Something I have experienced that is very common and defining for a lot of people with mental illness is the phenomenon of mostly doing what I am supposed to while a lot of sane people near me don’t do what they are supposed to and rely on everyone assuming that I am the one being bad because I have mental illness. Many of my friends are heroically and conspicuously not guilty of that offense, but that common problem should not be underestimated as an extreme source of additional damage to already suffering people. The fact is that when people’s brains have various problems, ranging from slight quirks and imbalances to severe damage, it creates a challenge to keep previous standards, and especially to match the ways other people are used to living and expect everyone to conform to. So, we appear to be habitually in error but are often spending a hundred times the effort of most people to do our responsibilities and help others. Meanwhile, people with a fraction of our challenges flail around without even an inkling that there might be a worthy mission or even basic decency to dedicate their own rich life to. These kinds of mistakes can be grown out of and unlearned, and people with disabilities themselves are often the most likely people to see through external trappings of social norms and superficial tickets to acceptance. However, the true blindness to right and wrong remains a problem that will eventually be reckoned with on a scale of eternal exposure and significance.
It simply is the definition of injustice to spend years accommodating other people’s ignorance and selfishness while they refuse to accommodate my disability that is already reduced 80 percent by my own symptom management. And then that I would show up to church as a depressed person and be viewed automatically as morally inferior while already putting up with an irony that cruel in my daily life is an embarrassment too unspeakable and shameful to represent a whole culture. And yet it may never be lived down.
Think about that for a second in terms of accommodation that supposedly is required by law. In a way, it is probably measurable, whether people know it or not. And if the reality is that people who have it pretty easy can’t adjust their lives and treatment of others to offer a mere 5-10 percent of patience, but people like me are literally adapting to life with severe constant impairment that requires an 80 percent change in how we would prefer to behave, or even more than a hundred percent and exponential if you consider accumulative effects of things like attendance, staying alive while suicidal, and working at all when the pay is a third of what we should be making, then the question falls back to the healthy people who might be not only refusing a minimal amount of effort to include all people, but might actually be doing worse than that and spending close to a hundred percent of their whole life not caring at all about their impact on any part of the whole world. That can be seen as a spiritual problem to be pitied above and injury or illness, but I think in the long run, it is more likely to show itself as a moral problem that goes tolerated far too much and with a cost that exceeds any basic consideration that the whole sum of disabled people have ever begged for in a state of rejection and torture.
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