trainingtowrestledinosaurs

[trainingtowrestledinosaurs]

Every person need to be taught disability history

Not the “oh Einstein was probably autistic” or the sanitized Helen Keller story. but this history disabled people have made and has been made for us.

Teach them about Carrie Buck, who was sterilized against her will, sued in 1927, and lost because “Three generations of imbeciles [were] enough.”

Teach them about Judith Heumann and her associates, who in 1977, held the longest sit in a government building for the enactment of 504 protection passed three years earlier.

Teach them about all the Baby Does, newborns in 1980s who were born disabled and who doctors left to die without treatment, who’s deaths lead to the passing of The Baby Doe amendment to the child abuse law in 1984.

Teach them about the deaf students at Gallaudet University, a liberal arts school for the deaf, who in 1988, protested the appointment of yet another hearing president and successfully elected I. King Jordan as their first deaf president.

Teach them about Jim Sinclair, who at the 1993 international Autism Conference stood and said “don’t mourn for us. We are alive. We are real. And we’re here waiting for you.”

Teach about the disability activists who laid down in front of buses for accessible transit in 1978, crawled up the steps of congress in 1990 for the ADA, and fight against police brutality, poverty, restricted access to medical care, and abuse today.

Teach about us.

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An Intro To Indian Dishes, by BuzzFeed India

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[trainingtowrestledinosaurs]

There's a bunch of adhd advice out there that's like "people with adhd tend to work better under deadlines due to the anxiety so here are ways to artificially induce a stress response in order to get you to get work done" and it's like well what if I don't want to be stressed out all the time in order to function

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[trainingtowrestledinosaurs]

What is very funny about being a specialist in juvenile law is that I never... actually liked children?

(Ok there is some possibility I am fooling myself about this, given that there has never been a single child client I got to know that I didn't love and root for and 100% support, but.)

I'm not a "kid person." I don't have the gift of running around and imagining with them. I babysat much less than equivalent older-millennial girls.

I just got into court, and I --

Okay, let me back up and talk about my first public defender's office. It was a rural office that covered several geographical jurisdictions, including multiple cities and counties, five total. Each of these had three courts that regularly needed to be covered: a juvenile/domestic court, a general court, and a slightly higher and fancier level of court. They all operated to varied schedules (general court A was on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but general court B was on Wednesdays and Fridays; juvenile court A was on Wednesdays and Fridays but juvenile court B was on Mondays and Wednesdays).

So, fifteen total "courts," and there were... hmm. 8-10 attorneys. And a boss who wanted us to be able to substitute for each other, and thus rotated us through the courts every month. On week 1, I might be doing general court A on Tuesday and general court B on Friday. On week 2, I might be doing general court A on Thursday and juvenile/domestic court A on Wednesday. I might have one day a month where I do general court C.

So on.

The court schedules cases not according to our schedules, but according to police officers. Do you see the problem yet?

Public defenders were fungible. For those who don't know that very academic-specific word, it means that we were exchangeable units. One case could go through four different attorney's hands because it would get continued, show up on someone else's date, get continued again, show up on someone else's date, and so on. Juvenile cases were particularly bad about this because they tended to linger in court for a long time, while the court monitored the juvenile's progress.

Here's another fun problem: the department in charge of things like child protection, custody, etc., would only come to court on Tuesdays. We did not have a spare attorney to cover an extra day on Tuesdays in which criminal cases would happen with children who happened to also have custody issues or a foster care prevention plan in place. They would put the criminal case on the next day, Wednesday. Effectively, this meant that we were not present for the decisions about where our clients went and what programs they would have to do.

So I'm dropped into this, a baby attorney, having watched a DVD about How To Juvenile Law. I feel my training is wildly inadequate, and I'm doing reviews on cases that have never had the same attorney twice. Zero trust between me and the kids, and why would there be?

I complained loudly until my boss gave in and ordered me the several-hundred-dollar Juvenile Practice In This State book, and then I read it cover to cover. I learned a bunch of really interesting things! Like all the stuff we'd been doing wrong!

My boss was shocked. "You actually read that?"

"What did you THINK I was gonna do?"

"Well, you're the juvenile expert now, I guess."

oh shit, I thought. oops. fuck.

But I leaned in, and not in the ambition way. I proposed a way to rearrange my schedule so that I would always be free on Tuesdays for DSS cases. Instantaneously, there was a change in the environment of the court -- before, it was the guardians ad litem, juvenile probation, and the attorney for DSS deciding what to do with kids. Now I was there. Making suggestions. And arguments.

We changed how we did the schedule, and how we put individual cases on that schedule. Keeping them on our days became a priority.

I instituted a weekly detention center visit, for myself. (I made it about half the time.)

I went to trainings. This area of law is wildly unpopular among a lot of public defenders, because it's complicated and sad and you don't get to do jury trials about it. Every new thing I learned just pissed me off. It wasn't that I liked kids. It was that kids deserved better. So I got to take over pretty much everything with regards to juvenile law in the office.

But like, I stumbled on this, I didn't know shit. I didn't have a passion for protecting children. It's just that every bit of law I learned made me go, "What? REALLY? Fuck off!"

[trainingtowrestledinosaurs]

Maybe it's just me as a Filipino who has lived through a murderous dictatorship and oligarchies in a queerphobic country controlled by the rich who brutalize grassroots pro worker movements all under the military abuse of US imperialism but...

You just gotta keep showing up. Support each other. Don't just fight for yourself. The work is hard, but you just gotta keep doing it. You'll always see results, even if they're not always the ones you want, or as big as you want them to be.

All your work always matters. Even if it doesn't feel like it at first. It always matters.

[trainingtowrestledinosaurs]

THEY MIGHT HAVE FIGURED OUT WHATS CAUSING LONG COVID?!?!???

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the anger... the pure RAGE I feel when the subtitles don't match up to the audio and/or are completely different from what's being said is unexplainable

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my partner said something that kinda rocked my world

[trainingtowrestledinosaurs]

i dont WANT pride months to be over,

on the other hand...

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I reference this blog post every single time I bind off a project, Susanna Winter I owe you my life

[trainingtowrestledinosaurs]

[“When we enter a new situation, we’re activated to focus our attention on this new event. However, traumatized people tend to be riveted on their traumas; new situations are connected to — and constricted by — that past event. The key to dissolving this constriction is simply learning to stay with the sensation until it begins to change. When you contact that stuck sensation, it will begin to change, simply because that’s the nature of all sensation. However, when you come in contact with that constriction for the first time, it can often give rise to fear. Indeed, the sensation is likely to get worse before it gets better because, for the first time, you’re experiencing it directly. As you stay with it, it may continue to get worse, then better, in a cycle of expansion and contraction. What’s important to realize is that you can pendulate — swing back and forth — between these sensations of expansion and contraction. And this means that you’re no longer stuck!”]

peter levine, from healing trauma, 2008

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[“It is not unusual for people not to be able to handle or tolerate having what they think they want. Beneath the urge to have or not to have is usually another layer that navigates our lives. There is an unseen, unconscious part of us that might go against our conscious goals and even attack and undermine them. In fact, everything we don’t consciously know about ourselves has the power to control and run our lives, in the same way that the riptides below the surface of the ocean are its most powerful forces.

We are especially conflicted when it comes to change. Behind the wish to make money, have a career, or have children, we might locate resistance to change, a hidden ambivalence about growing up, and a struggle with separation and loss. We might want a romantic relationship but at the same time resist or reject it, often because we need to protect ourselves from being vulnerable, abandoned, out of control, or consumed. Some are unconsciously loyal to their original families (particularly if they perceive that family as superior to other families), which makes it hard for them to belong to anyone else. Others feel emotionally responsible for one of their parents and therefore anxious about separating and leaving them. They maintain their childhood structure and worry about changing their position, being loyal to their family myths and legacies. A change is a slight goodbye to our past: to our childhood, to our familiar roles, to our known selves. To develop, to create, is to separate and live the future as opposed to cherishing the past. An unprocessed past will not allow us to move forward. It will hold us as the gatekeepers of our history.”]

galit atlas, from emotional inheritance: a therapist, her patients, and the legacy of trauma

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Okay this is gong to sound condescending on several levels but:

There's a kind of cliche about training a dog - that if you want it to always come when it's called, you should never scream at or punish it when it does. Even if you just spent twenty minutes getting increasingly panicked thinking it was dead in the woods! Even if it had been trampling through the neighbors garden! It is very important that it's direct association is 'stopping whatever super interesting thing I was doing to go back to human = being praised and rewarded'. If the association is instead being screamed at or punished, the dog will be less enthusiastic to stop whatever fun thing it's doing to run to that.

I feel like a great many people would noticably improve their own lives if they started applying the same logic to how they treated other humans.

[trainingtowrestledinosaurs]

The closest experience I've ever had to discovering "the vitamin" was buying a 100% wool outfit and wearing it in the winter.

Not only was I not freezing anymore, I was not sweating and overheating either. The horrible sensory nightmare of winter clothes disappeared.

In particular, I bought a pair of wool pants. They were a thrifted pair of fancy dress pants like you would wear at an important office job, and they were easily the most comfortable pair of winter-appropriate pants i'd ever worn. I wore them Every Single Day.

From that point on I realized a lot of my clothes were making me feel bad, and the common thread was polyester. Especially polyester blends.

It's a trap because the polyester clothes are the ones that always feel sooooo silky soft when they are in the store, whereas cotton, linen and wool can feel comparatively rough and scratchy. But when actually wearing them for hours throughout the day, it's the natural fibers that feel more comfortable.

Maybe the secret to sensory comfort is not about the presence of softness, but the absence of overloading sensations. Or maybe the sensory stress and agony is not triggered by texture of the fabric, but by how it breathes and regulates temperature.

Then there's the problem of clothing life span: polyester blends, no matter how soft they seem at first, become rough and scratchy and covered in hard, itchy pills after wearing them 10 or 20 times, whether or not they have been tumble-dried or even washed at all. (I tested it!) Linen and cotton become softer and more comfy the more you wear them, polyester but ESPECIALLY polyester blends become a constant stressor. Polyester blend t-shirts I used to love for their softness now feel bristly and irritating.

So now I'm trying to change my wardrobe to as many natural fibers as possible, and the more natural fiber clothes i have the more I realize that the plastic fibers stress me out. It's so easy to overheat or freeze in them and they're always degrading and becoming less comfortable and it sucks.