Support is Support, not Force

I'm disabled. I need support. I needed support when I was a child. I need support now.

I have supported people. I support people now. I have supported children. I have supported other adults.

And this matters. Because there are all of these assumptions that if you are Disabled you Can't Do Things. You Need Help. You need things done for you. You need things decided for you.

There are these decisions, that we need Supported. Where by this they mean other people come in and do what they think we need. Other people come in and move our bodies without our consent. Other people come in and change our homes without our consent. Other people come in and make decisions about what we're doing moment to moment. Other people come in and choose and choose and choose and do and do and do.

And we can't choose. Because we're disabled. We need Support.

But that isn't support. None of that is.

Someone coming and moving things around my home around so that I can't find any of it doesn't help me no matter how much they said this is cleaner and better organized. Someone telling me what I need to do in the day doesn't help me even if they say this means I'll get through more things, because it doesn't matter if they're more things if its not what I want. Someone coming and moving my body doesn't help.

It is traumatizing to Need Support and be given the "support" of having all autonomy taken away from you. It is traumatizing to not be allowed to decide the own words you speak, how you move your own body, how to exist, in a world. But that's what happens. Because we need Support. And it is what is deemed Correct To Do to us.

I am disabled. I need support. That is true, even as much as I say that none of this helps, and that all of this is traumatizing. I can't suddenly choose to not need support, because what people give to me under the name of support is controlling me, rather than helping me.

I am disabled. I was a disabled child. I needed more support then in many ways. I didn't know the language I know now; and yet I needed to communicate with people who treated me as lesser. My body was growing, with all of the unpredictabilities of trying to learn how a body moves. I needed support, and was so often given no choice.

Because, really, if you can't choose whether someone is helping you, are they supporting you, or are they deciding you obviously need something done? If you can't choose, who and how and when, and the details of what someone is doing and what someone isn't, then are they supporting you, or are they deciding for you what they think you are incapable of?

Because sure, maybe I can't do that, but I can try if I want to. And I can do that with you giving me a place to fall when I fail, because I can try and try again, and figure out what it is I want to do and how I want to do it. Or maybe I can't do that, but I can decide I do it anyways, because I don't see a choice, so instead I say I need you to do this which people say isn't going to be an option, that's not how support works, but it is how it works for me.

Or maybe, I say please, I need help, do this for me right now.

Becaues you know what,
it is my choice.

And someone Supporting me, by never asking, and never listening, and never letting me decide what is done and how? that isn't support.

Me being able to decide to do the impossible, or say I can't, and in either case, having someone do what I say I need

That is supporting me.

And I need support.
And I can get support.
And I can support others.
And I can be both and do both at the same times.

Because we live in this wonderful horrible interdependent world, of trying to survive.

And that takes support.