Month: March 2016

Being annoying is not the same as being hostile

Real Social Skills

Everyone is annoying sometimes. Some people are painfully annoying, a lot of the time.

Being annoying isn’t the same as being mean or sadistic.

Mean people are generally annoying; annoying people aren’t necessarily mean.

Sometimes it’s impossible to avoid annoying people. Sometimes people don’t realize they’re being annoying. Sometimes people know they’re bothering others, but don’t see any alternative. Sometimes the annoying thing is physically involuntary. Some people don’t have any non-annoying ways to communicate. Sometimes being annoying is a side effect of doing something else.

There are any number of other reasons people might be annoying. Sometimes people are annoying for the sake of being annoying, but often there’s something else going on.

It helps to keep in mind that being annoying is not the same as being hostile.

Ability is complicated.

Real Social Skills

Most people have some ability to improve some of their physical or cognitive skills. The limits on this are different for different people. Sometimes trying hard over a long period of time makes things possible. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Sometimes all it takes to be able to do something is to be willing. For instance:

  • People who have unusual speech (eg, a CP accent) are often ignored.
  • Most people who aren’t listening, could decide to listen.
  • Often, willingness to slow down and listen is all it takes.
  • (Not everyone can do this — there’s no shame in being unable. Sometimes disability is like that. The problem is that a lot of people who *could* understand relatively easily, or could learn how, don’t bother to listen)

Sometimes gaining the ability to do something takes significant effort over a sustained period of time:

  • For instance, most people could not decide to wake up tomorrow and run a marathon.
  • No matter how willing or determined they were, they would fail, because it’s not an ability you can gain overnight.
  • Many people can get the ability to run a marathon, by training over time.
  • Most people who can run at all can get better at running, up to a point, whether or not they ever gain the ability to run a marathon.
  • Getting better at running takes a lot of disciplined effort over time.
  • People don’t just decide to run fast, they practice and keep pushing themselves until they get better at it.

Another aspect of running ability:

  • There is a limit, and the limit is different for everyone. Discipline and effort only take you so far.
  • Very few people will ever be able to run as well as olympic runners — no matter how much work they put into trying.
  • Bodies have absolutel limitations, and they can’t be overcome by sheer force of will.

On the other side of things, flying:

  • No one can flap their arms and fly, because it is physically impossible
  • No amount of determination or disciplined effort will make it possible for a human being to fly by flapping their arms.

It’s not always obvious which category something falls into, even for nondisabled people:

  • Sometimes limits are predictable.
  • Sometimes you can’t tell until you try.
  • Sometimes things that feel impossible turn out to actually be easy once you try.
  • And vice versa: sometimes things that feel intuitively like they should be easy turn out to be impossible.
  • Sometimes things that feel impossible at first become possible with sustained effort over time.
  • Sometimes they stay impossible.
  • Sometimes the effort they take turns out not to be worth it.
  • Ability is complicated and can be unpredictable, for everyone.

It’s often even more confusing for disabled people, for a number of reasons:

  • For many disabled people, walking is like flying — flat out physically impossible, not happening.
  • For some people, it’s like running a marathon — possible, but may or may not be worth the amount of time and effort it requires.
  • For some people, it’s similar to a failed attempt to become an olympic athlete — some progress towards the goal is possible; but it’s still not achievable.
  • It’s not always at all obvious which category something is in.
  • And that’s true of a lot of skills, in a lot of disability categories. (Including cognitive skills.)

In addition, honest discussion of what you can and can’t do is often taboo for disabled people. We’re often expected to say that we’re just like everyone else, even when we’re obviously not. We’re often expected to believe that we can do anything if we try hard enough, even when it’s obviously not true. We’re often prevented from trying anything hard that we might fail at — in a misguided attempt to spare us frustration and the pain of noticing our limitations. All of this can make self-assessment even harder.

Ability is complicated. Most people can improve some of their physical, emotional, or cognitive skills. Willingness makes some things possible. Sustained effort over time makes other things possible. Some things stay impossible no matter how hard you try. Sometimes it is clear which category something falls into; often it is not.

This is even more complicated for people with disabilities. Research and rules of thumb developed by experience with nondisabled people can give misleading results. No one can do everything, and that’s ok. Most people make mistakes about what they can and can’t do, and that’s ok too.

Disability is not a number

Real Social Skills

Disabled people are as different from each other as we are from nondisabled people. Sometimes people don’t understand this. Instead of looking at specific impairment, they look at what they think of as severity. It’s as though they’re thinking, ok, on a scale of 0-10, how disabled is this person?

This can lead to a bizarre opposite reaction to disability and disabled people. People not only respond to disability based on stereotypes, they often respond based on the stereotype of a completely different disability. 

For instance, sometimes people who think of blindness and deafness as the same level of disability will respond to blind and deaf people interchangeably. (And often in ways that wouldn’t be helpful in any case). Because they don’t think about vision or hearing, they think about a severity category. 

Eg: a waiter who thinks this way might see two people signing to each other, notice that they are deaf and bring them a braille menu. Or they might, halfway through taking an order, notice that the customer is blind — then start talking really loudly. 

They don’t pay attention to the physical reality of the person they’re interacting with. Instead of thinking about what this person’s disability is and what accommodations they need, they’re looking in a box marked something like “what to do when you meet a level-8 disabled person”.

In real life, disability isn’t quantitative, it’s qualitative. Having a disability means something physical and/or cognitive, which will be different for every disabled person. It matters what type of disability someone has. It matters how that disability affects them, specifically. It matters what their preferences are, and what they’ve found works for them. Thinking in terms of severity level won’t tell you any of the things that matter most.

Braille is not a language

Real Social Skills

Braille is not a language. Braille is a system for making printed words accessible to blind people.

All braille looks the same visually.  Braille is always read left-to-right, even in languages that are printed right to left. Languages that are printed in different alphabets still look the same in Braille.

For example, even though Hebrew and English look dramatically different in print, they look the same in Braille. This can sometimes mislead sighted people into thinking that Braille is its own language, but it is not.

The only major difference between Braille and print is that Braille uses raised dots instead of visually distinct letters. (A minor difference: Braille uses a lot of contractions to make it less verbose.)

Braille is not translation, and putting something into Braille does not change the meaning.

If an English book is brailled, it’s still in English, and it still has all of the same words. It hasn’t changed languages; it’s just been encoded in a way that makes it possible to read by feeling rather than seeing.

Short version: Braille is not a language, and brailling books doesn’t change the meaning, Braille just makes it possible to read with your hands.

ASL is a language

Real Social Skills

American Sign Language and other signed languages are languages. It’s important to respect them as languages.

ASL is not English. It is a completely different language. Similarly, signed languages aren’t all the same. British Sign Language is completely different from ASL.

Signs are not universal, any more than spoken words are universal. The meaning of a sign isn’t always obvious just by watching; many signs are completely arbitrary.

Sign is not pantomime, and it’s not ad hoc gesture. It’s also not like symbolic gestures that are sometimes made up to accompany kids songs either. It’s a language, with all the complexities of language. The difference is important, and it needs to be respected. 

In order to know what signs mean, you have to learn them. (Just like in order to know what spoken words mean, you have to learn them.)

ASL is not just gestures, any more than spoken languages are just sounds. ASL has grammar, vocabulary, and culture. It’s important to respect this and not erase it.  

Rebuilding what was built incorrectly

Real Social Skills

Most of our social infrastructure was built incorrectly. It was built on the assumption that everyone is basically physically and cognitively similar, and that people who aren’t need to go away and be someone else’s problem.

People with disabilities have been treated as disposable. Children have been kept out of school; adults have been excluded from higher education. People have been institutionalized, and many are still stuck in institutions. 

People live without freedom, and are kept from their communities. People are forced to stay unemployed rather than supported in finding work that they can do. Disabled people have been harmed in any number of ways.

It has always been wrong to exclude people with disabilities like this, and in recent years, more people have come to understand that it is wrong. Accessibility and inclusion are on the table much more often than they used to be (in significant part, because the disability rights community has insisted that they be there.) 

Part of what we have to do is be willing to be inclusive, and be willing to change things for the sake of access. That’s necessary — and it’s also not enough. There are a lot of access needs that we flat-out don’t know how to meet right now. For some people, nothing we currently know how to do is good enough.
In order to build a more accessible and inclusive culture, we’re going to have to create things that don’t currently exist. We need better infrastructure and support. We need better technology. We need more resources, and more understanding that funding disability needs to be a priority. We need research and development, we need to learn a lot of things that we don’t currently know. 

The only way to get better at accessibility and inclusion is to start from where we are, and to commit to getting better at it. We can’t wait to be ready; we will never be ready. What we can do is understand that the people who are still being excluded matter, and keep building the things that need to exist.

Acceptance makes responsibility possible

Real Social Skills

Sometimes disability and responsibility are seen as opposites. This is destructive, and it’s related to a taboo against acknowledging disability and ability at the same time.

Within this taboo, either we’re seen as basically just like everyone else, or we’re seen as basically unable to do anything that matters. This makes it very difficult to develop a sense of what it means to be responsible as a disabled person.

People who want us to see ourselves as capable often teach us to try and ignore our bodies, so that we can pretend that we’re really just like everyone else. This teaches us to pretend to have abilities we don’t have — and to make promises that we can’t keep. 

On the other hand, we’re often taught that being disabled means that our promises don’t count for anything. That it’s just a symbolic gesture, and that no one is ever counting on us in a real way. That everything we do is just practice, or symbolic, or someone else’s charitable attempt to include us. (Eg: a kid with a disability may be put on a baseball team nominally, expected to attend practices and games, never taught to actually play, and given the chance to hit a fake home run late in the season as a feel good event.) This can make it really, really hard to learn that it matters what we do.

There’s nothing inevitable about this. Disability doesn’t have to mean magical thinking and constant broken promises, and it doesn’t have to mean a never-ending stream of fake tasks. It can mean understanding the bodies we live in, and the minds we have. It can mean taking all of that into account when we decide what to do, and when we make promises. We can take real responsibility and do things that matter.