Today my therapist introduced me to a concept surrounding disability that she called "hLep".
Which is when you - in this case, you are a disabled person - ask someone for help ("I can't drink almond milk so can you get me some whole milk?", or "Please call Donna and ask her to pick up the car for me."), and they say yes, and then they do something that is not what you asked for but is what they think you should have asked for ("I know you said you wanted whole, but I got you skim milk because it's better for you!", "I didn't want to ruin Donna's day by asking her that, so I spent your money on an expensive towing service!") And then if you get annoyed at them for ignoring what you actually asked for - and often it has already happened repeatedly - they get angry because they "were just helping you! You should be grateful!!"
And my therapist pointed out that this is not "help", it's "hLep".
Sure, it looks like help; it kind of sounds like help too; and if it was adjusted just a little bit, it could be help. But it's not help. It's hLep.
At its best, it is patronizing and makes a person feel unvalued and un-listened-to. Always, it reinforces the false idea that disabled people can't be trusted with our own care. And at its worst, it results in disabled people losing our freedom and control over our lives, and also being unable to actually access what we need to survive.
So please, when a disabled person asks you for help on something, don't be a hLeper, be a helper! In other words: they know better than you what they need, and the best way you can honor the trust they've put in you is to believe that!
Also, I want to be very clear that the "getting angry at a disabled person's attempts to point out harmful behavior" part of this makes the whole thing WAY worse. Like it'd be one thing if my roommate bought me some passive-aggressive skim milk, but then they heard what I had to say, and they apologized and did better in the future - our relationship could bounce back from that. But it is very much another thing to have a crying shouting match with someone who is furious at you for saying something they did was ableist. Like, Christ, Jessica, remind me to never ask for your support ever again! You make me feel like if I asked you to call 911, you'd order a pizza because you know I'll feel better once I eat something!!
Edit: crediting my therapist by name with her permission - this term was coined by Nahime Aguirre Mtanous!
Edit again: I made an optional follow-up to this post after seeing the responses. Might help somebody. CW for me frankly talking about how dangerous hLep really is.
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ough goopy my friend goopy... if it ever saw its original mom again would it recognize her
OH MAN............... that's tough...... she left to hop on the Company train some years before goopy did, so if she's alive she'd probably look a lot different!! hard to tell through the suit though... but. I think it would remember her voice :)
masked goopy is tricky because there's not really a lot going on up there... it loooves interacting with employees (even if it isn't mutual XD;; ) because of some itch that it cant really figure out how to scratch, "hey these funny guys seems like the right direction!!" just so clueless all the time tho... and like not self-aware at all
the Demaskening goopy. different. the Agony of Knowing.
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I hope my coworker isn't ever on NCIS tumblr because I'm about to tell you I just mentioned NCIS in the break room and excitedly told her about the Tiva spinoff, and she said "ugh" and talked about how much she dislikes Ziva and how her character "made no sense" LOOOOL
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I didn’t want to come out to my mom because I didn’t want her to have any more troubles on her plate. With everything else I didn’t want her to also have to worry about me and grieve over me. Cause none of her kids are normal. But of course my dad has to go and tell her, and now it’s even worse because she has the burden of me being like this, but also the burden of knowing that I didn’t trust her enough to tell her, and that she was the only one who didn’t know. When she thought that we were super close(and we are I just..fucked up..) Ughhhh
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I haven’t been insane about Vi enough lately so time to pour out some random thoughts. free association thinking time:
been thinking about her “It's my savings. I wanna be rich, okay? So I can travel, eat well, buy cool stuff… So no one can say I can't do something!” And none of the following will really be insightful or revelatory because it’s just what she says here but. yeah! that’s vi! the main reason she’s so big on money is because she has to be to get what she wants out of life! it’s what lets her say no to people telling her what to do, and that’s important to her because she has no choice but to be independent and support herself. because no one else will. No one at the Hive had anything positive or supportive to say about her being an explorer until she went out and did it (to a ridiculously successful degree, too. I have to wonder if/how it might’ve differed if she was on a regular accomplishment level team. not the one leading them all to the mission to the Hive). she never had a choice not to be. I could also see that being a little part of why she starts out not really being a teamwork person. past experiences have taught her she can’t rely on anyone else for support. (does make me wonder about what if she’d met Chubee before leaving the Hive. obviously she still would’ve left, but how might even a bit of support have changed other things?)
I feel like we don’t talk about the fact that The Beemerang Is Also Knives enough
ok so at one point there was this post talking about people with money and how it affects their life like. if you can afford to get a nanny then you can only do the fun parts of childcare and when you stop feeling like taking care of the kid you can just hand them to someone else to take them away. and again likely not especially revelatory but I would guess that’s the kind of way queen bianca handled the bees as her daughters (she does care about them. absolutely. but not in the same hands-on attached way as we usually associate with parents) and thinking about how that kind of treatment would then apply to vi....hm
in universes where discussions of Gender and Pronouns etc happen I think she has moments where she gets frustrated with the everything of Being Referred To and Having Complicated Identity She Hasn’t Quite Figured Yet and is like. gender is cancelled how dare you refer to me. but especially anyone else calls me a girl ever i will be stabbing them
also I think a lot about what circumstances she finds out about gayness/Gender being things. and whether she’s thought about it in herself before and whether she’d been dismissed on it/told it wasn’t a thing etc. most circumstances she ends up angry about the finding out times because of (un)consicious internal conflict stuff
underground tavern stuff implies she was definitely doing quests and stuff for money with them precanon. would kill to know what specifically it was. but also the first talk with utter implies that she was doing stuff off that questboard as well which is even more intriguing. utter’s spy also implies you don’t have to be an explorer to do them but otherwise you would think you did I feel. so again very curious what was up there
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Trans boy Percy can be a lot of fun
just a lot of people have a tendency to make it something he comes out about Pre-canon and that it changes nothing
while I'm over here like I firmly believe that Molly would not have continued having kids if she thought she already had a daughter
and i think she would be annoying as hell about him figuring himself out I just think she would be so disrespectful about it
Molly would be a "but your ruining yourself! you are my baby girl!" while crying type of parent and I believe that in my heart
She would guilt trip Percy like crazy about it while feeling 100% like she's doing the right thing.
Do I think that maybe she would realize after a few years that she's being absolutely terrible? I mean like I would hope so
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"(Baba please...)" I've been slain. She just had to write that bit, didn't she? Dammit I love these headcanons so so much. 8')
MOOD, Zhuming family has killed me truly
Also I'm just imagining when Yingxing starts to switch from calling them by more professional titles like High Elder, Ardens Regia or Master/General Huaiyan to when he starts calling them fonder terms and even calling them his dads like
Don't let me talk about how long it probably took him to call them that because it will be connected to a certain headcanon I have that is... sad
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Hello! I apologize if this is a nosy question, but what is the silly feelings wheel app you were talking about in a previous post? My therapist and I have been working on identifying feelings but I still very much rely on a list of feeling words to have any idea what I’m feeling, so it could be a helpful resource. No worries if you don’t want to share, just thought I would ask :)
It's called How We Feel! I'm not sure if it's available on all devices yet, but it's on ios and the google play store for sure.
I've been using it for about a year. It's more of a chart than a wheel but people usually recognize the wheel better so that's what I call it. When you first start it has a 10-part tutorial about emotional acceptance and regulation, then it has suggestions for each category of emotion. You can access both at any time tho after those first 10 days.
It has a share option so you can have friends, which has been great for me cause it prompts me to check on friends and them to do the same for me. It allows you to just respond with a little emoji in like a "I'm here for you" little notification to your friend, or you can reach out to your friend on your own. Its really helped me cause I'm bad at reaching out when I need support so to me and I'm bad about taking on other's problems even when I can't handle it so being able to send a little emoji instead to make sure my friends know I'm there if they need me and them doing the same has been great
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