Are You Neuroqueer? (Part 2) by Ib Grace

Maybe you read This Post Here and could relate to it, or maybe you almost could, but not quite, because the situation is a little different.  Because there are a couple of important situations I did not quite cover. And I want to. Because you might be Neuroqueer too, and welcome.

[Visual is the word "Invisible?" written in all-caps alone with question mark in white the middle of a black field, as if by chalk on a chalkboard.]

For you it isn't that you have a stigma situation going on that you worry about, or not all the time. Maybe it's more like this: you struggled through school feeling different and stupid and when they finally put a couple names on it, it was like a breath of fresh air.  Dyslexia? ADHD? Specific LD of some kind, a developmental or intellectual or mental disability or brain injury, perhaps something causing chronic pain, but not the kind that is apparent to everyone, so it took them forever to figure it out? It was a kind of liberation. You have felt alone, and now you might finally have some solidarity, some peers, some people who understand.

You're proud to say you're disabled, proud to say you're queer: nothing to hide. But you have to keep explaining yourself all the time, or else nobody will see you. You try to make the kind of eye contact that's like a secret handshake and it never works. Sometimes, people misinterpret it and kind of glare at you.

That can be on either or both intersectional location(s). Maybe you're femme and people assume you're straight unless you claim your space; maybe analogously even your queer disabled friends who get that fact already still have no understanding what you might go through as a dyslexic when they blithely make it be a whole book a week in the book club. Oh, just listen to the audio. As if that were so easily equivalent. Have they tried it? And yet part of you is grateful they even remembered, unlike the rest of the everyone, who crushingly fails to see you.

Tired, it can make you tired, and lonely, and this can also happen for all the people I remembered to put into the other article I was talking about when I was talking about medical stigmas on mental stuff.  Your disability is invisible and you feel unseen.  This is something I heard and this is how I know. I saw and heard, and so did many others who are here and who care about you. There are also other ways of knowing.  Seeing and hearing are two modes of recognition among many; in some ways, they are metaphorical.

[Visual is a vintage coffee cup on a red and white flowered tablecloth. The coffee cup says "Here's looking at you."]

But we are here and if you want us to see you we will see you and welcome you. You might be Neuroqueer or you might be a kind of ally in one or another aspect who wants to come with us and we can all recognize each other because this is good.  We are not alone, we are not islands.  We are in community and solidarity and love conquers all.

I invite you to recognize us here, and introduce yourself, and note yourself one of us or our friends as you may prefer, so that we may recognize you, and I will also invite you to write on here.  Soon I will write a more specific call for material for this site, so please be thinking if you would enjoy being a contributor.

Love,
Ib

I call to the shamed

I call to the shamed and you think and you feel

You are alone and you think and you feel

You are not worthy you are broken

And you shame yourself for feeling shame

It’s a cycle and the world abuses you

Then the people who abuse people they abuse you

And you shame yourself for being abused

And sometimes someone like me comes along

Singing a happy song an ode to life

Singing I love you and what you are

Come play with me and be real be yourself

You are all you have to be

And the beauty of you

You are real and I call to you

And sometimes you hear all this

And you feel more alone and you feel you will never

You will never feel the way I feel you will never

Ever see you the way I see you or me

And hearing me say it is shaming you too

But how can you say this

When the people like me so obviously mean well

And you might even think we are right

But it cannot stop the way you feel

This is real and I call to you

The shame is not forever and

While I don’t think the content is true I know

That the feeling is real and valid and lasts as long as it will

And I even know what it means what it is like

And I’ve sung that song before and before the freedom came

I knew the fear that kept the shame and this is how I know

How to remember that sometimes even my love

Feels like a reason for shame and pain

And I see you and I know it and for all the hurt there is

My heart hurts too and I remember and I wish for you

For the knowing to overcome the pain and shame

For our beauty to outshine the harms of abjection

We are real and I call to you

Love, 

Ib

Elizabeth Hassler: as depression is a breakfastfood,

as depression is a breakfastfood,

ee cummings doesn't scan correctly.

sometimes she chokes

---not like christy brown;

more figuratively.

shit. citing grammar rebels and spastic poets

will send tremors through her body

of work.

hypomania for lunch, on weekdays,

and she has only recently stopped reading other

people's suicide notes

for de(s)sert. lately

she eats cake instead.

boundaries

have new texture

on her teeth, but

even amidst all this self-discovery

she is still a really real depressed person

(goddammit).

other unfortunate facts:

she didn't draw herself

childhood trauma

in art therapy.

she eats really real depression,

or sometimes cereal,

for breakfast.

isn't cereal tragic

when a spastic eats it? they

choke, you know.

a graphic on the internet told her

she has four of the ten

impairments

commonly associated with cerebral palsy

---that makes her real,

yes? really

medicalized. real and really

to be fixed.

the next day,

a declaration of rights

listed bipolar as cognitive impairment:

the whims of statistics, and

that makes her unreal.

people don't listen

unless she uses big words,

people use "brilliance"

as a bargaining chip,

so she eats the dictionary

at all square meals. she wants words

that don't exist.

she wants intimacies

unspoken. when she wants

to die, which is a sharp want

nestled among her desires some hours

(it signifies

a gap in her meals: sometimes

for months without a plan),

it isn't because

she's a crippled girl.

also, it isn't because she hates her depression

or thinks life is pain---body

aches and misfired nerves

mean more to her about aliveness

than desperation

---or is really going to kill herself

in actuality (she's not,

like, impulsive,

and even if her

inertia wasn't generally productive of stasis she has promised

to Live For The Cause).

she should probably

eat lamotrigine with breakfast

now, and again.

she's writing this

to clean up breakfast dishes.

she wants the kind of life

not predicated on awareness:

can you see her?

is it safe?

can you hold her here?

queerness is the safe place

for her body, her spasming skins.

when i say that i attempt

these love letters to her body,

i mean the verse-writing

form that wanted to die today

after breakfast and needs to live

just so long and long enough.

                      --Elizabeth Hassler