The Antisocial Socialist

While Harper is generally known for tightly controlling the audience at his events and plugging any leaks in the media, he apparently has much less control over the bowels of his candidates.

Witness the following glorious, glorious headline:

Jerry Bance, Conservative caught peeing in mug, no longer candidate, party says



It's going to be such a rush of relief when we no longer have a Tory government.



The jokes continue to stream in.

Of particular note is Mulcair's response:

"This must be someone who's adept at Stephen Harper's trickle down theory of economics."

Though it was written awhile ago, this article on non-survivor privilege is making the rounds on FB today. It horrifies me to think that there are families and supposed friends who pull this kind of shit, but yes, it happens, and I understand that it happens quite a bit. I've seen it happen in communities that I've been a part of, where cohesion and harmony became more important than the wellbeing of survivors.

Not to disability-jack an article on an entirely different sort of privilege, but it really did remind me of living with a disability/chronic/terminal illness. The first duty of the invalid is not to look after her own health, but to ensure that no one around her is inconvenienced by her condition or made to feel uncomfortable by being reminded that not everyone is in perfect health, that bodies fail, and that eventually we all die.

"You're exaggerating, you bitter crip! No one is actually making these demands; you're just imagining it!"

I can't count the number of times these demands have been made on me. It's everything from the "oh God, I don't want to hear about this" face when I'm too tired to lie about how I'm feeling, to the times people have explicitly told me that they don't want to hear about it, to the constant efforts of everyone around me to minimize what I'm going through. It's the bike activists who cheerfully tell me that I should take up cycling because it's soooo good for me and the environment and then look aghast when I tell them that my spine is brittle and if I fall, I die. It's the people at work who, when I quite bluntly say that there is no guarantee whatsoever that I'll recover or ever lead a normal life, reassure me that this is impossible. But it's not reassurance. It's silencing, an attack on my lived experience as a person inhabiting a failing body.

You can't turn disability off, any more than you can turn trauma off, or gender, or skin colour, or sexual orientation. It colours every aspect of your interaction with internal and external realities. It's an added burden to have to lie about it for the sake of other people's comfort, to not greet every, "How are you this fine morning?" with, "well, I'm still tired and I'm still in pain and I'm still terrified about the future." I get it. It's not the nicest thing to be in close proximity to a negative person. You want to shine a bright light on his negativity to make those bad-feelings cockroaches scuttle the fuck back under the rug. But it doesn't work like that.

Part of why I'm so bitter is knowing that in all certainty, I will never have the feeling of a pain-free body, never ride a bicycle, never skateboard, ever again, that there's a good chance that I won't live out my natural lifespan, that even if the tumor is removed, there will always, until I die, be a strong chance of a recurrence. But I'm also bitter because it's exhausting to be around people who demand that I lie to them and tell them that everything will be okay even when I know it won't be. Our entire culture buys into the myth that anything is possible with a can-do attitude with no acknowledgment that certain groups of people are automatically excluded from this truism, and that they are in fact tangibly hurt by its existence.

So got that, non-survivors? Don't ask survivors to lie to you. Able-bodied people? Don't ask disabled people to lie to you. It's not rocket science, but it can sure as fuck make the world a better place.

Being sick or incapacitated is an affront to contemporary Western civilization, dependent as it is on the myth of individualism, personal responsibility, and human progress. If you're sick, able-bodied, healthy people resent you. They may not say so out loud, but there's a dividing line, and any complaint or serious discussion of your illness will be perceived as an assault on their moral order.

Here's the thing. I'm facing health problems. That's a euphemistic way of putting it. The reality is that I am in severe pain at almost every moment of my existence. I do not sleep. I can barely eat. My pain scale, as I've said before, has become so radically readjusted that what would normally have me calling in sick to work doesn't even blip on my radar. The definition of a "good day" for me has changed so that it's no longer defined as a day where not I'm crying or screaming in agony (that's every day), but a day when the paramedics are called but I do not, in the end, need to be brought to a hospital.

My prognosis is not very good. A full recovery remains a possibility, but it is one of several possibilities, and not necessarily the most likely one. Many of the possibilities are not what I would consider compatible with my continued existence. At any rate, it's very possible that I will be sick and in pain for the rest of my life. It still remains a possibility that I may die.

I have confronted these possibilities. My kitchen floor is messed up and my front porch is strewn with possessions that I consider extraneous and offensive because I just confronted these possibilities in an incredibly visceral rage-filled sort of way. I have plans. I have plans for three weeks to live. I have plans for six months to live. I have plans for a long period of convalescence. I have plans for a life where I am condemned to continue to suffer (they are the same plans as if I have three weeks to live). As the person with a 2-3 cm tumour tunnelling into her spinal column, surrounded by the barest whisper of bone that could give way with the wrong twist or shove on a subway, I am forced, every since second of both my waking and sleeping life, to make these plans, to consider these possibilities. And yes, I have EVERY RIGHT IN THE WORLD to complain about how this is unfair and I hurt and I'm angry about it. (Angry doesn't begin to cover it. There aren't any words that quite cover the feeling of intensely wanting to punch the entire cosmos into submission until it stops moving.) But anyway. I'm acknowledging that these are Things That Can Happen. Maybe not in a healthy way, but I'm hearing them and incorporating them into my consciousness.

People in my life—present company excluded; I like LiveJournal because it's the last place on the internet where one is permitted to whine and complain—will not fucking accept this. My Facebook is full of positive comments. "So glad to hear it's probably not cancer. <3 <3 <3! :) :) :)" "You'll be back on your feet in no time." "Like!" Work is even worse. You can't say anything negative in a school. Pretty soon they'll be sending people to re-education camps for being downers. You must always smile and walk in lock-step with the goddamned Happiness Patrol. Any sign of negativity is being a "quitter," "giving up," "letting the disease win."

Maybe looking on the bright side is nice for some people. Maybe it's even comforting. If I did that, though, I'd have been even more crushed by today's news (or lack thereof) than I was going in expecting to hear bad things. While what I heard was worse than what I'd estimated, it was better than what I imagined was possible. That ability to imagine bad outcomes, and what one will do should that bad thing come to pass, is unpleasant but necessary, and I believe superior to walking around believing that the universe is somehow benevolent and will reward you for smiling brightly at it.

But positivity is mandated. I'm the one suffering, but I am obligated—commanded even—not to act like it, lest I endanger the worldview of the "everything happens for a reason" contingent. God forbid anyone be made to feel like things aren't happy all the time. Like sometimes cells mutate, and it's not because I've put magic mutating cell-vibes out to the universe or because I have bad karma but because it's a random thing that could happen to anyone. Even you.

When I was in high school, I read The Golden Bough and had a brief interest in reading anthropology books about the religious and spiritual beliefs of so-called primitive people. The idea that you could draw a bison being speared on a cave wall and it would magically happen in real life is an understandable logical leap if you don't understand anything about science. And it's not such an outdated belief, really. It's the kind of thinking that underlies The Secret, New Age cafeteria dogmas, and free market capitalism. The individual's responsibility is not to work in real-world terms for change with other, similarly-minded individuals. The individual's responsibility is to change himself first, by the power of magical positive thinking, and thus will be sending good vibes out into the universe and get good things trickling back down. It's the perfect type of thinking if you're cowering from a bear in a cave and are completely helpless in a world you don't understand, and it's the perfect type of ideology to enforce if you're trying to keep the unwashed masses under control.

Random illness, though, flies in the face of this ideology. You can search for some meaning in it, I guess, but in the end it comes down to some things just happening for no reason, and most things just not getting better, no matter how many stars you wish upon.

I'll end off this little rant with an animation that I've linked to before but continue to love. If you're one of the three people on the intertubes who hasn't watched it, check it out now. You should also totally read the book if you haven't already—among other things, Ehrenreich talks about how there's zero correlation between cancer survival rates and having an optimistic outlook. (In fact, the people who complain more frequently do better than those who don't. If I'd sucked up the pain, smiled, and hadn't complained, I wouldn't have gotten far enough to be considering treatment options at this point.)

Show us your tits, writ large.

Memo to all concerned: My boobs do not cause earthquakes. Nor are they for your viewing pleasure. They are just boobs. Rather nice ones, but none of anyone's fucking business.

I was about to say: "Where is Twisty Faster when you need her?" But fortunately she's right here, because this whole thing is making me itchy in my second-wave feminist place.