nuestrahermana:

14kgoldnyc:

littlecthulhu:

Too busy trying to ‘correct’ fat people and they seem to have forgotten that not everyone can walk.

But didn’t you know? Being overweight is a disability!!1!

The amount of time and energy people spend giving me shit about such things… like, okay. I live in NYC; between my apartment being on the third floor and the lack of elevators/escalators at most subways stations, I go up and down many, many flights of stairs just to get from one place to another. I don’t mind at all. Some stairs, however, give me trouble, especially going down, because my epilepsy meds give me nasty vertigo.

Case in point: I spend however many nights I can afford to at the Met Opera. Their main staircases, while lovely, are spiral, and I can’t walk those without getting dizzy and tipping over and stuff. Plus, I sit in the cheapest seats, highest up; that’s too many stairs for my asthma to go up, and too many for my chronic-fatigue drained ass to go down at the end of a long night regardless. People find it necessary to be so fucking nasty to me while I’m waiting for the elevator with the older folk and those with canes and wheelchairs and whatnot. I’m ‘taking up space’ that I ‘don’t need’, right? Because my disabilities are invisible. When I was skinnier, I’d just have people commenting that I should make room for the people needing the elevator, at which point I felt perfectly free to be slightly nasty over the assumption that I didn’t need it just because my legs are fine. Now that I’m overweight again, I get the “you could stand to take the stairs” treatment, and for some reason that makes me less inclined to be nasty, because there really is the societal assumption that I’m a bad person for being overweight.

Fucking assholes.

Wow. There are so many ways that this is wrong (what is captured in the picture). 14K has pretty much summed up a ton of it. 

Personally, I am in my early twenties. People have a lot of assumptions about what my health should be. They assume I must be completely able bodied & have no chronic illness issues since they can’t “visible” see anything different. 

Except when they see me get on elevators when there are stairs. Or when they see me sit down randomly in stores where people just walk about like it is no big deal; I suppose it isn’t for them. 

The looks I’ve received tell a lot but the comments some people have felt so inclined to say are worse. 

“You should leave the elevator for people who actually need it.”

“Some people just don’t appreciate their youth!” (said with a sneer once when I was sitting at an ikea because my body just couldn’t handle that giant park of a store)

“Not going to help your mother there? How rude.” (said in passing to me when my mom was loading groceries in to the car the other day and I was trying to calm the shooting nerve endings of my legs.)

“Taking the stairs never hurts!” 

So, I could go on and on but you get the point. I can’t speak for anyone that has a visible disability but I can speak for myself in having an invisible disability. It is really hard. You don’t want to have to drudge up horrible memories & life breaking points in your past for a stranger who demands you take the damn stairs because your young. 

When I relapse, I am gone from the world. For months at a time and when I start to get better and can go out; I WILL. It is a hard thing to feel you must justify to able bodied people. 

It makes it extremely hard to go out in to the world and do it stress free and just live in the way I can. 

Some days, I wish I could allow the people who have judged me the harshest to experience at least ONE relapse. To understand what strength it takes to move past it and continue forward. Even on days where you vomit, are dizzy, have migraines, muscle pain, spams, pain, can’t even cook or bathe yourself; you move on forward. You have to mend your soul & allow your body to heal over and over. 

I suppose what I want to say through all of this is; you don’t know what someone’s health is. Ever. 

You cannot assume by looking at them. So, don’t.

If you see me around the bay and I’m sitting with my eyes closed or taking the damn elevator don’t hassle me about it. I’m probably already having a hard enough time existing in my body.