People Whose Body's Work

stfu about disabled folks being online

ngl, the screentime argument is just recycled couch potato propaganda with a fresh coat of paint. Before that it was tv. Before that it was comic books & reading novels. Remember “bookworms?” Those poor doomed little weirdos who were never gonna function in the real world because they always had their heads in the clouds, buried in a book instead of paying attention to the important things, like... I don’t know... whatever the adults were convinced was ruining civilization that particular decade. It’s almost as if every generation finds something young people enjoy, declares it’s the end of society as we know it, then quietly forgets they ever said any of that dumb shit once the next moral panic comes along.

I read every fucking book I could get my hands on, & I will forever be grateful to the woman down the street who volunteered to run our little plywood library on wheels. Every week she’d roll out those shelves, unlock them with a combination lock like she was opening Fort Knox, & somehow, despite having the literary equivalent of a broom closet to work with, she always made sure I had something new waiting. Every Nancy Drew. Every Trixie Belden. Doctor Dolittle. Whatever she thought I’d love next, she’d find a way to get it.

Photo by Mel Poole on Unsplash

People have this weird Hallmark version of readers in their heads, all curled up in a window seat with tea & a blanket.

Nah. I was more, Anne of Green Gables in tree branches in the orchard.

I’d already milked the goats, fed the chickens, collected eggs, picked berries, hung the laundry on the line, crossed creeks, ridden my bike with no brakes through the woods to see classmates, & then I’d disappear into Little Women, lying in tall grass ugly crying because Beth died. Again.

Reading didn’t replace my childhood.

Reading happened alongside it. I read in cars. Under the covers with a flashlight. During class.

I was reading full novels in primary school. I got in trouble at my 3rd-grade parent conference because I read too much in class. Mind you, I had straight A’s. I wasn’t ignoring the lesson. I’d already finished the assignment, aced the test, listened to every instruction, done the extra credit, & was somehow still expected to stare politely into the middle distance while 25 other kids caught up. My lords, man... your lesson took 45 minutes out of a 7-hour school day. What exactly was I supposed to do with the other 6 hours? I never did homework. I had to do it first in class before I could read. That turned out to be a problem later in life.

I did every gifted program they could throw me into. Olympics of the Mind. Spelling Bees. Community college classes. I’d already tested into kindergarten at 4, nearly skipped another grade {my parents refused & I got sent to private school until the next school year}, & eventually there were 4 of us weird little brainiacs getting shuffled around because the schools were running out of ways to keep us occupied. My favorite glow up is Geoff who went on to become an archeologist. That’s so cool. He was a nice fella.

By 5th grade the deal with my teacher was simple. Get 100% on the Friday math test, then I could read quietly... as long as I also paid attention & wandered around helping the 6th graders when they got stuck. I have abnormal visual memory. I learn to spell words by writing them, once. After that, with near perfect recall, I’ve memorized how to spell any word or name or number. The TBI & stroke scrambled that a bit. I no longer type 100wpm with 100% accuracy. But, I did. Once. It’s not necessarily how you make new friends at school. And I attended 13 schools.

Think about how weird that is.

I was already a couple years younger than my classmates, half their size, & tutoring kids 3 years older than me because I’d finished my own work before they’d finished copying the problems off the chalkboard.

Some teachers deserve a helluvalot more credit than they get. Public school teachers advocated for me. They found bigger libraries. They found harder books. They figured out ways to feed a brain that would’ve otherwise been bored out of its skull. And they did it again & again & again as our family bounced around on our weird hippy voyage of pulling up stakes every few months for years on end.

The basement library at the police station 20 miles away had shelves & shelves of romance novels people donated. Free stories? Say less. I’d chew through five novels in a day if that’s what was available. I wasn’t allowed to watch The Jetsons because it was blasphemous to god to suggest humans could ascend to the heavens in a vehicle… But I was allowed to read decades old misogynistic romance novels as long as I kept them out of sight. I spent birthday money on books at thrift stores we’d visit a couple times a year.

And kids these days with Uber...

Babes.

We hitchhiked. Or, in my case, didn’t get to go very many places until the high school bus came to town when I was 12.

What’s that? There’s someone in GenZ reading this & doesn’t know what hitchhiking is? Think analog Tinder with fewer profile of their car if you really boil that shit down. Human beings have always taken risks to move outside their little bubbles. We just keep changing the technology & pretending our version was wholesome.

The funniest part is people have spent my entire life confusing disability with stupidity. With laziness. By overperforming in one area, it was demanded of me in all areas.

I’ve had people accuse me of lying about how fast I read because it offended them more than it impressed them. My ex literally made me take AOL speed-reading tests because he was convinced I was exaggerating. I finished 1st. I scored 100%. He missed questions.

He wasn’t looking for the truth.

He was looking for proof he was smarter than me.

You start minimizing yourself because other people get weirdly angry when intelligence shows up inside a body they’ve already decided is weak. Even now I catch myself saying, “Well, he went to college...” knowing damn good & well I wrote his papers because otherwise he wasn’t passing the class.

Then people wonder why women downplay themselves.

Buddy...

Some of us learned it for survival.

Which brings me all the way back around to phones.

People love acting like everybody staring at one is watching porn or rotting their brains on nonsense. Even if they were & they’re statistically not, but even if they were... if the bills are paid, the laundry’s done, the kids are fed, & responsibilities handled, why the fuck is it anybody else’s business how someone unwinds?

People are reading novels, taking classes, answering work emails.

They’re applying for jobs.

They’re learning languages.

They’re watching somebody restore a rusty tin toy from 1947 because, for whatever reason, that scratches an itch in the brain. No? How about those power-washing videos with the blue foam soap? C’mon, surely you’ve watched an unboxing video of something? HGTV? Picture in picture TV? Anyway, weirdo…

Who is entitled to decide if someone can or should spend 2 hours watching cat videos?

Who cares?

Seriously.

Who the fuck cares?

The same generation that spent the ‘80s complaining we’d all become couch potatoes from watching too much TV now sits in front of cable news for 6 hours a day & somehow thinks that’s fundamentally different because one rectangle hangs on the wall & the other fits in your pocket.

We all get 24 hours.

One life. {obligatory Tupac reference here}

Whatever combination of hobbies you have, whether you meditate, garden, curl up for a mid morning nap. There’s no morality whether you scroll Instagram, disappear into a fantasy novel or watch reality TV because after dealing with actual reality all day, fake drama feels downright therapeutic.

Not every second of a human life has to be optimized into a side hustle. Hobbies aren’t meant to be monetized to be worthy of our time. Not every moment of rest has to be earned.

Some of us can finish 8 hours’ worth of work in 30 minutes. We already know that doesn’t mean anybody’s gonna pay us 16x as much & send us home early. It just means they’ll hand us more work.

So yeah. When my responsibilities are done, I’m gonna read, scroll, watch videos about people refinishing thrift-store furniture. I loan out my capacity for mental loads like I’m dropping spare change into a collection tin. I love jumping into a project with a friend & spending a couple hours in community with them, helping in some digital way, as my body allows.

I’m gonna “waste” an afternoon learning some completely useless fact I’ll remember until the day I die. If I’m lucky.

I’m not writing to pass a class anymore. I’m writing to pass the time. And maybe that’s the thing we’ve forgotten somewhere along the way, that humans are not machines designed to convert every waking hour into measurable output. Sometimes the thing you did today was survive today. No one’s getting an A+ every day. Some days you get a C. Some days you fail to show up. You’re allowed to be human. Sometimes the thing you did today was rest. Sometimes the thing you did today was laugh at a stupid video about somebody building an entire cabin in the woods by hand & sped up, because for 15 minutes your brain got to exist somewhere that wasn’t pain, bills, politics, trauma, or whatever fresh hell the world decided to throw at you before breakfast.

And here’s the part people really need to sit with: 1 in 5 people are disabled. One in five. You have no idea how many people you’re judging for “being online too much” are literally participating in society through the one piece of tech that allows them to do so without their body charging them a physical toll. An hour sitting in the wrong chair means barely being about to walk for days at a time. But HIPAA means you don’t get to demand an explanation for why someone is sitting at home, using a mobility aid, taking a break, posting memes, or existing in a way that doesn’t match your imaginary version of what disability looks like. But honestly, even before HIPAA, the answer should have been pretty simple: maybe don’t be a dick.

You don’t know if that person spent yesterday in bed recovering from a trip to the grocery store. You cannot look at me & see my spinal cord injury. Though I have been asked to show my surgical scar by a grocery store manager who saw me parked in a handicapped spot even with valid Disabled Parking signage. You don’t know if someone’s phone is their workplace, their classroom, their social life, their connection to the outside world, their pain distraction, their medical tool, or just the place where they get to be a person for a little while. You don’t know because you aren’t entitled to know. And you definitely don’t get to decide that somebody else’s rest is evidence of a moral failing.

Some of us have bodies that work exactly the way they’re supposed to. Some of us have bodies that are out here freelancing chaos like they signed up for the worst possible subscription service. Either way, we all get to have a little joy. We all get to waste time. We all get to exist without turning our entire lives into a productivity report for someone else’s approval.

Thanks for spending some of your precious time reading my ramblings, friends.

~AK