Disable Magic Quotes

Summers with Rene began with a cigarette in one side of her mouth and a squinting of her eyes as she thought . . . . Shortly, she would make her pronouncement and it would seem magical no matter how often the words were said. "It's a beach day," blessed the day. The rest was understood. No more needed to be said. I knew that she knew. She had the gift to read what would come from the skies as surely as my mother could see births and betrayals in the cards.

That made love—not grace—the magic ingredient. Then a new thought hit her. Perhaps love was grace. A shiver went up her spine. What did that make anger? The antithesis of grace?

I’ve come to believe that the word ‘disabled’ is a misnomer. ‘Disabled’ implies that you are broken beyond use. No longer functional. I’m quite abled.

To find magic in the mending.

The next time someone tells you that they are struggling with an illness – listen. Even if they look fine. Even if you’d rather talk about something else. Don’t condescend, don’t ignore, and please: don’t disappear. You may feel certain that if they just got out of the house more, or “stopped dwelling on it,” or tried this great holistic diet, that all their problems would magically disappear. But no matter how certain you are, and no matter how well-intentioned, you have no idea whatsoever what’s going on inside of another person’s body. But that person knows. And if you truly love them, you can start by trusting them.

I have always been told that a person has to accept that the illness is chronic," she says, at the end of our interview. "You can be 'in recovery,' but you can never be 'recovered.' But I don't want to be on disability forever, and I have started to question whether depression is really a chemical thing. What are the origins of my despair? How can I really help myself? I want to honor the other parts of me, other than the sick part that I'm always thinking about. I think that depression is like a weed that I have been watering, and I want to pull up that weed, and I am starting to look to people for solutions. I really don't know what the drugs did for me all these years, but I do know that I am disappointed in how things have turned out." Such is Melissa Sances's story. Today it is a fairly common one. A distressed teenager is diagnosed with depression and put on an antidepressant, and years later he or she is still struggling with the condition. But if we return to the 1950s, we will discover that the depression rarely struck someone as young as Melissa, and it rarely turned into the chronic suffering that she has experienced. Her course of illness is, for the most part, unique to our times.

First off, as has been well stated by many Indigenous Feminists before us, the idea of gender equality did not come from the suffragettes or other so-called "foremothers" of feminist theory. It should also be recognized that although we are still struggling for this thing called "gender equality," it is not actually a framed issue within the feminist realm, but a continuation of the larger tackling of colonialism. So this idea that women of colour all of a sudden realized "we are women," and magically joined the feminist fight actually re-colonizes people for who gender equality and other "feminist" notions is a remembered history and current reality since before Columbus. The mainstream feminist movement is supposed to have started in the early 1900s with women fighting for the right to vote. However, these white women deliberately excluded the struggles of working class women of color and participated in the policy of forced sterilization for Aboriginal women and women with disabilities. Furthermore, the idea that we all need to subscribe to the same theoretical understandings of history is marginalizing. We all have our own truths and histories to live.

Limitations are not a dead end.

We hear things like “we elected a black president,” as if that event was the magic eraser to wipe away all of the racial problems in our country in one fell swoop. But that would be like saying that in 1932, we elected a president with a physical disability, so we should stop building ramps and having reserved handicap spaces because that’s reverse discrimination against the able-bodied

I never knew what it meant to fall in love, but I know what it means to create, and maybe the two aren't so different? Creation is an act of hope. You start with nothing but possibilities ... and you put them ttogether in an effort to discover perfection. To find magic in the melding.

Hugh turned his left arm, showing off three precision cuts across the bulging triceps. Had I managed to cut deeper, I would’ve disabled the arm with each one. “Look at this.” Hugh indicated the cuts to Curran. “Like a fucking artist.” I started toward the cage. “Touch her again and I’ll kill you,” Curran said quietly behind my back. “She doesn’t need your help,” Hugh said. “But any time you want to play, let me know.

You took a social problem--parents divorcing, mother a nymphomaniac, father drunk or gay (or both), brother on drugs, child crippled or bullied, a moron in the family, epilepsy, poverty (but only if you were stuck for a problem; poverty was too easy)--and you wrote about this Problem in stark, distressing terms. Then--this is the Rule--you gave it to the child with that problem to read. The child was supposed to delight in the insight and to see his own parents (or brother or disability) as a joyful challenge.

The evil stepmother is a fixture in European fairy tales because the stepmother was very much a fixture in early European society–mortality in childbirth was very high, and it wasn’t unusual for a father to suddenly find himself alone with multiple mouths to feed. So he remarried and brought another woman into the house, and eventually they had yet more children, thus changing the power dynamics of inheritance in the household in a way that had very little to do with inherent, archetypal evil and everything to do with social expectation and pressure. What was a woman to do when she remarried into a family and had to act as mother to her husband’s children as well as her own, in a time when economic prosperity was a magical dream for most? Would she think of killing her husband’s children so that her own children might therefore inherit and thrive? [...] Perhaps. Perhaps not. But the fear that stepmothers (or stepfathers) might do this kind of thing was very real, and it was that fear–fed by the socioeconomic pressures felt by the growing urban class–that fed the stories. We see this also with the stories passed around in France–fairies who swoop in to save the day when women themselves can’t do so; romantic tales of young girls who marry beasts as a balm to those young ladies facing arranged marriages to older, distant dukes. We see this with the removal of fairies and insertion of religion into the German tales. Fairy tales, in short, are not created in a vacuum. As with all stories, they change and bend both with and in response to culture.

Key to the success of many with ADHD is finding the “right life” in which to live. This means a job in which their particular talents for nonlinear thinking and quick emergency response are prized, and a spouse who can appreciate, or at least learn to live with, an often uneven distribution of work within the relationship. Without these things, many with ADHD feel that they don’t really fit into the world, or that the face that they put forward in order to fit in is false. The other critical factor for the success of an ADHD spouse in a relationship is for both partners to continue to respect differences and act on that respect. Here’s what one woman with ADHD says about living a life in which others assume that “different” is not worthy of respect: I think [my husband] uses the ADD as an excuse to be bossy and stuff sometimes but I find it very upsetting and hard on my self esteem to have my disorder and learning disabilities used that way. We do have very different perspectives but reality is perspective. Just because I see things differently from someone else doesn’t make one wrong or right…how I experience life is colored by my perception, it is what it is. I hate how people try to invalidate my thoughts feelings and perceptions because they are different from theirs. Like telling me [since] they feel…different[ly] from me [that their feelings] should make me magically change! It doesn’t work that way. Even if my ADD makes me see or remember something “not right” it’s still MY reality. It is like those movies where the hero has something crazy going on where they experience reality differently from everyone else.

I very nearly titled this book Stop Murdering the Henchmen after this trope. If I could wave a magic wand and remove a single BS lie from our annals of storytelling, it would be this one. This trope doesn’t just insult a population of the disabled. It doesn’t just discount the experiences of family members of loved ones suffering with a disease. This is a trope that kills real people in the real world, every day.   The

The Disabled Warrior -Keith Leggott Tyr! The God who proved his bravery, To ensure the safety of Asgard’s residents. You willingly gave your right hand to ensnare the Fenris wolf! Because of you the Gods were able to place Gleipnir, The magical fetter, upon the wolf. You have shown us how to overcome a disability, Taught us the importance of family, of friends. Tyr, a fighter, a leader, a disabled warrior, A favourite amongst the Gods, God of war, and God of justice. So important to the inhabitants of Midgard, that we named a day of the week after you. Hail to Tyr, Son of Hymir, an angry jotun, And grandson of a hateful nine hundred headed female beast. We praise your loyalty and bravery, We leave for you this offering as a gift, We leave for you this offering as a thank you. Hail to the god of bravery, Hail to the God of war!

I know this one truth: some people, ignorant of the miracles love performs, might think I am disabled, trapped for a lifetime in a useless body over which I have so little control. But Mama knows, and now Papa knows, too: mermaids are real; they exist to bring love and laughter, happiness and hope into a world that has forgotten that miracles happen in the most magical ways. And I am a mermaid.

Several countries also observed that following the arrival of the SSRIs, the number of their citizens disabled by depression dramatically increased. In Britain, the “number of days of incapacity” due to depression and neurotic disorders jumped from 38 million in 1984 to 117 million in 1995, a threefold increase.62 Iceland reported that the percentage of its population disabled by depression nearly doubled from 1976 to 2000. If antidepressants were truly helpful, the Iceland investigators reasoned, then the use of these drugs “might have been expected to have a public health impact by reducing disability, morbidity, and mortality due to depressive disorders.”63 In the United States, the percentage of working-age Americans who said in health surveys that they were disabled by depression tripled during the 1990s.64

Like maybe the "magic" isn't just about believing in mermaids; it's about believing peope like me don't exist, Like maybe admitting I've needed crutched dispels the myths we want to believe about people. That we're not perfect. That our bodies have needs. That this doesn't make us any less real. Any less human.

Since the arrival of Thorazine, the disability rate due to psychotic illness has increased fourfold in our society.

This chair, Kate, it isn’t a bad thing.” “But you can’t walk.” He raised his hand. “Hear me out. Before this injury, I had never been seriously ill. I’m a physician who understood what it’s like to be sick but had never personally felt the impact of a life-threatening disease or experienced a significant injury. This chair made me a better physician. It has given me a new perspective. Tell me, when you see me rolling toward you in the hall, do you see me or do you see the chair?” “I see you.” Of course I saw him. He was still Doolittle. He smiled. “My point exactly. I’ve come to believe that the word ‘disabled’ is a misnomer. ‘Disabled’ implies that you are broken beyond use. No longer functional. I’m quite abled. I may no longer participate in field operations, but I’m a better teacher now. I require additional arrangements to negotiate a flight of stairs, but I stop to smell the proverbial roses more often. I’m fortunate to have bowel control, and while my bladder requires occasional use of a catheter, I refuse to be defined by which functions my body can or cannot perform well. Quite frankly, I’m more than the sum of my physical parts. I’ve come to terms with my new life and achieved personal happiness. Whether or not I will recover pales in comparison. Does that make sense?

But here is the conundrum. Given this great advance in care, we should expect that the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States, on a per-capita basis, would have declined over the past fifty years. We should also expect that the number of disabled mentally ill, on a per-capita basis, would have declined since the arrival in 1988 of Prozac and the other second-generation psychiatric drugs. We should see a two-step drop in disability rates. Instead, as the psychopharmacology revolution has unfolded, the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States has skyrocketed. Moreover, this increase in the number of disabled mentally ill has accelerated further since the introduction of Prozac and the other second-generation psychiatric drugs. Most disturbing of all, this modern-day plague has now spread to the nation’s children.

I’m struck by the fact there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight—another form of consciousness “parted from [us],” as William James put it, “by the filmiest of screens.” Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities—call them spirits if you like—other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin. In this sense, I guess Paul Stamets is right to think the mushrooms are bringing us messages from nature, or at least helping us to open up and read them. Before this afternoon, I had always assumed access to a spiritual dimension hinged on one’s acceptance of the supernatural—of God, of a Beyond—but now I’m not so sure. The Beyond, whatever it consists of, might not be nearly as far away or inaccessible as we think. Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually “realized being” as simply a person with “an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything.” Faith need not figure. Maybe to be in a garden and feel awe, or wonder, in the presence of an astonishing mystery, is nothing more than a recovery of a misplaced perspective, perhaps the child’s-eye view; maybe we regain it by means of a neurochemical change that disables the filters (of convention, of ego) that prevent us in ordinary hours from seeing what is, like those lovely leaves, staring us in the face. I don’t know. But if those dried-up little scraps of fungus taught me anything, it is that there are other, stranger forms of consciousness available to us, and, whatever they mean, their very existence, to quote William James again, “forbid[s] a premature closing of our accounts with reality.” Open-minded. And bemushroomed. That was me, now, ready to reopen my own accounts with reality.

It would’ve been really easy to blow off the question. I could’ve said that the neurodiverse crowd simply hadn’t shown up. Or I could’ve cited my own limited knowledge of such disabilities as the reason for a lack of diversity, and that likely would’ve ended the conversation. It also would have ended my blog’s premise of being a resource devoted to offering a platform for the underrepresented. Instead, I took a different tack. I posted the reader’s question publicly and asked for help. Soon after I did this, I received messages from other readers who had more experience with, and knowledge of, disabilities than I had. Through this influx of new information, I was able to reach out to a polyamorous blogger with Asperger’s syndrome. I got some letter-writing assistance from a partner who has some familiarity with Asperger’s, and I communicated the needs of the blog, and let this blogger do their thing. What I received from this blogger, was one of the most personal and informative entries in the blog’s history. Not only was the profile amazing, the author immediately followed up its publishing with a second entry that drove even deeper into the intersection of autism and polyamory. Had the self-identities questions been available then, the follow-up might not have been needed. Instead, that follow-up became the signpost that such a question was necessary. It would be added to the submission form the very next week. So, what happened in this situation, is that I gave up control of my platform, and opened it up to ideas outside of my own. As far as representation goes, the goals of my blog are clear, but I understand that I don’t have the tools to manage them. Not completely and not by myself. Had I kept my hands on the steering wheel, this bit of magic would never have occurred. Furthermore, I’d have lost the idea that my platform was welcoming to neurodiverse people or people with disabilities. I didn’t want to be the kind of privileged person who tells oppressed people what their version of diversity should look like. It’s the reason why I readily accept nominations for blog contributors. Everyone can have a hand in the creative process, in as much as it pertains to them. So, instead of trying to control the narrative, the pen was passed to those with lived experience to express themselves in the way that felt most authentic to them. In response, Poly Role Models became a more honest and welcoming resource, especially with the newly inspired question.

In her 1968 book, The Epidemiology of Depression, Charlotte Silverman, who directed epidemiology studies for the NIMH, noted that community surveys in the 1930s and 1940s had found that fewer than one in a thousand adults suffered an episode of clinical depression each year. Furthermore, most who were struck did not need to be hospitalized. In 1955, there were only 7,250 “first admissions” for depression in state and county mental hospitals. The total number of depressed patients in the nation’s mental hospitals that year was around 38,200, a disability rate of one in every 4,345 people.

Several countries also observed that following the arrival of the SSRIs, the number of their citizens disabled by depression dramatically increased. In Britain, the “number of days of incapacity” due to depression and neurotic disorders jumped from 38 million in 1984 to 117 million in 1995, a threefold increase.62 Iceland reported that the percentage of its population disabled by depression nearly doubled from 1976 to 2000. If antidepressants were truly helpful, the Iceland investigators reasoned, then the use of these drugs “might have been expected to have a public health impact by reducing disability, morbidity, and mortality due to depressive disorders.”63 In the United States, the percentage of working-age Americans who said in health surveys that they were disabled by depression tripled during the 1990s.

Thus, in 1955, 1 in every 468 Americans was hospitalized due to a mental illness. In 1987, there were 1.25 million people receiving an SSI or SSDI payment because they were disabled by mental illness, or 1 in every 184 Americans.

disability justice asserts that ableism helps make racism, christian supremacy, sexism, and queer- and transphobia possible, and that all those systems of oppression are locked up tight. It insists that we organize from our sick, disabled, “brokenbeautiful” (as Alexis Pauline Gumbs5 puts it) bodies’ wisdom, need, and desire. It means looking at how Indigenous and Black and brown traditions value sick and disabled folks (not as magical cripples but as people of difference whose bodyspirits have valuable smarts), at how in BIPOC communities being sick or disabled can just be “life,” and also at how sick and disabled BIPOC are criminalized. It means asserting a vision of liberation in which destroying ableism is part of social justice. It means the hotness, smarts, and value of our sick and disabled bodies. It means we are not left behind; we are beloved, kindred, needed.

Orion continued on as if there had been no interruption at all. “-are razor sharp and can be inserted into the heart of a Fae to extract their magic. The process takes less than two minutes and once completed, the Fae will of course be dead and the Nymph will acquire the full power of the Elements that Fae possessed.” “So how can we defend ourselves against that?” Sofia begged, her eyes rounded with fear. Orion tapped the screen in response, revealing a page entitled Shields and Defences. “The draining sensation is a tell-tale sign of a Nymph in your vicinity. A bluish flash often precedes the blast of energy,” Orion said. “Before any other tactic is even considered, I highly suggest you run. You are freshmen, not trained Fae. You will stand little to no chance against a Nymph if they begin the draining process.” “And what if they get too close for us to run?” a guy asked, anxiously scraping a hand through his dark hair. “Then you are most likely dead already,” Orion said completely deadpan. Way to give a pep talk, sir. “But,” Orion said with a dark grin that made his dimple pop out. “Most Fae are too tenacious not to fight to the bitter end. So here are a few tactics you can employ.” He pointed at the first line on the board. “In light of what has happened, shields will no doubt take precedence in your Elemental Classes from now on. If used well, you may be able to shield yourself from the effects of a Nymph's draining power long enough for you to get away. The second tactic.” He pointed to the next line. “Is to engage them in combat before they have a chance to start draining you. As you are not yet trained for battle, I would encourage you to blast the extent of your powers at the creature in one single, wide blow to increase the chances of you hitting your target. The third and most effective means of defence for you to use is to shift into your Order form. Nymphs cannot disable your Order abilities with their power so a Dragon can still breathe fire at them, a Vampire can still use their enhanced strength etcetera. At the very least, your Order form will make it easier for you to run.