by way of introduction, kinda-sorta:
Three Four things that happened in one day (connect the dots):
1. In my first class, the professor made a joke about emo kids and suicide. When one gal called him out on it, saying it was in bad taste and hurtful to some students, he launched into an off-topic whirlwind of 'splaining about how he wasn't really "making light of mental illness," because he would never mock anyone else's "struggle" like that. No, he was only joking about those sheepish, trendy kids who are "melodramatic" or suffering from "teen angst" and kill themselves because the culture they immerse themselves in romanticizes death and they decide that suicide is the cool thing to do, apparently. (Seriously, this was a college professor speaking. Really.)
After class, the gal who had tried to make this professor apologize before cornered him to talk more about it, and presumably to make another stab at wrangling an admission of insensitivity out of him. I lingered outside the door; I was pretty upset too, and I wanted to say something but my throat seemed to have closed up and I couldn't think of what I would say, or how I would hold my conversational ground if Professor Jerkass decided to drop one of his pauseless defensive monologues on me. I was relieved that someone else was doing it for me, but I felt like I should hang around until she was finished to see how it went, and maybe offer a kind of invisible, wordless solidarity. (Somehow.)
But when she came out of the classroom, she was crying. There were literal streams of tear-water running down her cheeks. The skin around her eyes was red and wrinkled. I had no idea what to do. I'm never sure what to do when someone I don't know very well starts sobbing. I chose to walk alongside her in silence, hoping it would come across as comforting rather than creepy.
I don't think he ever apologized. I typed out a long e-mail that evening, telling the professor that, yes, more than one person in the class was offended; that he can't know the difference between people who are "really" experiencing depression and people who are faking it; that I'm not sure I believe that anyone does fake it, at least not in order to be seen as cool; and that if he said anything like that during a future class, I would walk out. He hasn't responded to that e-mail yet. I want to think he just hasn't gotten around to it yet, but I suspect that an answer is never going to come.
2. In my second class, I was pressured into outing myself as autistic in front of everybody. I wish I were less embarrassed about letting people in on this little fact. It's not like I think it's some horrible, shameful state of being. I just don't think all my casual acquaintances necessarily need to know, and I get really flustered and choked up whenever I try to talk about it because it was one of the Great Forbidden Topics in my family when I was growing up and we would only ever refer to my autism in the most vague and elliptical way possible. ("With Fitz being, well, the way she is..." "Some things are a little harder for Fitz..." "Because of your condition, we aren't sure if it would be safe for you to..." "Fitz was a challenging child to raise, she had some problems, but she was also very gifted in certain things...")
All right, maybe I did internalize some shame.
Anyway, I still wish I hadn't been pushed into it. A classmate came up to me afterward to tell me she thought I was "brave." Nettlesome. I mean, her heart was clearly in the right place, she seemed to mean "brave to publicly identify yourself that way," not the more condescending "brave to do everyday things even though you're disabled," but...gah. Maybe if I'd chosen to out myself, in my own time and on my own terms, it could be considered brave. This was just...doing what I could in a really awkward situation. And I couldn't do very much.
[All this is, of course, not even touching on situations where it might actually be dangerous for me to identify myself as autistic (or otherwise disabled) This particular class isn't one of them, but there's also no reason that my peers in it should know some or all or any of my diagnoses or disabilities. I'm still chewing on my feelings about this one. As I wrote, I don't wanna be ashamed of who and what I am. But. It oughta be my choice who I tell and how I tell them, and when, and where. ]
3. On the internet, I learned that Amanda Palmer is an ableist jackass with an ego the size of a small moon. I hadn't really listened to anything AP had put out since the Dresden Dolls broke up, but I loved the Dresden Dolls when I was in high school. This whole affair is fucking disappointing, especially when people whose opinions I normally value highly tell me they truly, honestly don't understand what's wrong with this kind of glamorization/exoticization of disability, or with the casual handling of sexual abuse, or with the portrayal of conjoined twins as though they were magical fantasy creatures that don't exist in real life, this quirky gimmick free for the taking...
4. I decided to start this blog. It's on eljay 'cause, well, I'm used to eljay, and I'm comfortable with its workings. It's got its problems, yeah, but the power of familiarity is a strong and insidious thing.