over the past 12 hours, haphazardly bouncing around. A cacophony of unprocessed thoughts and earworms laying in bed staying awake for another hour and trying to wind down.

    Went to bed hungry, been on my phone for hours after waking up and I need to get up but there are roadbumps keeping me from doing that. My stomach has that dull ache, the kind that arises after one's body has just kind of resigned to deal with the signals that indicate hunger. Unfortunately, I need to do my morning routine first which I don't have my clothes picked out for so it's just a straight mess right now. Not much was planned so it's not the biggest deal, but I do feel like I wasted the better part of a weekend in one of those extended hyperfocus hazes and resulting fallout. Airing my thoughts out here feels like a bad idea but it's helping me process what the hell I just put myself through.

    At least the redstone farm is done and works pretty well, considering I made it from scratch to conform with very specific constraints

  • I had to politely make a doctor shut the fuck up after it said I was a drug addict and a liar, all in the first minute of the appointment, new record! Their little minds can't conceive that a person of my age has chronic pain and takes opioids.

    As soon as I named the drug I'm on, it asked me "Do you inject it?". I, surprised by the question replied no, I'm prescribed pills, to which it says... "X drug doesn't come in pills, X pills don't exist!" with a perfect I gotcha smug on its face.

    I calmly stated the commercial name and laboratory of X, and its shit eating smile started fading away.

    For the rest of the meeting this crap was passive-aggressive against me, as if I had insulted it or something...

    It finished telling me it could diagnose certain thyroid issues just by looking and listening at the patient's moves and speech patterns. When I asked how (in good faith, genuinely curious), it tried to change the subject, I guess it realized I could see through its bullshit. I had to hold my laughter.

    I might be autistic but I am not stupid. It's scary how many doctors don't know ANYTHING about opioids, not even at a wikipedia level. If I told you all the things I've heard you wouldn't believe me.

    This week I've been feeling dreadful. Being insulted, mocked by a piece of shit who happens to influence the course of my treatment reminds me how vulnerable my life is.

    These clowns should face the wall (of text, I'm not implying violence at all!)

  • Not having a lot of executive function energy sucks. I'm working on getting a better sleep pattern, getting better about having a set schedule, but it's not easy. I appreciate having Hexbear around where I can shitpost with people that are comrades. It makes the tough days a little better

    • oh twinning, im planning on fixing my sleep schedule too.

      it's kind of gonna suck because most of my friends stay up to ungodly hours but i think being on normie hours will help me overall

60 comments