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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something really cool happened today that i wanted to share:
my nephew is 9 years old, and a stereotypical little boy. he likes dinosaurs, minecraft, and ninjas.
today i walked in on him excitedly watching Nimona with my dad. (minor spoiler warning!)
i had never heard of it, but i sat down and watched some of it, just to see why he was so happy.
he started narrating it, anticipating parts of it, almost as if he’d seen it before. he had.
we didn’t get to finish it, but i watched it on my own, because it looked fun and i wanted to see how it ended.
and i loved it. it was a fun, exciting, fantastical adventure about the importance of acceptance people who are different to us.
and it had a very clear queer subplot.
one that my nephew hadn’t mentioned at all in his explanation of the film. his summary was “it’s about a monster who helps a knight that was framed for killing the queen”.
and honestly yeah, that is what the film was about.
before sharing it with us, he had watched it all, engrossed himself in the story, took it in entirely, and the part he cared about most was whether Nimona got her acceptance. he wasn’t indoctrinated, or confused, or questioning anything about himself.
he didn’t bat an eyelid over a gay love confession. he just enjoyed the film, raved about it, made my 60 year old dad watch the movie about the monster who didn’t fit in.
he’s still the same little boy who’s been asking us how to get a girlfriend.
the only thing a movie centred around queer and queer-coded characters taught my nephew was that those who are different to him are not monsters. that’s it.
and that dragons are really cool.
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i really like how canonically yuu is genuinely supportive of grim wanting to be a great mage. if i recall correctly, even character voice lines point this out. and it seems like yuu dotes on grim a lot and defends him too??? yuu even encourages grim's ambitions whenever he declares wanting to be a great mage. and also when he does that boss-henchhuman dynamic. i mean yeah you can interpret it as yuu saying that being condescending and sarcastic as if they're talking to a child saying "when i grow up i want to be famous!" but like. i really think they're genuine when mc loves grim in their own way.
even if grim is usually a menace, he's become like family to yuu.
and i'm pretty sure grim feels the same way.
think about it this way. despite all the mess, all the unpredictability, the danger, and all the drama being in nrc. what's always the constant? yuu goes home at the end of the day to the ramshackle dorm (basically their home at this point considering they slowly but surely fix it up over time) and with who? “the great mage” grim. as the sole outcasts in that academy, they both sleep soundly knowing they will always have each other at the end of the day.
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I love how the dragon in Dungeon Meshi doesn't have the usual lizard-y limb anatomy but something more along the lines of a large land mammal or even a sauropod +500 points from me
(also the way the fire breathing is explained is in line with a lot of spec evo stuff, cool)
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