At the moment, I am in a bit of a slump with online interaction. I feel like there are a  number of problems.

  1. People don’t read properly. I include myself in this, probably. People have disagreed with me this week, whilst making the same point I have just made, but, telling me my version is wrong. People have also asserted that I am saying something I have demonstrably not said. I do generally try not to be too bothered by these kinds of things, and, in fact am not particularly upset by it, after all, we all get caught up in the feeling of the news right now, it’s all so horrible and frightening.
  2. Speak up about x or y. Mostly this comes up about disability, especially mental health. Now, don’t get me wrong, I used to actually leave my house to go and speak in person about my experience of mental health, speaking up about such things is an important thing to do. But the current narrative online is one that does not reflect the reality. I mean, it reflects A reality, but it is not fair to assume all mental health realities are the same. In all the very visible media pushes, the positive stuff is all around a very small section of the mental health experience. There is still a huge number of people for whom all the media portrayal of them and their experience is negative, for whom speaking out is still dangerous. Telling people the should be able to talk to break stigma, is not enough. It needs to be safe for them to do so. At the moment, it is really not, and people who DO have the media spotlight in a positive way in regard to their mental health need to recognise this. It surprises me that mental health is still all lumped together, like we expect all people with ANY experience to be able to speak on behalf of all other people with ANY experience. We don’t do this with physical illness.
  3. Constant disparagement of “Autism Mom” – like everyone with an autistic child is the same, and can only be defined by that. It’s fine to do that. It’s not fine to define autistic people in the same way. I mean, I don’t go in for abusive therapies, I don’t stamp myself all over my child, I don’t restrict him due to perceived (or actual) disability. I guess I have to suck it up, because I am not the minority. I get this, I really do. So, I try to just ask the things I need, and be positive. But, like I recently had cause to say, no child comes with a manual, and if your child doesn’t respond to the instinctive NT things, smiles, hugs, jokes, then it’s like your whole existence is thrown into doubt. Everything you know about communicating is useless. I do not in any way negate the experience of being autistic, in a world where you are very day the square peg being hurt and broken trying to fit into a round hole. But, I do think that it is important to remember, that it can be very difficult and different to parent in an emotional foreign language. It is not a tragedy. It is not even that it is necessarily harder, but it *is* extremely different, and if the people who are autistic are not getting enough support, then the people trying to raise them are getting even less. It doesn’t take a lot to understand that bleach enemas, and training your child like a dog are hugely wrong and should never happen. It takes a lot to relearn everything. Plus, if I as an NT person don’t know what I am doing because I am not autistic, how does an autistic person who is not NT know what I am doing, since they are not NT? I said before, is we BOTH understood more, it would be a lot better.
  4. In Group. The trouble with claiming an identity, sticking up for it, making sure there are out group people, is that some people are crossovers. So, maybe it is my age, or maybe I am a nasty, ablist, white woman. I never expect people to do what I have done. But, my experience is valid. As a human being. As a person who, like most other people fits into many groups. Not Autism Mom. Not mental health service survivor. Not mental health professional. Not mother of a preteen. Not mother of a 5 year old. Not left wing. Not anti brexit. Not pro vaccinating. Not disabled. Not an addict. Not white. Not middle aged. Not some questionable reference to sexuality. I am not any one of these things. I, and all other people, are not quantifiable in terms of one of these things, when maybe all or any subset of them is true. Maybe a huge range of other things are true too. When we shut off those possibilities because we have a single issue agenda, we lose so much real person.
  5. Exhaustion. Only allowed to be a feature in people with a visibly diagnosable reason. Even though it is the single fastest way to reintroduce myself to hospital. That is not on anybody’s agenda. Doesn’t fit anyone’s in groups.
  6. Suicide. There are STILL people who call me names and insult me for saying that suicide is (except in very specific cases) not a choice, and that it is not selfish, and that mental illness kills people. The mortality rates for some mental illnesses are higher than those for some cancers (speaking as a cancer AND mental illness family), and yet this is a grossly offensive *fact*  to some people. I used to get upset by those people. Now I simply realise that, given the state of the country, we KNOW mentally ill people are the first in line to be rejected as human in times such as these. We’re already up to random hatred for foreigners and trying to “other” as  many people as possible.

I hope that I will survive long enough to see the country come out the other side of this. I know that currently, I am on the side that is at risk. I am less at risk than many others, so it is my duty to speak out, no matter the insults. Insults are nothing. Some people are suffering and leaving and dying due to the state of our nation. Already. This, that we find ourselves living in, has never been proven to be the right side of history. It is frightening. But it is not undoing years of progress, it is the evil, smelly, slime of humanity just getting back up to the surface. We are all close to believing that anyone in an *other* group is expendable. Pushing people into suffering is more likely to bring such feelings to the surface, and this is what the government here has done for ages.

I hope that my children can see that people have value no matter where from, no matter disability, or any other thing. I worry that we are on a frightening course, along which many more people will be sacrificed, and we are not safe. it would be safer to not have spoken, but this is not how anything is changed.

We have done better in the past. We have done worse. But we are sliding fast.