The Truth About Disability

**Trigger warning - subject of suicidal thoughts included in this piece.**

There has been a lot of talk in the news and social media lately about the current US political administration trying to do away with Medicare, Medicaid, and Disability benefits. All 3 of these would have a very negative impact on me, Krista—your personal friend.

Of course, this would have negative impacts on many more people than just me. However, since the needs of the masses don’t seem to resonate with people who support this current administration, I want to appeal to the side of them that know me, Krista—your personal friend.

It has recently come to my attention, accidentally and covertly, that there are “friends” in my life who secretly agree with the measures being taken to get rid of these essential benefits. Upon finding this out, I went through a very profound anger, followed by a deeply felt hurt, followed by more anger. I have spent some time trying to work through those feelings, and instead of spouting off about it, I decided to try to reasonably explain my personal situation—in hopes that maybe even one person can be open to a different perspective.

Krista of 15 years ago was also in the dark about a lot of these subjects. I had an incredibly different mindset and perspective. Over the span of a few years back at that time, I started doing a lot more traveling, reading, and conversing with people who weren’t like me. Because I have always tried to keep an open mind, I found that when I learned more about the world outside of my doorstep, I was able to change my mind about things I had previously not known much about. I had a lot of patient and supportive teachers.

I myself am not a patient teacher. I acknowledge that. Once I know something, I think everyone should know it and I get angry when they don’t. I am grateful I had people in my life who aren’t like me, so that I was able to learn and grow. I have a lot of gifts and talents, but being a patient teacher is not one of them.

I also acknowledge that anytime someone was belittling me (or anyone else who didn’t have a large set of experiences that allowed them to be aware of other perspectives in the world) I would shut down. This is pretty common. I am not alone in this. And I am lucky I had people who didn’t do this, because I was able to stay open and learn from them. When I am in the position of “teacher”, I admit that I am also not as good at remaining neutral and kind. I can come off condescending.

So, this is my attempt to share information and knowledge about something that I have a very personal experience with, in a way that is not belittling. I can’t guarantee you won’t hear emotion and anger and hurt in my words. But I don’t intend to make anyone think I am positioning myself above them.

I hope that through doing this, people can open up their minds to the reality of what is at stake here, what this will do to people they love and care about, and why voting for Trump and his administration is/was dangerous to us all. There are a plethora of reasons why he is so dangerous, but this is just the one I have more experience with, and therefore can speak more articulately on.

Anyone that knows me or has been reading my Substack for a little while knows that I have the chronic illness Long Covid. If you have been keeping up with my series on here about that, and if you are up to date on those articles, you know just how hard I tried to work and stay employed with this illness. I did not want to have to try to get on disability. This was in part due to the internalized shame and ableism I suffer from because of the fact that we live in a country that is ableist and shames people with disabilities.

We are taught our worth is almost solely how hard we can work and how much money we can make. And if we can’t do those things, then we are looked down upon, generally speaking, in this country. We are considered a “drain” on the taxpayers and society. We are told we are “lazy”, “working the system”, and “faking it”. And, not only are there people who say this outright, but there are also many people who believe this deep down, but don’t actually say it. My guess is because deep down they know that is a mindset to be ashamed of. But, that is the mindset they take to the polls, and the subconscious energy they bring to the table.

I cannot stress this enough, if I had my choice, I would not have left an independent life in a really good-paying job, a high rise apartment on Lake Michigan, in a really fun city, with the abilities and means to do much of what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. And if I’d had my choice, I certainly wouldn’t have traded all of that in to be in my 40’s living with my parents in my old hometown. (I love them, I just want to live on my own! LOL)

I am not alone in this. Almost the entirety of people on disability are not scamming the system. I promise you that. Not only because it is not an ideal life by any means, but also because they make it REALLY hard to get. Very few people can get to the point where they are approved. And when you do, the benefits are not enough to make it worth the effort to “scam”.

Believe me when I tell you I have seen this with my own eyes time and time and time again—We live in a country where the very small percentage of the rich and powerful know it is in their best interest to pit us all against each other and make us think we are the enemies, when it is actually them. Every kind of minority is painted as the enemy at some point—and that includes the disabled.

Poor people have next to no power in this country, and they are painstakingly breaking their balls to work minimum wage jobs that keep that small percentage of rich people rich, and poor people poor. And the middle class is dying and the biggest heist of all time has happened where these 1%-ers have convinced the “middle class” that it is poor people, immigrants, minorities etc who are to blame. Please think about this. It makes absolutely no logical sense.

How does an immigrant working for next to nothing in menial jobs that you would never consider working causing you problems? Then, for instance, how is an insurance company CEO denying necessary medical care so him and his cronies can make record-breaking profits for themselves while giving piddly, minuscule raises to their employees not causing you problems? For one, if you work for a company where they are hoarding the profits at the top, that impacts your pay. Then you don’t have enough money to put back into the economy. And, for another, if you are a customer, you are being denied necessary medical benefits. Or if it is a company that isn’t an insurance company, there is still a butterfly effect when they don’t share the wealth.

If I get a 2% raise when a company made booku profits, and then my rent goes up $50 a month and the raise doesn’t cover that, then I can’t go out and support local small businesses, and then they go out of business, etc etc. There’s a million scenarios of this. But time and time again these people are somehow convincing people who make minimum wage that the 1% isn’t the enemy and the minimum wage people are the enemy.

If we actually all come together and rise up against these oligarchs, then who is going to do their backbreaking work for next to no money so they can stay rich? And it is a bitter joke that they have managed to paint a picture for us where we are blaming each other. Where minorities and oppressed people are blamed by the powerful. We stay fighting with each other, so we don’t fight them.

One of those groups of people that are being blamed and shamed are disabled people. And someone might be saying, “well, they aren’t contributing to society and my tax dollars are paying for them to lay around and do nothing. Why should I have to go to work and pay for them not to work?”

So, here is where I explain my experience with disability, and what I know about the people who I personally know who are on it. I am not here to do the facts and figures research for you on how much is spent on disability benefits in this country vs. how much is spent on all the other things our government funds. Because it is really hard to find unbiased, transparent information. A pro-republican site says one thing, a pro-democratic site says another. If you “Google” it, it can be hard to distinguish what is propaganda and what is facts. If any of my readers have legitimate, real news, fact-based sites with this kind of information, I welcome it in the comments. My writing of this is of a personal nature, and not a research one.

I personally know probably about 15 disabled people, including myself. Only 3 of those people are on disability, including myself. The other 12, who genuinely need it, have not been able to get it whether it be because the process is too hard for them to continue it, or because they keep getting denied. One of these people had several stroked and can’t walk or talk. They have been denied. One of these people has a rare illness where they are in blinding pain almost every day that is so intense it causes them to throw up all the time. They are denied. And the list goes on.

And, of the 2 other people I know, besides me, who are on disability, both of them very much need it and are 100% not “taking advantage of the system.” I personally do not know anyone on disability who doesn’t truly need it.

I have heard the stories of a friend of a friend of a friend who is scamming the disability system. I have yet to meet any of those people, and have any actual proof of their existence and that they are, in fact, “scamming” the system. If I could meet them, I’d be interested to pick their brains and found out how it made more sense to go through all the work and years it takes to get on disability, to make a very small fraction of their previous income, still pay taxes on it, and then have to re-up it every couple of years. Because if they are smart enough to scam the system, then they are smart enough to know scamming this particular system has very little pay off.

I began my disability application process at the end of August 2022, after my second bout of Covid rendered me unable to work, as detailed in my last post about my journey with this illness. I had zero idea where or how to start. I had a caseworker who was helping me.

The caseworker set my expectations from the start by telling me, it will take at least two years to get approved, you will get denied at least two times and have to appeal, and your best chances of approval are at the hearing level in front of a judge. During the period of time in which you are applying for disability, you cannot work. You can get by with a few hours a week, as long as your income for the year is under like…I genuinely do not remember how much it was. I wanna say like 4k for the year, but please don’t quote me on that.

Basically, you have no way to earn any money for around two years or so. How do you pay for anything during that time? Even living with my parents where my bills were much lower than living on my own, I fell in the hole HARD. My credit card got maxed out and I cashed in my 401k in order to make ends meet for those two years. What kind of dumbass scammer wants to do that? You are being lied to when you are told most people are trying to scam the system.

This is the tip of the iceberg. It’s not just about the lack of money and huge debts for two years, it’s also about the soul crushing emotions and the most intensely frustrating bureaucratic labor you could deal with. For two years you are genuinely day in and day out fighting through the most confusing red tape you have ever seen only to receive letters every 8 months telling you that you are denied until you hit that two year mark where you get to go in front of a judge.

We all have had to make the phone calls where we wait for 30 minutes to then get transferred around endlessly and put on hold for another 30 minutes to finally reach a voicemail where the person never gets back to us. And when you do finally talk to someone, they are very unhelpful. In my previous life, I probably had to make about 4 or 5 of those phone calls a year. When applying for disability, be prepared to make those phone calls 4 or 5 times a week. Some days, you make that many in a day. If I was a scammer, I would have looked for a different ruse at this point.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself here. Back to day 1 when the caseworker set my expectations. She also informed me that the huge application was designed to be incredibly confusing so as to make it so hard for people that they would give up. The application would take a few appointments between her and I, each appointment being a couple of hours, to even complete it. Additionally, the way the website is designed, they do something funky that makes it ridiculously hard to log in each time. Luckily, she knew some workarounds so that we could do it with more ease.

So, I spent the next couple of weeks working on this application with her, and we mailed it off and waited 8 months for my first rejection.

In the meantime, she told me that the more medical records I had, the better my chances were of being awarded disability. I countered this with the fact that any doctor I had been to so far had zero idea how to do anything to help with this brand new illness that no one knows anything about. Wouldn’t that be a big waste of my time and energy?

Well, it doesn’t matter if the doctor’s appointments are actually useful and helpful—I needed as many as possible to build my case. It wasn’t as simple as getting verification of my condition from one professional, I needed to spend the next 2 years driving all over the tri-state area, making 3 billion phone calls, and running myself ragged doing as many as 9 appointments a week. (Seriously, for 3 months in the summer of 2023 I had 9 appointments a week almost every week, and a handful were out of state.)

Thusly, the soul crushing torture didn’t just stop at the application and denial process of disability itself, but also in the medical system in which no one knows how to treat this illness, and almost no one in the medical community is willing to admit that they don’t know how to treat it, therefore finding stupid ways to make me feel gaslit and dismissed about my illness. So I spent many of my waking hours fighting the emotional fatigue of dismissive doctors.

My first denial came right on schedule. April 2023. I applied in Aug 2022, and 8 months later, right after my 40th birthday, I received the denial letter in the mail. Even though I had been forewarned and prepared by so many people that it would happen, nothing truly prepares you for the blow. That letter really does slap you in the face.

At this point I hadn’t worked since Fall 2022. I wasn’t feeling any better. I was actually feeling worse because I was using more energy than I had available to me to run around to different shitty doctors all of the time. I was doing an insane amount of admin work on an almost daily basis for all of these appointments and applications. And it can’t be overstated how disheartening it is to physically feel like absolute shit, be dismissed by so many doctors, have so many people think you have a fake illness, to be 40 and living with your parents, to be working so hard at trying to prove you can’t work, and receiving that big fat denial.

By the end of 2023, I was suicidal. Imagine how you feel physically, mentally, and emotionally when you are really sick. Then imagine feeling that way almost every day for a few years. Then imagine you can’t work and have no income. Then imagine you can’t do many of the things you enjoy doing, and need a lot of help just taking care of yourself. Now imagine while feeling this way you are constantly seeing news and social media posts about what a fake you are, and how many people don’t even believe how you feel is real. And those people refuse to take even the easiest and most basic of cautions to help protect the weak and vulnerable. And how you are chastised for wanting them to. And you are 40 years old and can’t do the basic adult things for yourself like grocery shop. And you no longer have any independence and very little privacy because you are living in your childhood home with your parents. You spend every single day either going to doctor’s appointments where you get zero help and sometimes get gaslit or are doing paper work and admin calls all day to get the help you need. That was my life, and I was suicidal as a result.

And, I have one of the better scenarios because I was able to live with my parents and have lower bills, I didn’t have any kids to take care of, and I had people who really cared about me and helped me. So, if my situation was that bad and I was feeling as awful as I did, then I can’t imagine how hard it is for people who have it even worse than me, which is a lot of them. The thing we can do to make America great again, is to make America kind again. Make America empathetic again. Make America care about other people again.

On every single occasion that I have heard someone say that their politics are motivated by “needing to take care of their family before they take care of other people,” the person saying it owned a home with more bedrooms than people living in it, cars in the garage that were newer than the latest Taylor Swift album, clothes on their back that were nicer than some people will ever hope to wear, vacations to Florida every year, and no less than 2 flatscreen TV’s that are as big as a classroom chalkboard.

I’m not in any way saying people shouldn’t treat themselves to these things. Lord knows I have and do. I’m saying at what point do you consider your family taken care of enough that it is ok to start taking care of other people? At what point does sitting in church on Sunday and putting money on that collection tray strike you as performative and not actually helping anything?

Voting for someone who wants to take away all of the help that people who are less fortunate than you desperately need is not “taking care of your family.” Because, as we have seen in Trump’s current term, he is taking away things that are hurting the families of even the people who voted for him. And none of them thought it would happen to them. But it is.

I know people who voted for Trump who’s significant other and parent of their children have been taken by ICE, and they just thought he wasn’t actually going to do that—until it happened to them. I know people who are on government benefits who voted for Trump and are shocked that he is trying to take all of those away from us. I know government workers who have lost their jobs because of all the cuts he has made and they never thought their vote for Trump would equal the loss of their job. I know elderly people on Medicare who are shaking in their adult diapers because the man they voted for is trying to cut it.

Because when we vote just solely for our own needs, and we think it is only going to happen to other people so we don’t have to worry about it, it will eventually bite us in the ass. Because someday, that other person, will be you or your family member. We just have to start caring about people besides just ourselves. That is why we are supposed to be going to church on Sundays.

I spent the second 8 month stint of my disability application process in the same hell. The endless doctors appointments and admin work. This time around, I was told to hire a disability attorney to help me with the appeal. These attorneys are not easy to get. They only take your case if they think you can win, and the chances of winning are so low its crazy.

I spent several stressful months begging an attorney to take me on. My caseworker was really pushing for a certain firm that boasts a 97% success rate and takes 25% of your backpay if they win. Backpay is a lump sum of money you get if you win disability that covers some of the time between when you applied and when you were approved.

I had SEVERAL phone calls with this firm doing everything I possibly could to get them to take me on as a client. Since Long COVID was so new, and had just been added to acceptable disabilities to receive benefits, almost no one was winning these cases and almost no one could get attorney representation. Therefore, I had another stressor to add to my plate. Doing all of this with such a slim chance of winning, and fighting tooth and nail to get representation. Because your chances of winning are much higher if you have an attorney rather than representing yourself.

After a few weeks of desperate calls and jumping through multiple hoops, I finally got this firm to take me on. Then I was passed off to one of their administrative workers who reviewed my case and told me they couldn’t take me on because I wasn’t going to win. Luckily for me, I had already signed a contract with them, so they had to take me on. Unluckily for me, they did almost no work on my case whatsoever, rarely responded to my emails and phone calls, and I continued to do all of the work on the appeal. If I won, they would get 25% for doing absolutely nothing.

By November 2023, 7 months after my first denial, I received my 2nd denial. The appeal had not worked, the firm had done nothing for me. Now it was time to move on to the hearing phase. Time to file another appeal and wait for a hearing date with a judge to be set. So, at this point, how many “scammers” do you think are still in the race? And how many disabled people do you think have given up? How many people do you think have any options left at this point? No wonder so many of us get suicidal.

At this point, the firm passes you off from the admin to the attorney. I spent all of December and January trying to touch base with the attorney about my case, and absolutely no one at the firm would get back to me. In January, my court date was set for April 4. By mid-February I had not been able to have any kind of conversation with anyone about what the plan for this hearing was.

For the past 17 months I had been running around to doctors like crazy. And when I tell you that many doctors take absolutely horrible and sometimes downright inaccurate notes, please believe me it is BAD. After every single appointment I had to comb through the notes and email them a list of additions and corrections. Which many of them did not take kindly to, and some were downright mean about. But, at this point since they couldn’t actually help me get better physically so as not to need disability, the only thing I needed from them was just basic correct medical notes to turn in to the judge.

By mid-February I received a phone call from the attorney that would be representing me. He started out the conversation by saying that I “wasn’t going to win.” He “didn’t even know why they had taken my case.” That the judge I had been assigned was “notoriously bad and had an extremely low approval rate”. And that by looking at my medical records it looked like I was “overweight and the judge was going to use that against me”. He then proceeded to somehow find a way to slip in that he thought one of my providers was trans and started covertly belittling them for that and saying the judge wouldn’t take them seriously (the provider in question wasn’t trans and even if they were I cannot begin to explain how many levels of fucked up these comments were.) And I spent about an hour arguing on the phone with someone who clearly wasn’t even going to try to help me win.

At this point, it is worth mentioning there are two different kinds of disability benefits, to my knowledge. SSI and SSDI. Now, please don’t take my word for this and look it up for yourself, because I may be getting this somewhat wrong, but here is my understanding: SSI is for people who have no to very little work history and have had a long running disability that has kept them from working. Therefore, they haven’t paid many or any taxes towards this government benefit. The amount of money they get a month is around $800-$850 I think? Or something close to that. It is a set amount that is not based on previous income.

The person I know that received this spent their entire adult life with a crippling disability that made it impossible for them to hold down a steady job and their parents were burdened with financially providing for them for many years until they were able to get SSI benefits. No sooner did they receive these benefits and the public housing they lived in raised their income-based rent to like $250 a month. Then, food stamps took away the $250 a month they gave them in groceries. So, when they received $850 a month, they lost $500 a month, and were left with about $350 a month. For those of you without your calculator, $350 a month is $4,200 a year. The poverty level in their state for a family of 1 is $15,500 a year. Even if they got the full $850 a month, their yearly income would be $10,200. Well below the poverty level. This is for someone who is so sick they can barely leave their home. We should not be complaining about our taxes going to help these people. How much taxpayer money does Trump use to golf every day rather than work?

SSDI is what I was applying for. This is an amount based on your previous income and work history. The SSA gives you a star rating based on how many previous years you have continually worked and paid into your SSA benefits. The higher the rating, the better your chances are of being awarded SSDI. I had the highest rating possible because I had no lapses in my work history for the previous 10 years and had been consistently paying into MY TAXES that cover this benefit SHOULD I NEED IT.

Now, please don’t mistake those caps for me saying that ppl who receive SSI who haven’t been able to work and pay-in aren’t deserving. That is absolutely not at all the case. Everyone who needs it is deserving of it. However, I just want to point out that the people who get more money are getting more because we have paid into it. So the people saying we get too much clearly don’t understand why.

Also, the amount I get per month is literally 1/3 of what I made when I was working. If I was living on my own, I would not be able to afford to live on my own anymore. The amount I get a year, is barely above the poverty level. Oh, and because it is above the poverty level, I PAY GOVERNMENT TAXES ON THE GOVERNMENT BENEFITS THAT I RECEIVE FROM HAVING PAID GOVERNMENT TAXES FOR SO MANY YEARS. Yes, that’s right, the amount I get is taxed every year. Did you know people on disability still get taxed?

Ok, so, back to the attorney debacle. Clearly this guy was terrible and I was not going to win with him. And, if for some reason I did, he would get 25% of my backpay, which would be a bigger amount for them than traditional SSI backpay since I was up for more money with SSDI.

With my hearing date a month and a half away, I pulled a hail mary and I went to one of my caseworkers for some advice. This particular caseworker (different than the one who had sent me to this awful attorney) told me I should try to get on with a local state-funded legal office that is free. They also don’t take on every case, but if they do take your case, they don’t take any of your backpay.

I called them and explained my situation. I spoke to the nicest person I had spoken to throughout this entire ordeal. She was the attorney, and she could not have been more helpful, kind, empathetic, and supportive. She gave me lots of great info. She understood the crazy deadline we were up against, and she needed to review all my records to see if she could even take my case. There was just one hitch in this plan…

She could not review my records while I was still under contract with another attorney. I would have to fire that attorney in order for her to even review my records. Then, upon reviewing my records, she would decide whether or not she could even take my case. If I wanted the chance at having her, I had to let go of the one attorney I for sure did have. And, if I let them go, there was a chance I could end up with no one.

Everything in my gut screamed that this was the right decision. But, I sat on it for a couple of days and got some advice from some trusted sources. I decided that it was worth the risk. I decided that I had a better shot of winning this case just representing myself than with the transphobic asshole attorney. I left my contract with the old place, and I put my faith in the new place.

It took a few weeks to review these notes, and we got to mid-March before I knew if I was going to have an attorney for my 4/4/24 hearing. She called me and told me that even though she wasn’t completely confident I would win, she thought I deserved the best shot at winning, and if anyone could win a Long-COVID case then I had a good chance. So, she took me on.

She coached me and prepared me for the hearing and I was nervous but feeling like this was the best case scenario I had. Then, on 4/2, I ended up in the hospital until 4/6. Therefore, unable to attend my 4/4 hearing.

Now, being in the hospital certainly didn’t hurt my chances of winning. But it did mean the hearing date would be pushed back several months. However, my attorney suggested we ask the judge to go ahead and review all of my records without the hearing and make a determination based on that. It wasn’t a big risk because if he denied me, then we could just reschedule the hearing and he could hear more from us then. The only drawback is that it would get pushed back that much further. However, if he reviewed the records and approved it, then I didn’t have to have a hearing at all.

Well folks, I am happy to report that is exactly what happened. I received notice in late May that I had finally been approved. I received my first payment in July 2024. Almost two years to the date I had applied in August 2022. And the attorney that helped me win got zero of my backpay. It was a free service. (I kinda wanna go into that transphobic asshole attorney’s office with my approval letter and say “You wouldn’t represent me. You work on commission, right? Big mistake. Huge!” Just call me Pretty Krista Julia Roberts Atkinson Woman.)

The judge made notes about how well my records proved my disability. Had I not hounded doctors endlessly to give me more robust and accurate notes, that would not have been the case.

At what point would a scammer still be in the game here? At what point would this be worth it to someone who could do something else?

Once I received my disability, I lost my public aid and they put me on a Medicare plan that takes a decent premium out of the monthly disability money they give me. I lost my food stamps. And I have deductibles, copays, and whatnot with my Medicare plan. So, I gained one benefit but lost two. I gained money but pay some of it right back to the government.

I am also taxed on the money I get.

This will all be up for re-evaluation after 2 years, and I could possibly lose it again.

I get about 1/3 of what I made when I was working.

I spent two years racking up credit card debt, clearing out retirement, and living off an allowance my mom gave me.

And I am one of the very lucky ones.

If there are people “scamming” this system, there are not many, trust me. And in my able-bodied, full-time working, big-time tax-paying days, I would happily pay taxes knowing that less than 1% of ppl receiving these benefits are scamming the system because I would know that so many people who have no other hope desperately need it and what they get is so minuscule that they can barely even get by on it.

Getting that approval completely changed my life. I was suicidal and was completely at my wit’s end. And I was in a relatively good situation for someone who needs to be on disability. Someone with kids, a mortgage, a worse disability, and no one to give them an allowance like my mom gave me. I can’t even imagine.

The last thing I want to address here is the way we judge people for what they do with that disability money. That’s not ok either.

With my backpay I paid off the serious debt I got in over the two years of fighting for disability with no income, and I took a vacation. I wasn’t even able to replace my 401k with it. And there are people out there judging the vacation. I get it. I can understand in this society, and the way we receive news, that makes us turn against each other. “Why should my tax dollars fund their vacation?”

Because we deserve to be happy, too. We deserve to do something nice for ourselves every so often, too. And honestly, probably most of the people on disability can’t do that because they do have kids, mortgages, etc. Because I made the trade-off of living with my parents and forgoing more independence, I was able to do something nice for myself. The rest went to paying off debt and buying a cheap used car because I didn’t have one anymore. Oh yeah, I’d also sold my car when I moved home so I could make ends meet.

The logic that because someone is poor, disabled, and on government benefits they should never be allowed to have anything nice for themselves is so fucked up. But it is standard and not questioned. Like say it out loud and truly hear it. If anyone deserves to have something nice for themselves it is the chronically ill and disabled person who has lost every semblance of the life they once knew. Who spends all of their time at the doctor. Who feels like shit most of the time. Who spent 2 years fighting for 1/3 or less of what they used to make. Do they not deserve a vacation every so often? Are we really mad about that and not about all this…. *gestures around at the absolute dumpster fire that is this country right now/insert any number of daily news headlines under this current administration*?

I want to urge anyone who is of this belief system—before you go liking that social media post of Trump’s about how people on disability are garbage, remember your friends can see that and it shows up in their feed. Even when you think you are hiding your beliefs from them. We can tell by the little comments you make, or the side eye you give, or the uncomfortable tension around the subject, or the social media posts you “like”. Even if you think it is gauche to talk about politics, we see it and we hear it. And we do not have the energy and space for the people who are harboring secret harmful feelings about our disability. Just be forthright with your ableism. With your prejudice. With your thoughts about our rights being taken away.

Now, if you were someone who just truly didn’t know and understand. And had been duped by the horrible messaging that this administration puts out about us, I get it. I understand. You don’t know what you don’t know. Krista of 15 years ago also had a very limited scope of the world outside my life. I am not lecturing you.

I just genuinely want people to think about how harmful and untrue the news we received about stuff like this is. The way this stuff personally effects the people you know and claim to love. The real truth behind it all. The way your vote impacts other people and why they matter too. The way the things you say, and sometimes the things you don’t say, could push a suicidal person over the edge. The posts you quietly like that speak volumes about how much you secretly hate people like me because you don’t fully understand or empathize with what we’re dealing with.

The Christian thing is to care about and help other people. That’s it. That’s the biggest thing that is talked about, and the thing that is acted upon the least. Basic humanity is just thinking about other people besides ourselves. Opening our mind to their perspective. Having some empathy. Not judging someone until you have walked a mile in their shoes.

I know I got spicier and sassier in this than I originally claimed I would. I did the best I could. It fires me up. At this point in time with all the resources we have to get proper information, it blows my mind that there are still people who believe the lies and spread so much hate. But, I am trying to remember that we don’t know what we don’t know. And there was a version of me who didn’t know what I didn’t know—and still don’t.

And back then I read some powerful articles that called me out on my closed and narrow thinking. It was harsh to read. But it was effective. And there were people who put it to me plainly. They weren’t condescending, but they were sharp. I am not trying to condescend. Because I don’t think anyone is any better than anyone else. I still have so much to learn myself. But I do need to be very real and very sharp here. This is a real issue and it needs to stop.

If you know people who need to hear this, I would love for you to share it around.

xoxo, K