Disabled Community Megathread from June 30, 2025 to July 13, 2025
If you carry one thing with you today, let it be this: you are beautiful, you matter, and you are loved.
As always, we ask that in order to participate in the weekly megathread, one self-identifies as some form of disabled, which is broadly defined in the community sidebar:
"Disability" is an umbrella term which encompasses physical disabilities, emotional/psychiatric disabilities, neurodivergence, intellectual/developmental disabilities, sensory disabilities, invisible disabilities, and more. You do not have to have an official diagnosis to consider yourself disabled.
Mask up, love one another, and stay alive for one more week.
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259 comments
I started feeling terribly dizzy this afternoon. The room was spinning. This happened before when I had a hemiplegic migraine, but I had no other symptoms. I was even worried I might be having another stroke. Don't know what was going on with that. Got my next foot surgery tomorrow morning.
I hope the surgery went well and your dizziness didn't return. Take care
Thanks. Just got back from the surgery, it went fine. The staff were nice, ones I hadn't seen before. Although I got the dreaded question, "So what do you do?" And had to say "Nothing at the moment," and then justify it by explaining all my health issues, but these were some of the rare people who accepted I couldn't be expected to work in my condition instead of being judgmental about it. Although they did do the whole "You'll get better soon," thing, and imply that I can get back to work eventually. Why is our society like this? No matter how insurmountable your health issues society can never just accept that you're on the scrapheap, work-wise. There always has to be some undercurrent of "You should be working."
And don't even get me started on "So what do you do" being the standard conversation opener for everyone, everywhere, always. Always immediately judging and classifying someone by their job. Are we really so unimaginative that we can't think of another way to start a conversation with a stranger? How about "So what music do you like? Been anywhere nice lately? What's your favourite film?" I mean, literally anything that is about an individual's personal interests rather than how productive they are to capitalism and where they fit on the social respect scale.
There always has to be some undercurrent of "You should be working."
God, I hate this. I'm glad your surgery went well and the people there weren't as horrible as they could have been, but I totally get that feeling of "Why do we have to talk about employment?" I get these questions too, quite a lot actually, and whenever they ask why I'm unemployed, I say that nobody let's me work, despite all my applications. That's literally the only thing that sometimes manages to shift the blame of unemployment away from me. In other cases, you just get questions like "Well, what are you applying for?" and it meanders on and on and on.
I'd appreciate questions like yours a lot more as well. Been to a meetup once where almost everyone arrived by car, so when we sat together, I opened by asking "What's the funniest thing your driving instructor did?" And could you imagine, people actually had more fun recounting stories than talking about work. We're social animals, we want share stories, not CVs.
Thanks. Yeah I think if you're unemployed no answer will ever be good enough for the employed. Whatever "excuse" you have for being unemployed, they will find some reason why you just aren't trying hard enough.
I bet some of those people were relived they got asked an opening question that wasn't about work. This constant obsession with work and defining people by their work really degrades and diminishes our humanity.