"Also, if you tell a person with any form of a depression to “just think positively!”, you are an absolutely terrible excuse for a human being. I think one of the things that really makes me angry about the whole “think positively!” thing is that positive thinking, being optimistic, can be a very dangerous trap for disabled people, especially disabled people on limited spoons, especially especially for disabled peoples on limited spoons who are still getting used to that fact. I spent four years being optimistic: “I’m sure this time it will work! This time I’ll manage! This time I will still be going to my lectures at the end of term! This time I’ll actually study for my exams!” only to have the same thing happen again. That’s four years down the drain when I could have been learning actual coping mechanisms. Even now, I have to be *extremely* careful to be realistic, not optimistic. Sure, it’d be cool if I could make pizza, seeing as I love cooking and the recipe seems as if it’d be really fun – but I really don’t think I have the spoons to manage that, at least not on my own. It’d be nice if I could look up a local feminist organisation and engage in some activism, but my course comes first and I have a bad enough track record on that that I’ll have my hands full not failing. I’d really like it if I could get a cheap set of drawers from IKEA so I could finally pack away the last of these damn boxes – but, realism time, it’s quite a way away and although I made it there a few weeks ago my spoon levels have gone down far enough that it’s just not going to happen. Any contingency plans? What positive thinking nets me in the end is a trail of plans that never went anywhere, ideas I bounced around for months until they became obsolete, unfinished things, a whole lot of me spending spoons I need elsewhere on optional tasks, and – ironically – *huge* amounts of anxiety and negative emotions from beating myself up about all the things I didn’t do. Being realistic about things from the start saves me so much hassle. Because for some of us, there is no “I can do it if I just try hard enough!”." - Kaz
Posted on: Fri, 14 Jun 2013 22:23:21 +0000
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