Elucidating Questions

It’s funny

When you’re disabled you see things and you just know someone’s going to have trouble accessing them

But able bodied people insist that if they aren’t disabled then nothing around them needs to be accessible

God forbid they get old or have an accident which changes their mobility

And me saying that things are inaccessible is an attack on able bodied people

They mock me for saying that it’s not accessible

They tell me I have a victim complex

And am only thinking about myself

They tell me this about things that I will never be able to physically be there to access and thus it is incomprehensible that I am in fact thinking of myself when pointing out they’re inaccessible

This world of the quickest snappiest nastiest thing you can think of off the top of your head

I get treated like a bigot for being perturbed by inaccessibility all around me

When you’re disabled you see things differently

It doesn’t matter that I will never be there

Someone will experience the inhumane moment when they’re not capable of getting somewhere everyone else goes

And why don’t you want to be the solution to that awful feeling?

But they don’t

I noticed it early, being a lefty

Because the world is built for right handed people

I can’t use scissors properly

Not for me

But when the mobility issues started popping up

I was thrust into this new perspective that I frankly hate

That I wish no one else had to experience

There’s a Starbucks near my house with two entries but only one has a disability button and it’s out of the way, and more narrow so it’s awkward for wheelchairs

And they both have really high, uneven, and loose, dividers that make coming over them in mobility devices difficult

There’s curbs for crosswalks all over town that go down into the road but then have a second, steep, drop and I’ve almost fallen over them in my walker more than once

Theres a person who parks out front our place and blocks off the entire entry way so I can’t leave with my walker

These are things I face incessantly, daily, if I go out of my home

It’s like slow water torture

You don’t belong here

The world was made for other people, not you

So, yeah, when I see things that are inaccessible I get frustrated

Disability is a fact of life and we should frame everything we do around it. Stairs shouldn’t even exist.

Stairs should have been reimagined as something that people in wheelchairs can use by now

Why are we all assuming that every person with a mobility issue has the tens of thousands of dollars it would take to renovate a place to be accessible?

“Build it normal and then someone can renovate it to be accessible later”

Hence half of downtown businesses (built in the late 18 early 1900s) are inaccessible and unfixable because

“Sorry they were already here”

I’m so tired of disability being an afterthought

I’m so sick of people like me being an afterthought

You have such timing

That cosmic timing

Unless you tell me what I means I refuse

And I always wonder why these moments grace me

When LA is a warzone, when Manitoba is burning, while Gaza is a bullseye for various forms of target practice

Why the Universe twists around me in this way

It would take another thirty years for you to convince me to jump again

Jumping is for the lucky and the rich

And the beautiful

And why?

All this hell going on around me that I cannot do anything about

Yet you taunt me with these moments

I didn’t ask for a coincidence

500 coincidences and yet you couldn’t spare a coincidence of someone coming to their senses about the madness in the world

The hatred

And, perhaps, if it had been seen, there would have been some happy story to share with the world

I don’t think it would have lasted

And I don’t think a difference would have been made

Love isn’t born from madness

At least I’m not lucky enough to have such a grace bestowed upon me

Not from where it started

How can I change things?

I have too much anger and frustration in me to handle the ignorant gently

See, but, I can’t count on anyone else to do anything

I have to do it myself so I have to be everything

If this was Madoka I’d be the one making contracts to wish I was a god

Would they poison me?

Maybe our own darkness suffocates them

The gods

All their little fingers

Beckoning every which way

But does anyone listen?

I don’t know

Perhaps there are gods that I have not encountered who beckon darkness from us

But it’s their cursed neutrality that confounds me

With every miracle a horror story in tandem

Perplexed

And what does it mean?

Complex signs

This and this

So what?

Always nothing

Always nudging

Curse it

Go solve some actual problems I have no interest in searching around for a sign that the sign is a sign

So go sign someone’s next day given instead

What does it matter?

In the face of everything

What does this secret held in the strongest box of my soul matter?

It didn’t

A fresh secret out in plain view and a secret that is buried so deep no one would believe it if they did find it

A year ago I almost fell in again

With your prods

Not again

Any destiny that wants me can come get me

I wish I could live in my dreams

I almost don’t know why I do it

Go into comments sections regarding trans people

But I look, I think hoping I’ll find just one person whose opinion that I shouldn’t exist was changed

Haven’t found it yet

A person changing their mind

Lots of infighting

It’s the same for every other minority

It’s the same for the genocide

No one changes their mind

Can humans actually change their minds?

It’s hard

Just seeing vitriol about your existence constantly

I feel very unwanted by this world

My being here doesn’t matter

And I’m struggling again so I don’t want to be here anyways

I suppose if I did manage to swallow my fears I’d be doing some people a favour

But I have this feeling like I need to take up space

I don’t want to though

I wanted to die in my sleep last night

One of those nights where you don’t want to wake up in the morning

But I did

I just want to enjoy myself

But I can’t

And my mum is okay with me selling feet pictures

If only I could get on a platform that I can do that from

Course you need money for most

Course I’d probably flop like everything else I’ve ever done

Incapable

I don’t want people, who haven’t done anything to deserve feeling like I do, to feel this way

I’m the worst person I know

But I don’t want others to feel like this

I feel like starving myself for fun

I’m supposed to feel this way but other people shouldn’t have to

It’s just how it is

For some reason my life is about not getting things I need and missing out on things I want

I really wish I could just disappear

I feel so stuck

So taunted by my exlandlord’s words that finding another job would be easy

I need money

I need like $500 to just show up and I’d be comfortable

But I’d put up with $200 if I could

And I want to work

I don’t want to sit here and passively collect a pauper’s income

I want to do something

But apparently 16 years of customer service

And countless musculoskeletal injuries

And days I felt were actually going to make me more sick

That did, in the end

They don’t count for anything

I feel defeated by silence and “we regret to inform you”

Don’t even know what’s wrong with me so I can’t fix it

And chances are it’s the disability thing

Or the I quit jobs when they start affecting my health thing

How dare I not work at a place my entire life?

How dare I get used to how a place is run by one manager and then take offense when things are arbitrarily changed and we begin to accelerate into shittiness?

Did I foresee Petcetera going out of business?

No, but I definitely knew it wasn’t being run properly

Did I know Lowe’s was going to run into serious problems and need to rebrand back to Rona because of image issues?

No, but I knew that an entire store’s management being entirely restructured less than a year after being opened was a bad sign and so was the turn over and they started treating employees like crap

I was also having a mental health emergency

Others were for things like moving

Physical health issues

Harassment and discrimination

Got fired once for complaining about bus schedules because I mentioned that my job had cut my hours in the post as well

I just want to be employable

I just want to work my few hours a week

Maybe make like $400 every two weeks, maybe like $300, that’s fine

Not be pushed to flare ups

I ask for so little and receive less

I’m saying hi world I would like to live on $26k a year while most of my countrymates live on almost double

And it’s too much to ask for

And I know there are so many people with less

Were we to gather every person who is struggling because of this world into one place and have them jump?

I imagine it would measure on the Richter scale

Their suffering is just as unforgivable as mine is

I think people think I’m complaining just about myself

When overwhelmingly what I am trying to say is that if it’s this bad for me it must be worse for other people

Maybe humans are just stupid animals hiding the symptoms of their disease

And the disease is capitalism

Is blood suckers just sucking money out of the economy into their bank accounts

There was not trillions of dollars in the economy in, say, 1912

They printed it, created it, whatever

Yet there still isn’t enough for everyone on Earth

I don’t know

If you had told me at 15 that at 35 I’d be living with my dad, unemployed, unemployable, and being spat on by the Ministry of so called “social development and poverty reduction” every once in a while

I definitely would have “completed” suicide

I can’t find anything

Not the stuff I keep looking for in the boxes upon boxes and piles and clothing and random shit

Not a job

Not a home

I want to live on my own again

I can’t handle this

Being responsible for my dad

Being responsible for other people’s feelings about how I live my day to day

I want to sing

I miss singing

I miss singing without being told I should enter choirs that sing about Jesus all day

I miss my stuff

I miss everything where I put it

I miss my living room

And my chair

I miss my crystals

Being everywhere

I miss my bedroom

Not mine

Tenancy

I used to fantasise that I’d buy that house some day and rent out the top floor

Just live in my basement and then pay the tenant to be the caretaker of the house

So many dreams died when I left that house

And I have nothing

No job

No place to call my place

Constantly worried I’m bothering someone

Constantly worried that I’m going to do something to bring out my father’s bad side

Constantly being told my world view is wrong

Just because I understand things differently

Doesn’t matter if I reached the same conclusion or not

Bowing to Christianity constantly

Just makes me want to set it on fire even more

I want my life back

I wasn’t really wrong when I said my life was ending the day I moved

Nothing is the same anymore

I just want my freedom back

I miss my freedom

I don’t live well with other people

So anxious and agitated all the time

I don’t know why things happen in this world

Sometimes it feels like the wrong sort of chaos

Sometimes it feels like there are threads of order within it but they don’t make sense

Nothing makes sense

I didn’t intend to lose to this world, but it’s exactly what I did

I want everything back

The idea that this is just a life that repeats over and over

And I end up wanting to repeat it every time

Has crossed my mind before

I’m stuck in a loop of failure and if I just went back and did something differently

Tomorrow is so far away

Why can’t it get better today?

I wish I didn’t have to listen to Christian music

It’s not good for my brain

My brain that once thought it needed to be Jesus

Psychosis is weird

Because I obviously know I’m not Jesus

And it’s not grandiose

It’s responsibility

But even with knowing

Certain phrases trigger it to come in again like a gut punch

I didn’t think I was Jesus because I thought it made me powerful

Christianity’s poison still seeping through my veins

Someone has to take responsibility for the state of the world

I didn’t imagine myself powerful

I imagined myself beaten and strung up

Powerless

I don’t even believe in that god

I don’t believe the stories of the Bible

But it’s in me like a virus

Fear that I have to take responsibility and be Jesus or even Jesuslike

I hate that I can’t get the tunes out of my head

My father singing them in his choir

He thinks I should join

I don’t want to sing songs about Jesus and their god

I wish I had songs about my gods to sing instead

Instead I just raise my voice to them in general song

It’s stressful to be around a Christian again

It’s scary to be faced with this doctrine again

He refuses to entertain other world views

While expecting that his should be respected and believed without question

I don’t understand it

I spend all day humouring his world

I can’t even hint towards mine

He thinks animals run on instinct and have no feelings

He doesn’t consider the Earth a living being

He’s decent, sometimes he says bad things

He corrects me for no reason

I said “my (crystal) skull melts ice”

And he laughed at me and said “the skull doesn’t melt the ice, the material it’s made of melts the ice”

Thank god a man was here to correct this terrible error

I’m just tired

I was so free

I thought I was grateful

But it was taken away

Does that prove I wasn’t?

It’s hard for me to be around this

I daren’t wish it would end because I want my father to be alive and well

Oh complexities

I wish it wasn’t

I wish it wasn’t so complex