Extreme mood swings, inability to write, and other headfuckery

So i haven't been posting much lately, despite the fact that there have been a shitload of things i've wanted to post about (actually, that seems to be true of a lot of bloggers at the moment... January weather?). Partly, this has been because of the fairly extreme mood swings i've been having, accompanied by a general, all-pervasive feeling of pointlessness, partly because of something which Danechi of Stimming With Rainbows of Every Design described absolutely perfectly in a recent post:

I spend a lot of time intending to write. I think of a topic that piques my interest, and I plan that when I have time, I'll blog on that topic.

But when I actually go off to write on that pre-determined topic, I freeze up. The best way I can describe it is that when I first think of the topic, the word pathways open up and I can follow them down and make a coherent post. Of course, I'm either not at the computer then or I'm trying to get something else done, so that doesn't happen. Then five or more hours later when I'm finally attempting to write it up, I'm on a whole other island and maybe there are other paths and maybe there aren't, but regardless, I'd have to do a lot of leaping across impossible gaps to get to the island with the first path. After a few days, I *might* reach it again (certain islands are frequented more often than others), but there's no guarantee.

In a way it's kind of reassuring to know that someone else experiences writer's block in the same sort of way that i do, and that it is (possibly) an autistic thing, rather than something unique to me... doesn't make it less frustrating, but somehow makes it more "acceptable"...

...altho, i'm having massive trouble seeing anything about me as "acceptable" at the moment - i've spent probably most of the last few days feeling like i am utterly worthless to the world, a burden on and shameful to everyone i know, and only capable, no matter how i try, of taking from the world and never of putting anything useful into it. Like i'm a complete parasite, a mockery of humanity, an infinitely hypocritical monster with no possible claim to absolutely any of my/its decisions or actions being justified in any way - in fact, the pure fact that something is being done by me, rather than by someone else, makes the action inherently unjustifiable, even if it is something that i would have no ethical problem at all being done by others. In fact, the other day i spent several hours so overwhelmed by such thoughts that i was literally lying on the floor, unable to summon up the motivation to move, even to eat (let alone cook), because "wasting" food to keep me alive felt utterly unjustifiable.

This is one end of the mood swing, and then the other is the fantasy - and even while feeling it, i think "how dare someone like me even fantasise about stuff like that?" - of being part of a community, connected to all sorts of radical ideas and movements and connecting them all together, being loved and appreciated by the people i love, being part of intellectual discussion which goes into such radical uncharted territory that it extends the frontiers of human thought and knowledge, being almost exhausted by all the utterly awesome things that my mind - maybe my mind alone - can connect together - then lapsing back into despair because i will never, ever get my head together enough to truly connect it all...

And on top of all that, there's the sexual frustration, the social frustration (combined with feeling like, as the completely ethically unacceptable, selfish, hypocritical, take-and-never-give person i feel like i am, i don't even deserve a social life, and in fact deserve to be laughed at even for wanting one), the cold of winter which i neither can nor deserve to escape from, and a totally irrational but sometimes totally overwhelming desire to be held. :(

And then the feeling that, well, i have no right to feel this needy or this despairing, when people like Amanda and Elizabeth (and shitloads of others, just the first 2 examples that came to mind) have real shit that they have gone or are going through, to which nothing i will ever go through in my life, as someone with all kinds of unearned privilege (white, male, (at least superficially) straight, no significant physical impairment, good education, etc) could possibly compare.

I think i am someone with negative natural authority. As in, someone with natural authority has the ability to make others see what they say as true and reasonable, and to follow their suggestions for how to do things, without any sort of coercion, just because they are able to present them as sensible, self-evident and rational. I am the exact opposite - anything i say, even if it is exactly the same in substance as what someone else might say, is, by definition, unreasonable, and any suggestion i make, regardless of what it is, is a completely ill-thought-out, laughable, unworkable suggestion, which no one in their right mind would follow.

- so, of course, it's fucking difficult for me to feel like it's worth me writing anything in this blog, if anything i write is automatically unreliable, distorted, misrepresenting the truth, so far out there that no one could possibly believe it, etc etc, just because it's me who wrote it... and no one's ever going to read this anyway...

Some of the mood swing aspects of all this might be because of some of the supplements i've been taking (St John's Wort and Korean Ginseng) - while i'm never convinced that any of them are more than placebos, i've taken them in previous winters and thought they might have had some positive effect, so i picked some up when i saw them cheaply in a local supermarket, and finished the bottles (one a day) last week, so i dunno, maybe some of the extreme depression/fatigue/cognitive twistedness might be due to coming off them... so, i've bought some more and taken some today. I don't like to attribute chemical causes to thoughts that seem to derive completely logically from the circumstances of my life, though - i can't help feeling that treating symptoms with chemicals/supplements/whatever is simply cheating myself when what i need to solve my problems is to turn my life around - but right now there doesn't seem to be any acceptable way to do that...

(well, there is the one thing i've attached a little nugget of hope to, which is the meeting i have booked with Colin Barnes at the Centre for Disability Studies in Leeds, on Friday 8th Feb... but i have absolutely no money, and i just looked up train ticket prices, and the cheapest return from Birmingham to Leeds is fucking £45 - which is twice what i thought it would be, considering that a return from Birmingham to London, an only slightly shorter journey, is £15... and when i told one friend she offered to pay for the ticket, but i feel guilt about that...)

This post really hasn't come out how i wanted it to; i'm not sure if it's coherent at all, but i think i'll post it anyway. If anyone who knows me in real life is reading this (probably unlikely, i know, but still), i'd appreciate (even if i don't feel like i deserve) them to call or email me, because i was lifted out of this depression for at least a few hours yesterday just by the sound of a friendly voice, but there are only about 3 friends who i know i can call just because i want to hear from them, and only so often i can call them. Apologies for the serious doublethink headfuck. Maybe i'll get it together enough to be able to write something meaningful tomorrow...

Ruminations in a hot bath

I just had a very long, very hot (like, above 50... how the fuck do you get a degree symbol on a keyboard?... C) bath. It had an amazing effect on my state of mind and general thinking ability (which has, in general, been pretty shit recently). I philosophised about a whole load of stuff...

I thought about "self-harm" (recent topic of discussion over at Elizabeth's blog), and how inherently contradictory and paradoxical a concept it is that any being could actually desire to harm itself... and yet, at the same time, so understandable, in a paradoxically irrational-yet-rational way... which led me to think about the self, and what is the self, and whether i have one... which led me to the realisation that one of the precepts that fundamentally underpins my whole worldview is the idea that self-regarding actions are entirely outside the sphere of morality - and, therefore, anything that an individual does to hirself, as long as it harms no one else, cannot be morally wrong. There are a whole load of interesting byways that i could go into on the origins of this idea in my mind, and how i "evolved" that realisation, but i'm paradoxically feeling too contented to bother thinking about that in words right now.

(Vague memories from the first year of my politics degree are telling me that the origin of that idea, or at least the first famous phrasing of it, is probably from classical liberalism... John Stuart Mill? Bentham? However, despite all my (pretty scathing and to-the-core) critiques of classical liberalism, i think there's a good case that that idea is pretty fundamental to any kind of libertarian thought, whether pro- or anti-capitalist... certainly, IMO, to social libertarianism...)

Of course, the question of whether there truly is such a thing as a totally, exclusively self-regarding act is a much. much harder one, and one that i'm not sure can ever be truly answered... that, however, caused my mind to swim into delicious tumbling paradoxes of wordlessness...

I also thought about how, when i'm warm, i feel good. When i'm warm, it feels good to have skin. It feels good to have muscles. It feels good to have bones. I was even looking at my body and liking it - I who, normally, can only see all male bodies, my own included, as hideously ugly, was looking at the half-submerged angles of my body and even thinking it had elegance... in its own, inelegant way ;) Even my genitals slept contentedly.

On the contrary, when i'm cold, physically existing feels like a hideous, unpleasant chore. Thinking about any aspect of myself or my body is almost unbearable - just having a body hurts. Everything aches, nothing is desirable, everything is depressing - but, when the temperature changes, it's like a switch flips and everything is the exact opposite.

I think i have climate dysphoria...

So, why the hell am i posting such an obscenely self-indulgent post? I think because i haven't felt the kind of near-euphoric contentment that i'm feeling now in a long time, almost as long as i can remember, and i want something to remember feeling it by... hell, i'm feeling euphoric enough that i'm posting flippant comments on other people's blogs, and me being flippant is rarer than a nymphomaniac giant panda.

Anyway, to make this post have some purpose, some awesome posts on other people's blogs i've found recently:

Dw3t-Hthr on being genderqueer... this post (and its comments) gives me absolutely shitloads of spin-off ideas that i need to find time to write about...

Amanda from Ballastexistenz on how the same behaviour can be accepted, fetishised/valorised or pathologised in different social contexts - something which has all kinds of gender, class, ethnicity, etc, as well as disability/neurodiversity implications... yes, i'll probably try to write either a proper post in response to it, or at least a comment to it...

ABFH drawing an awesomely powerful parallel between "cure autism" propaganda and how it would look if it were about an ethnic group... this links in with a shitload of stuff about disability and eugenics that seems to be a reasonably hot media topic at the moment... yes, another post to write in the next few days... it's worth noting that i'm not always entirely happy with different categories of oppression (disablism, sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc) being equated with each other, because each is nuanced in its own way, but this comparison is IMO a pretty faultless one...

Anyway, i'm enjoying the ability to clearly think for once. I hope everyone reading this has the same...

Just sent an email I could and should have sent any time in the last 2 years

I have absolutely no idea whether it's a well-worded email. It almost certainly isn't exactly the email i wanted to send, or should have sent. But, fucking hell, after 2 years of procrastination and meaning-to-do-it, I finally went and sent it...

To: disability-studies@leeds.ac.uk

Subject: MA Disability Studies

Dear CDS Staff (apologies for not knowing exactly who to send this enquiry to)

I am interested in applying for the MA in Disability Studies, ideally for September 2008 entry. I would like to know what, if any, possibilities there are for obtaining funding from external sources to do this course, either as a one year full-time MA or as a part-time MA.

I am a self-identified disabled person, with a medical diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome, and am involved in the disability rights movement as an activist and writer/advocate. One of my key interests is the relationship between impairments (particularly "hidden" impairments such as those on the neurodiversity spectrum) and the social model of disability, and one of the primary goals in my life is to forge closer links between disability activism and advocacy and the academic study of disability from social, economic and political perspectives.

I have a BA (Hons First Class) in Politics with International Studies from the University of Warwick, gained in 2005, but am currently unemployed due primarily to impairment-related issues. My experiences both of unemployment and of paid work have convinced me that academia would be my ideal life situation both in terms of my own satisfaction and of the good I would be able to do for the world and in particular for my fellow disabled people and disability theory and culture.

My other areas of academic interest include social ecology, libertarian socialism(s), gender and embodiment, and concepts of productive and non-productive work and the dichotomy between "work" and "non-work" activities. One of my long-term aims is to attempt to incorporate a disability perspective into an analysis of these issues.

I would like to visit the Centre for Disability Studies at the first convenient date to find out more details about the course and in particular to discuss funding possibilities. Could you let me know if and when this would be possible, and what opportunities too talk to CDS academics about the course might be available?

Yours

[my real name]

It's... possibly ironic that it took the recklessness of being in a near-suicidal* state to write it... but, i'm reminded of what Amanda Baggs said here:

“I’ve written things about the value of all people’s lives while wanting to kill myself, and seriously contemplating doing so. I’ve seen that Sue Rubin has spoken out about torture at the Judge Rotenberg Center while utterly loathing large parts of her brain and body. This does not make self-hatred and despair good things, it just means that even in those circumstances people can do important things, and that waiting around to not experience those things might mean leaving important things left undone.”

*well, not actually suicidal, because i don't think i'm capable of actually wanting to die - death is something i literally cannot think about without lapsing into utter, abject teror and inability to comprehend my own non-existence - but, right now, i feel like i don't deserve to live, like i'm a complete fucking parasite, a monstrous, irredeemable creature that can only take from the Earth and from humanity and never, no matter how hard i try, give... like i am a creature whose needs and desires are so utterly, fundamentally unfair and unreasonable to the rest of the universe that the only good thing i could possibly do for this world is get the fuck off it; and, to cap it all, too much of an utter coward to even do that one potentially-redeeming thing.

But i don't want to die... because of the vital, amazing, awesome movements that i've only just discovered (that i might, possibly, even be instrumental in the rebirth and re-evolution of)... because of all the ideas swirling around in my head that i so urgently feel the need (and simultaneously the inability) to pull together - some of those ideas ones where i feel like i might be the first person ever to have thought of putting them together (of course i'm probably not, given the infinity of human imagination, but still that's what it feels like sometimes)...

What do you do when dying isn't an option, but living doesn't feel like one either?

Nevertheless, what Amanda said holds; and, of course, i'm confronted with the paradox that, if anyone else i knew found themselves in the situation that i'm now in, i wouldn't hesitate to leap to their defence, to tell them they were utterly within their rights and treated unfairly, that they didn't deserve any of the shit being said about them, that they were being discriminated against, that there were all kinds of positive and love-worthy and redeeming things about them, etc, etc, etc... and yet, when it's me, absolutely none of that stuff holds, and when a friend says it to me, i try to disprove it because i know in my heart of hearts that it's not true, that i am wrong in every aspect of my existence, the thing that should not live...

How the hell do i integrate this with talk about "activism" and "advocacy" and all the rest of it?

I am a doubleplusgood doublethinker. Which, probably, is doubleplusbad... ;)

Anyway, i sent the email... waiting for the reply is, i guess, one more thing to live for...

Bizarre spam comments, and reasons for not posting.

OK, i have now enabled comment moderation, because 2 of my posts have attracted... extremely odd spam(?) comments, from someone who likes to write dissertation length rants attacking every race and religion imaginable, telling everyone that they need to become asexual, and going on about (plural, non-specific) "gods" and "the disfavored" a lot. I don't know whether anyone else has been targeted by this individual, but hir comments were not just nonsensical and offensive to... pretty much the entire population of the world, really, but so long that my computer very nearly crashed when trying to load the comment pages in order for me to be able to delete them.

(OK, so my computer crashes/freezes/does inexplicable things pretty much all the time, being about 10 years old and with nowhere near enough RAM or hard drive space to be even able to handle broadband internet, really... which is one reason why i'm on Blogspot, and not Livejournal, because LJ pages seem to be so data heavy that they can cause freezes from trying to load them. Which sucks, because there are several awesome blogs on Livejournal, and i'd like to be able to comment on them. Why i'm on Blogspot and not on WordPress is another question entirely, and one i'm increasingly not finding any acceptable answer to... maybe i'll move to WordPress eventually, but i think i need a bit more tech knowledge first. Anyway, this parenthetical paragraph has got far too rambly...)

The thing is, i'm not 100% sure exactly how comment moderation works. I'd like people to be able to post comments on my blog without having to wait for approval, just as they could before comment moderation was enabled, but i'd also like to be able to delete gigantic, nonsensical spam comments. However, there seems to be no way to enable deleting comments without comment moderation...

I'd also like comments to appear underneath the post when you click on the "n comments" link, rather than going to a comment page that doesn't include the original post. I don't know if that's possible without sacrificing the ability to delete comments, tho...

If anyone knows exactly how comment moderation works, and/or if it's possible for me to have the combination of features i want, please let me know. Unfortunately, i don't know exactly what will happen to your replies if you post them as comments to this post...

Also... i said in the title of this entry "reasons for not posting", but i don't think i have the energy to actually go into those reasons right now. Suffice to say, i have an ever-growing list of stuff i want to write blog posts about, and quite a few that i intended to post in the last few days, but some shit has been happening in my life that has been leaving me extremely stressed and without the kind of levels of concentration or rational thought necessary for coherent writing, or the faith in my own ability to understand or justify anything to allow me to write it. However, this stuff is hopefully short term, and going to be resolved, and when it's resolved i'll probably post about it. My mind is in too much of a state of flux for me to feel able to post about it before it gets resolved, tho...

Anyway, i'm gathering some determination to work through the above shit and write some posts on unrelated issues in the next couple of days or so...

Cold

I really, really cannot stand cold.

Yesterday i got back from an activist gathering i went to for the weekend to find the boiler in my house had stopped working. It is the coldest this house has ever been. Right now i am sitting at my computer wearing 3 jumpers and 2 pairs of socks, sipping very slowly at a hot cup of tea while alternating holding my hands against the cup until i have to stop because of the pain, with holding my hands in the cold air until i have to put them back on the hot cup because of the pain.

Cold makes my entire body feel stiff - so stiff that right now i can walk either like a Cyberman or like someone with spastic CP. My shoulders feel like there are a couple of bricks on each of them. My face hurts because my muscles are scrunching it up into a frown uncontrollably. I'm getting constipated because the cold shock of the toilet seat makes my anal sphincter tense shut. It feels kind of like being completely covered in something that i have a reflex to flinch away from - so i'm trying to flinch away from the whole of my own surface area at once...

I don't know if this is purely an autistic sensory-intolerance thing or if i have some sort of physical intolerance to cold as well. While the latter thought is scary, i actually kind of hope it's true because (like a couple of other things, such as the extreme levels of hunger i feel and my complete inability to put on weight no matter how much i eat) if it's physical it's potentially treatable, whereas if it's sensory/neurological then it's a basic part of who i am, and there's nothing that can be done about it except to accept it.

Also, my concentration is pretty much zero. I had a list of about 10 things to do today, and i've done one of them (and i only managed to remember to do that one because i sent an email to someone saying i'd already done it). Even my vision doesn't feel right (difficulty focusing and noticing things).

I have incredible difficulty in explaining to people just how badly i'm affected by cold. It's probably the primary component of my SAD (although light levels probably play some role, but i think that's more indirectly through effectively denying me the use of half my available day). In every single house i've ever lived in, there has been more or less major conflict over me needing to put the heating on and others turning it off - it has even led to me becoming the recipient of physical violence (from someone who wasn't even paying rent in the house). Last night, i went into full-on flashback panic paranoia PTSD mode because i tried to turn the heating on, it seemed to be turned off again, and this repeated several times before the boiler became totally unresponsive to anything at all - i was utterly convinced that someone else in the house was turning it off, or even had sabotaged it to prevent me turning it on.

(The rational part of my mind replies that no one would be crazy or vindictive enough to deny themselves as well as everyone else in the house all heating and hot water, just because they felt one person in the house keeps the heating on too much, but the paranoia/PTSD part of my mind is fuelled by all my lifelong experience of living in a world where everyone's opinions and feelings are regarded as reasonable except mine, and even things that are held to be reasonable when coming from anyone else somehow automatically become unreasonable if they come from me...)

I don't actually know what to do about the boiler. It doesn't have an instruction manual, i have no knowledge at all of how such things work (although i'm capable of effortlessly memorising the most obscure facts and theories, practical stuff like how to fix things never seems to sink in, no matter how many times i try to memorise it... this might be dyspraxia-related), i know the landlord would be no use because he doesn't speak English and has never fixed anything we have asked him to fix (and in any case i have no credit on my phone to call him), and i have absolutely no money to pay someone to look at and/or fix it.

I suppose i have to hope that a) someone else in the house is bothered enough to want the boiler fixed and thus phones the landlord, and b) he actually calls in someone competent enough to fix it and is willing to pay for it. In the meantime, i am going to have to work out where other than my house i can find excuses to be...

And this almost certainly isn't even anywhere near the coldest part of the year... why the hell do i live in England?

All the blog posts i had been planning to write over the current couple of days will have to wait until i am capable of sustained concentration...

Money money money, it's the root of all evil

Right now i'm feeling despairing because i seem to be trapped in a situation of poverty that i can't find any way out of...

I am living on Jobseeker's Allowance (a total of £59 per week, paid every 2 weeks) and about £33 a week housing benefit. That £33 is supposed to cover my rent, but in fact it only covers approximately 2/3 of it - my rent is £208.33 (a third of the rent for the house, £650) per month, which comes out to approximately £50 per week - which is very cheap for the area i'm living in, and is the same amount of money i was paying for the (roughly equivalent quality) accommodation i was living in in 1999. The reason the council assessed the amount of HB i was to get as £33 is because they assessed the "market rent value" of the house (without actually sending a rent officer to visit the house) as £450. There is absolutely no way that anyone would be able to find a privately rented house of comparable size to this one in this area for £450 - in 4 months of looking, the cheapest house we found was £625 (which had a lot of disadvantages compared to this one at £650). I had to blag a fake job reference from a friend of a friend's company to get past the estate agent's credit checks, because of the absolute unwillingness of any estate agent in the area to take clients on housing benefit.

Total income of £92 per week minus approx £50 per week rent leaves me with round about £40 per week for all of my living costs. I can and have lived on that amount relatively easily before, but i seem to be having trouble now. I think at least in part it's because over the spring and summer of this year i went to quite a few demonstrations, activist gatherings and events such as Climate Camp, all of which cost money for travel, plus fairly regular (maybe every 2 weeks) visits to a friend who lives a £6.50 train journey away (I have managed to jump the train a few times, but after the cumulative psychological effects of threats of arrest and violence from ticket inspectors i don't really feel willing to do that any more, except on the particular trains which i know don't have inspectors, which is only the last train at night, which as the single train fare is almost as much as the return doesn't help me much). Last month i was stupid enough to buy a couple of books from Amazon, which i think, together with the cumulative impact of the travel costs, was probably what tipped me over from having just enough to pay my rent to not having enough, meaning i had to owe my housemate until next benefit day...

I thought that, as my benefits happen to get paid at roughly the same time fortnightly, and there were 3 "giro" days in October, that this month i would be OK - but somehow i'm not, and i'm either going to have to borrow money from somewhere (and i don't know where, because i have pretty much exhausted all the friends i could possibly borrow money off - i already owe about £800 to various friends, £400 of which is to one person who i've owed since 2004, and probably something in the region of a couple of grand to my parents, although i haven't really kept track of that, and don't know whether they'll ever really ask for it back) or do the same again - but if i do the same again, i'll never be able to get back on track with the monthly money cycle, because there's just no possibility at all of me saving the £80 or so necessary in a month.

I don't exactly want to be unemployed - i guess i've just pretty much despaired of finding a job. In smaller towns i've lived in, i was able to get... not quite continuous, but regular-enough-to-pay-the-bills temp work, and while it was mind-numbingly alienating, exhausting and generally horrible work (sweeping the floors of factories or stacking rusty metal on pallets, for example), i could at least afford my living costs. Since moving to Birmingham just over a year ago (a move partly motivated by thinking work might be easier to find in a big city), i've attempted to register with temp agencies, but had no work offers whatsoever.

I've applied for "permanent" jobs which i felt myself to be amply qualified for, but had no replies whatsoever, even when the employer advertised the "Two Ticks" scheme (under which any applicant with a disability who meets the qualifications for the job is supposed to be guaranteed an interview). Other jobs, which i am reasonably confident i would be able to actually do, have "person specifications" worded in such a way (usually referring to neurotypical social skills, which would not actually be regarded as essential for the job in any open-minded approach to logic) that it would be impossible for me to truthfully answer the questions on the application forms in such a way as to meet the specification.

I won't even go into details on the scheme "for getting disabled people into employment" which the council led me to believe was an alternative route into a job to application/interview, by doing a short unpaid work placement, but actually turned out to be an unpaid work placement doing the boring bits of someone else's work, just for the sake of it (suffice to say i didn't take up the offer)...

And, of course, there are all my anarchist, feminist and ecological critiques of the nature of "work" under capitalism, which i could probably write a dissertation on if i had the concentration and access to all the books i would need to reference...

There's nothing additional i can get under the benefit system either. Unlike a friend who has just been put on it, i seem to have managed to avoid the Employment Zones programme (possibly by virtue of having a Disability Employment Advisor), but the nature of my disability is such that i have pretty much no chance of getting Disability Living Allowance (DLA), because that gets awarded depending on how much assistance you "need" (or, more accurately, are assessed as "needing" by someone with often no real understanding of your actual needs), and, well, with my impairment there isn't really anything that anyone could be paid to "assist" me with. There would be no point in me going on Incapacity Benefit because for me, as someone who hasn't worked enough to build up National Insurance contributions, it would be on exactly the same rate as JSA. After attempting to appeal against not getting my full rent awarded in Housing Benefit, i was given a "discretionary" payment to make it up for 3 months, but only for 3 months because that would apparently give me time to "bargain with my landlord or find a cheaper place" - the first of which bears no relationship to anything resembling reality whatsoever, and as for the second, the likelihood of finding anywhere cheaper is slim to none, and moving would be an upheaval that, right now, i just wouldn't be able to face again...

What i've been saying i really want to do with my life for about the past 2 years is to go to Leeds University to do the MA in Disability Studies, followed if possible with a PhD (probably focusing on disability, labour and employment - a radical deconstruction possibly involving what "work" would look like in my utopian post-capitalist society). I have the academic qualifications to get there (a first class degree, undeserved in my own opinion though that might have been, in Politics with International Studies from the University of Warwick), but no way that i know of to get the funding. (I have been procrastinating for nearly a year over actually contacting the Centre for Disability Studies and asking what funding possibilities might be available...)

Getting back to immediate stuff, I have already got into conflicts with my housemates (which can only get worse over the winter) over having the heating on when "we" (read: me) can't afford the gas bills, when my sensory sensitivities (which i've sort of told my housemates about, but not fully, because i'm not "out" to them about my impairment) mean that i find it utterly unbearable, to the point of feeling suicidal, if the temperature goes below my comfort level (and i would be perfectly willing to pay the whole heating bill by myself, if i could safford it)...

I really, really want to go to the Anarchist Bookfair in London this weekend (both because of the actual books and because several people who i've lost touch with but would really like to get back in touch with are very likely to be there), but can't afford even the train fare.

I got an email from a fellow crip activist a few days ago replying to my question as to whether she was going to the upcoming DAN gathering, saying that, because her DLA had been reduced (resulting in her losing housing benefit), she can't afford to leave her house for anything that doesn't pay travel expenses until February. (I'm trying to sort out a lift for her from the fellow activist i'm getting driven down by.) Why the fuck do we have to live like this?

The cruel irony is that the disability movement doesn't have the resources to organise to campaign against such enforced poverty, because most of us are living in poverty... and then there's the vexed question of how to integrate an anarchist desire for a world with neither states nor money, with having to be supported by the welfare state...

This post doesn't really have a conclusion, unfortunately. I might be able to sort my life out if it did...

Disablism and relationships

Last night i had a long phone conversation with a friend who has progressive physical and visual impairments and is in a long-term relationship with a non-disabled partner. The last time i had spoken to her, her partner had mysteriously disappeared for a few days and she was really worried about him. Last night, she called me, we talked about other stuff for a while, kind of skirting around the subject, then i kind of stupidly asked, after she said she was having to delay going back to uni because of inability to find a PA, "couldn't X do PA stuff for you?" (yeah, me and my Aspie mouth)... which led to her telling me all about the reasons for the problems between her and her partner, which basically come down to disablism interfering in the relationship...

Basically, the partner's friends and family are putting pressure on him to dump her (if not explicitly, then implicitly) - asking stuff like "what are you doing with her when you could be with an able-bodied woman?" or "do you want to have to look after her all your life?" - and his behaviour is showing her pretty strong evidence that he feels "ashamed" of her, doesn't want to take her out anywhere because of stuff like the hassle of dealing with accessibility issues and other people's assumptions/prejudices, that it sounds like he's internalising into himself (or maybe always had, unexamined... although it's a little hard to believe he didn't examine them after getting into a relationship with a disabled person)...

Then there's the issue of him wanting to do stuff, both sexually and in other contexts, that he can't do with her because of her impairments, and what she said to me that he basically wants "a walking, non-disabled girlfriend"... leading to her feeling that no matter how hard she tries to be the best partner that she can be, she will never be good enough for him (and until recently she was certain that she wanted lifelong commitment, marriage and children with this guy)...

The thing that really fucks with my head is how impotent i feel because i can't do anything about the situation, despite how strongly i feel for her and want her to be happy and for it to be resolved... this seems like one area in which i really can't think of a way to fight against disablism effectively...

It's also got me thinking about whether crip/non-crip relationships can work, or whether disablism will fuck up every one... there are some that seem to be successful, like Wheelchair Dancer's (she says some very relevant stuff in her post to this situation, just unfortunately not anything that offers a solution for when the non-disabled partner thinks differently), Elizabeth McClung's, and Dave Hingsburger's, but i know from my (pre-diagnosis) relationship with a visibly impaired person how strong the effect of social attitudes to disability can be (even in supposedly "liberated" circles)... it's probably stronger when an impairment is visible than when it's invisible, but i know that i would need someone to have a good understanding both of autism and of the social model of disability for me to feel comfortable having a r/ship with them, which in practice probably means limiting myself to crips as potential partner material (I think there may be an analogy with "political lesbianism", a la the previous post, here)...

I think it's probably relevant that all 3 of those examples are r/ships where the disabled partner acquired their impairment after already having been in the relationship for several years, and also that the latter 2 are queer/same-sex r/ships. As i said in the conversation last night, the whole "normative expectations that crips might not be able to live up to" thing is part of why i think queer theory (and related stuff like polyamory and BDSM) is so relevant to disability... queer theory is all about rejecting the normative assumption that a certain kind of partnership, with certain kinds of sex and certain roles and obligations, is the only "valid" sexual relationship or the norm that everyone needs to aim for in their relationships or compare their r/ships to, and being able/allowed to carve out your own niche, to define (consensually) your own relationships as the kind you want, with the roles and responsibilities (sexual and otherwise) being "user-defined", rather than having to conform to a pre-existing template.

Because that pre-existing template is, by default, a heterosexual one, same-sex r/ships (and ones involving trans people, etc) are already outside of it, and thus arguably freer to reach self-definition without the assumption that template-fitting is necessary. IMO, the same is true of disabled people's sexual relationships, because we may not have the ability or the inclination to have "normal" kinds of sex or to fit "normal" gender-based roles - thus we need to create our own roles and relationships, or else we are doomed to "not feel good enough" or to have our relationships infiltrated and undermined by all of the normative, disablist crap... which goes quite well with the slogan i've heard that "all disabled sexuality is queer sexuality" (something touched on in, but actually not the main focus of, Eli Clare's Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation, a fucking awesome book which i'm still planning to write several posts on).

Still, despite my feelings of powerlessness to help, my friend said that she actually appreciated talking to me about the situation, because of my ability to talk "logically" about such things... so maybe some of my AS traits are actually useful in friendship situations...

This post is probably a bit incoherent and there are probably things i was intending to add to it. Oh well, it's late, maybe i'll think of them tomorrow...

Sexuality as choice vs sexuality as inborn: a false dichotomy?

I recently found this via Trinity's Livejournal. While i probably have somewhat more sympathy for the radical feminist position than Trinity does (or at least i find radical feminism's critiques of patriarchy and society in general powerful and persuasive enough to consider it a hugely important body of theory despite some of the things i'm not sure i can accept about it, and i tend to think it's a straw man to consider all radical feminism to be dependent on some of the more extreme premises inherent in this checklist), there are certain things that some people seem to regard as essential to radical feminism which i will instantly turn into your enemy if you try to defend them. Transphobia is one of them, condemnation of any kind of consensual sexual practices as somehow equatable to rape is another (which Trinity more than amply expresses my views on). One which i hadn't really encountered before (or at least not so explicitly) is this "all women are lesbians, and if they think they're not they need to be liberated from their false consciousness" thing...

OK, so, on a personal level, i really don't "get" why a woman (or a man, for that matter) would be sexually attracted to a man - but i don't doubt or question the reality that women, and men, are sexually attracted to men...

The responses to Yawning Lion's post point out how the "sexuality is malleable" argument is used as fuel for condemnation of people's sexuality and attempts to brainwash it out of people (which have a lot of parallels with the many nasty things that have been done to disabled people under the ideology of "behaviour modification"); however, it strikes me that the idea that sexuality is inborn has the potential to be used in oppressive ways, or to deny people's lived realities, as well...

The debate about whether sexuality is something people are born with, something socialised into people through external agencies beyond their control (ranging from intra-family abuse at the individual level to patriarchal cultural values at the "macro" level), or something that people freely choose, seems to be one that will never end - but, IMO, it's actually a distraction in terms of liberation...

One (disabled, lesbian) friend said to me that the reason she thought a higher proportion of disabled than non-disabled people were queer is because of the higher likelihood of sexual abuse happening to disabled children (either in family-home or institutional settings). The issue i had with this theory was that, if it was accepted as true, it could be used as fuel for arguments that queer sexualities are the "product" of abuse and therefore somehow pathological.

However it seems to me that the libertarian response to this, and the one which would be consistent with the social model of disability, and acceptance-of-diversity in general, should not be to deny vociferously that a person's sexuality could ever be influenced or "caused" by abuse, but to affirm its validity regardless of that fact.

Likewise (or conversely), a lot of people seem to have a lot invested in denying the possibility that someone could "choose" their sexuality, seemingly based on the idea that something freely chosen is somehow a less valid part of one's identity than something congenital and inalterable.

My response to that debate is: why can't it be all of the options? Why can't it be accepted that some people are born gay, some achieve gayness, and some have gayness thrust upon them? There are as many possible experiences of sexuality as there are people with sexualities; I don't see why it has to be either/or, when it might be option 1 in some cases, option 2 or 3 in others, and a bit of all of them in yet other cases...

There's an obvious parallel here with disability and impairment. Attitudes towards disability may vary between those with congenital impairments and those with acquired impairments, but neither group is any less "genuinely" impaired or disabled than the other. Why should it be any different with congenital or acquired sexualities? (I am going to post fairly soon on hierarchies of impairment...)

There is not necessarily a hard and fast distinction between aspects of a person which are "freely chosen", and those which are "socialised", due to biology or to any other external factor. One thing which is important on a personal level to me is trying to disentangle those "lacking" aspects of my own personality which are due to my impairment, and thus "inborn", from those which are the result of depression and/or PTSD from living in a society without understanding or acceptance of that impairment; however, i recognise that what is really important is not whether some hypothetical version of myself, with identical biology but raised in a "perfect", prejudice-free society, would have those negative traits or not, but whether or not it's feasible for me to change them. Even if I, or any other disabled/queer/whatever person, are who we are because of things that happened to us that "should not have" happened to us, we still deserve acceptance for who we are, not an obligation to change or "cure" ourselves (unless, of course, we want to change in that way).

Of course, that analogy doesn't really include the "freely chosen" bit: having tried and failed to be attracted to people of both sexes, i am forced to conclude that i cannot change my sexuality, and that i am exclusively attracted to women whether i like it or not. (Thus i probably shouldn't feel the guilt i sometimes do over being "inherently patriarchal" or "sexist" for such "discrimination"). However, i wouldn't ever try to deny someone's claim that ze did choose hir own sexuality. (I'd probably submit that such a person would have to have had the capability to fancy both genders to begin with, in order to have chosen one or the other, but i have no pronlem with different people having different capabilities in the realm of sexuality any more than in any other realm of human experience). Thus, while i might kind of envy someone who can choose hir sexuality, i believe that, consistent with libertarianism as a general social principle, they have the right to make that choice, and no one has the right to deny them that choice, regardless of whether or not everyone else has the ability to make that choice (I also need to write something about libertarianism and recognising different capabilities...) - a "chosen" sexuality is neither more or less valid IMO than an "unchosen" one.

It is up to us and us alone, whoever and whatever we are, to conclude both whether we are "broken", and whether we want or need to be "fixed". If a behaviour or a human difference harms no one, then no one has a right to condemn or attempt to alter it in anyone but hirself, and whether it is "chosen" or not is immaterial...

(this turned out a lot longer and ramblier than i intended it to... but at least i wrote it :) )

good meeting, good conversation... crap internet.

I met up with an awesome and gorgeous woman yesterday (who I'll call K, because I'm not very imaginative)... the circumstances of meeting her were a bit weird and possibly fucked up... basically, at a conference thing to do with independent living i went to a few months ago, she was sitting at the table behind me, and when i was giving out some leaflets i wrote a little message in the margins saying "if you are ever in Brum and want a drink and a good time, call me"... i actually had no expectation at all of her getting in touch with me - i thought she would be at best flattered but bemused and at worst disgusted - but on the way back she txted me, and we've been intermittently emailing each other since...

I still don't really know what to think, ethically, of that - as soon as i gave her the leaflet, i thought "oh fucking hell, what a sleazy, monstrous, exploitative hetero male thing to do that was". At least 3 female friends, including one very outspoken lesbian feminist, told me they didn't think it was sleazy or exploitative, but i have it so deeply imprinted in my head that ANY remotely-vaguely-sexual proposition from a man towards a woman is an act of oppression that i can't help having it nagging at me in my head that i'm a... traitor or something. I think i need to find some (ideological and practical) ways round that one... i definitely aspire to sex-positive feminism, but i can't quite work out where male sexuality can or should factor into that...

Anyway in the first meeting there was no indication (at least that i could detect) of whether anything sexual might happen, but i actually don't mind if it doesn't, because she's definitely a person worth knowing and being friends with regardless... i do think she's very attractive tho ;) We had really good conversation about disability stuff, particularly about what it feels like to finally know you have an impairment, and about how (regardless of type of impairment) there are common things to all disabled people... it's also good to know that i'm not the only person in the disability movement who has had a formative experience of trying to "work with" disabled people, and seeing (unlike everyone else present) the hierarchies and injustices inherent in that...

she also seemed to be quite receptive to the "biodiversity" concept, which is cool... i have this tendency to strongly identify with characters in books in a way which involves kind of trying to map my own life onto theirs (ok, crap explanation... will return to this subject in my planned blog post on ways of reading fiction), and I've just read Octavia Butler's "Parable of the Sower" and "Parable of the Talents", and at the moment i can't help seeing the biodiversity concept as my "Earthseed", and thinking almost strategically about having people i know in different cities as "comrades" who i can introduce to the concept... I hope this isn't a sign of megalomania ;)

Another interesting thing is that K reckons that her impairment (which is a pretty rare one, with numbers only in the low hundreds worldwide), and possibly a number of other rare congenital impairments which seemingly only started occurring in kids in the 70s and 80s, and occur in "clusters", is possibly the result of government testing on expectant mothers of drugs aiming to produce "perfect" children, in some kind of secret or quasi-secret eugenic programme. Knowing some of the stuff i do about what has been done (and still is being done) to transsexual and intersex people in the UK and US, and some of the stuff that happens in disability institutions, this doesn't really actually surprise me, but it's a reminder of how fucked up the world actually is (we talked quite a bit about how non-disabled people often simply don't believe the truth of the shit that happens to (or more precisely, gets done to) disabled people). I have to say there's an irony in there tho, if they were testing stuff with eugenic intent - trying to produce "improved" or "perfect" children, and a bunch of crips is the result... :o ;)

Had other things to say, but they've slipped my mind for now... I'm writing this in Word and intending to post it online tomorrow, because my internet is down for a couple of weeks, which is really fucking annoying. This is one of my (probably to be fairly frequent) "tangent" posts...