Consent to the Process (Fractures)

lets back up and look at this again, and lets pause about COVID

I’m stumbling about here with some kind of thesis about vaguely hearing my trauma and finding the stories locked within. I do seek support for my writing, I’m here obviously. Quieting the injustices around us and what we’ve normalized, let me break down this trauma response capitalist hell corner I’m living in.

1. Trauma impacts career capacity (for my example: long-form writing)

2. Loss of career capacity enhances trauma, and living with it unacknowledged worsens trauma.

3. Further career capacity is lost, to the extent I am regarded as a permanently disabled person due to the severity of the overlap between PTSD, panic disorder, autism, ADHD & bipolar.

And now?

My mental health has also worsened my physical disabilities, and though those are disabling enough on their own, I have to emphasize that it is not my physical disabilities that motivate support around my needs. Unacknowledged and unsupported disability were instead elements of the compounded trauma because of the isolation that comes from being unacknowledged and unsupported. This created in conjunction with the above, a state of being for me wherein the structure of workplace expectations are triggering in and of themselves. To be employable, I have to approach with an as-of-yet undefined shift in how my needs are potentially accommodated.

Performative Labour

Me being here? Me writing this? This is busy work for me to pander to the worth of existence wondering how I fill the economic gap between the support offered to me and the poverty line. I am too disabled to work, so ….

The Trauma Forecast

Just looking at my own experiences and considering how many people are going back to work, normalizing a new normal, living with new, unacknowledged, and developing disabilities. I’ve heard it theorized that people will eventually become too disabled to work, and that is consistent with my experience as a person whose employment capacity has degraded with time.

We also do not talk about the trauma that comes with the change in social status, expectations, respect, and dignity that often follows the onset of disability. A disabled workforce can push their way through performative labour to a certain extent, but all you have to do is look at the magnitude of unmasking autistic adults to hear the horrors of compounded trauma that compulsory disability concealment brings.

With the chronic re-infections of COVID bringing about emergent disabilities, it is understandable to theorize that eventually, many people will be too disabled to work in many of the ways we are used to today. I would go a step further and say, that if not too disabled to work from the physical disabilities we are collectively developing, then we will be too traumatized from this onset that is unsupported and unacknowledged, the grief work we are neglecting.

It will catch up to us.

The more we pretend we are not in a mass disabling public health event, the worse the inescapable post-traumatic cost will be in the future, 10 or 15 years from now. We will be culturally fractured by conspiracy, fear, confusion, and misunderstanding. We already are.

And genocidal opportunists are preying on our general void of insecurity by offering up narrative scapegoats (such as the targetting of transgender people) to instill and resecure systems of control over people in a era when we should be ripe with self actualization and discovery of potential brought on by technological opportunity (instead we are predictably locked in the horrors of future shock).

In my journey with cPTSD and coming down from the grips of extreme gaslighting, I feel this insecurity deep down in my core. I want to put a mask on outside, but I feel like an insane person. I doubt my own discernment. This kind of self-gaslighting is pathological in me.

Paint is a light-skinned individual in front of red hollyhock flowers in this chest-up portrait. They have octagon glasses, a leather-style open-button top, and a reptilian-patterned red dress. They have tussled short ash brown hair and facial hair, looking slightly up and away.

social compulsory disability concealment

I can barely convince myself to accept reality, to know the painful reality that awaits an increasing population of newly disabled people, in a country (Canada) that has legalized and offers suicide as a medical intervention to disability and mental illness (MAID), knowing the pathways and patterns of abuse people have already been subjected to and instead of focusing on my trauma by myself, I am here participating in co-education hoping my better-minded peers can utilize my summary points as I am a pattern seeing person, and I can not narrow down all of my perspectives and thoughts, I share them in the interest of our protection and self-preservation…. (run on thought… got lost).

This is explosive on my nervous system, I am fighting like hell to write. I have yet to make tangible that trust in and reception of an income I can earn of $300-$500/month to bring my disability support above the poverty line and to make it possible to dig myself out of debt, to conceive of my top surgery, come into communion with the world, be able to offer my arts and insights. I struggle with the belief that the world does not deserve me and I wish I could inspirationally say that I’ve never given it a chance, but I have good reasons for eroded trust in the world around me.

I am dysregulated and seeking reverence for the sacred state of my nervous system. I can talk of nothing without the politics of myself because we are all on the plane called capitalism crashing into the rivers of white supremacy, colonialism, and religious fundamentalism. Some will worship the water as it drowns them. I am just as guilty of screaming and kicking trying to stay afloat.

I’m tired of being worshipped for surviving when I can count the names of people I know who faced with challenges I’ve faced and did not survive.

I am not stronger or better or more resilient than my list of dead friends and I am sick of being worshipped for surviving.

I am not better or wiser than my friends still battling the voice that says give up, that I still battle.

I am lucky and breaking the rules of reality to survive, and yet I fear so much the tiniest nuances of social approval. This seems ironic and I know my vulnerability has been and could be weaponized against me because I dare to speak of my mental illness not as a personal failing, but as a symptom of the society that made me sick.

Personal Update (1 paragraph)