Tag: questions

Get woke

Get woke

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

The last 8 months have drastically altered the way the world works. By being forced to stay indoors for weeks – in some countries, months – on end, we’ve been thrust into personal isolation in a way we’ve never experienced. In the future, some will probably only talk about how they were really bored, unable to go on holiday, or gained an unhealthy obsession with TikTok during this time (guilty…). Whilst others will have worse tales to tell.

Overall however, there seems to have been an increase in how much the general public pay attention to the news. It’s an unsurprising change, given we had very little else to do…but even though people started watching the news more, it seems we still struggle to fully engage with what we’re hearing.

When we go through school, there are often moments in our classrooms when we’re encouraged to discuss the politics relating to whatever we’re studying: whether that’s how the social climate of 1920’s America influenced F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, or whether it’s answering the million-dollar question: why did Henry VIII have so many wives? However, a lot of the time our curriculum doesn’t actually encourage us to really think about the topics, and then relate what we learn to our society today. We learn phrases we know ‘the examiner wants to hear’, but we’re 15, so why would we need to care about these things outside of the classroom?

But then we come into the world and we’re completely unprepared to understand everything that’s going on. Only we’re not completely unprepared: it’s just that we’re rarely taught how to recognise that what we learnt about the Tudors, the Bolsheviks, or the Ancient Romans is relevant to us now. Furthermore, people think they don’t have access to politics because they don’t know the lingo. But politicians complicate things on purpose; they’re trying to make you think that you don’t get it because then you’ll leave them to it.

Plus as humans, we separate ourselves from our history and assume that because we weren’t there, we don’t need to give it that much attention. And our learning at school is for exams, it’s rarely for the sake of knowing. But trust me, you’d probably recognise a lot of the ideas and political tactics kicking about now, from your history lessons if you took a second to think about it. After all, humans can be amazingly innovative but we also have a habit of ignoring our past, then repeating it because we’ve ‘forgotten’ about it.

So I couldn’t care less about how many news articles you share on your social media: it’s your profile, do what you want. What I do care about though, is people asking questions and actively learning about the world they live in. We’re the next cohort of citizens and we’re inheriting a big, phat, stinking mess. I mean, the planet is literally dying…

You learnt so much about how the world works today from school and everything you’ve ever read. It’s not irrelevant and it’s not always ‘boring/depressing’: educate yourself about the positive/exciting parts of world history too. But there’s so much to be said for paying serious attention to humanity’s past mistakes, learning from them, and finally doing something else.

I listened to a podcast the other day that said around 22% of American millennials don’t even KNOW what the Holocaust was. And that’s terrifying. So please please please exit Instagram/Facebook/Twitter/TikTok for a couple of hours today and read a book, watch a documentary, listen to a podcast, read an article – I don’t care, just learn something new.

We all feel like a sea cucumber sometimes

We all feel like a sea cucumber sometimes

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

I think that loving your body and the way it looks every single day is impossible. But don’t worry, I don’t mean this as a massive downer, or some precursor to a hugely self-deprecating blog: relax.

I just mean it in the sense that having insecurities, and waking up some mornings thinking you look about as attractive as a sea cucumber (those things are not pretty, don’t try and tell me that they are), is not the end of the world. Insecurities are normal and healthy, as long as you don’t let them overwhelm you.

For me, the things I don’t love about my body are largely based around how I think I look when I move. I just don’t like the idea that my disability causes me to have a limp or is accentuated when I walk. This doesn’t mean that I think it’s a big deal when other disabled people have a limp, it just means that somewhere in my head, I feel insecure about whether I might have one. Does that make sense?

You might read that and think: ‘no, that doesn’t make sense, why be bothered by such a minor thing? Plus, you are disabled, so if you did have a limp then it’d make sense and not be a big deal’. But that’s how insecurities work: I tell you what I don’t like about myself, you say you barely even noticed, that you don’t care and think that I shouldn’t either, I thank you, feel better for a second, but still duck my head before I see my legs reflected in shop windows.

So where do we go from there?

Well, what’s clear is that businesses prosper when people don’t feel good about themselves: that’s part of the reason we buy things. We’re also addicted to scrolling through social media and looking at examples of ‘perfect people’ in ‘perfect places’ with ‘perfect lives’. Basically, we like to see what’s beautiful.

So obviously a huge remedy to our insecurities would be to recognise that what we see on social media is a fragment of the truth, but we know this already. And obviously we need more varied representation of body types in the media, but it’s also impossible to represent everyone because each individual human is different – and there are a lot of us. So in all of this, we haven’t really been able to solve the problem…

And that’s because there simply isn’t a quick, one-step solution to getting rid of all of our insecurities. Humans will always find flaws in how we look because improvement, jealousy and seeking perfection are just in our nature.

But something that we can definitely try to do, is not let our insecurities consume us. By all means, feel it, and even wallow in it for a minute, but don’t let what you don’t like about yourself be the only thing you think about. You know you won’t like how you feel after thinking about it, so why waste your time like that?

We all have to become more aware of how we treat ourselves, so if you’re looking for a one-sentence piece of advice on how to do that, I guess all I can say is:

just don’t be a b****.

Can you be hot AND disabled?

Can you be hot AND disabled?

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

On Monday I had some really gratifying conversations with my group of friends. All the points we made and discussed, are points that I want to write about in future blogs but one in particular sparked this entry.

For a while I’ve been wanting to discuss what it’s like to be disabled in the dating world, but I’ve never really known how to articulate it. The truth is: I find it really unfortunate just how much it probably does affect how I’m perceived by boys, because it’s something about myself that I absolutely cannot control.

When my friend asked me whether I think my disability affects my dating life, my immediate answer was: yes, but I don’t think that anyone ever told me. My response may come as a surprise because as I’ve said before, I’m aware that once someone spends time with me, it’s very easy to forget that I’m disabled.

The thing is though, no matter how confident or independent or self-sufficient I am, I will always be disabled and will always have to live my life with certain adaptations for my health. When people get into a romantic relationship with someone, everyone has some preconceived idea about what it’s going to be like. These preconceptions come from all the popular culture and media we consume on a day to day basis – and have done for years. But very rarely does that popular culture include examples of relationships where one person is physically disabled and the other is not.

In the past year, I’ve gotten particularly impatient with my failed attempts at romance – as you’ve probably noticed hehe. Whenever one has failed, like most people I find myself looking for reassurance that sometimes it can work out. So I look around me, and at the media. But never ever ever ever do I see myself reflected in the relationships shown. I don’t often see couples on the street where one of the two is disabled. I definitely barely see it on Instagram. And I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a famous person with a physically disabled partner walk a red carpet.

If I have seen a couple like this in the media or popular culture, it’s often felt tokenistic. By this I mean, in television programmes or Snapchat ‘Born Different’ stories it’s examples of severely disabled people and their partners. Whilst it’s (rightfully) always a celebration of those love stories, I still don’t feel represented or particularly comforted by them. And with that, the disability always seems to overwhelm everything else that makes that person attractive. Can you not be hot and disabled? Can that not be a thing too?

I don’t feel disabled enough to relate to those permanently in a wheelchair or with more severe illnesses than I. But then I’m still disabled, so I can’t fully relate to anyone who isn’t.

Since we don’t see examples of couples where one person is (not severely) physically disabled, subconsciously that plays a part in how we date. I’m not trying to say that it makes someone a bad person for not finding someone with a disability attractive, because that might not even play a part in how you feel about them. But then again, the intimidation which might come with how little you can relate to that part of someone’s life and the degree to which you feel prepared to try, might well shape your decision about dating someone.

Explaining what it’s like to be disabled to someone who has no idea, is an impossible task because no matter how hard they try, they just can’t access that type of human experience. So that’s obviously going to be intimidating when dating someone because you literally canNOT connect with them on such a huge level. And that might not be what you want. I totally get it.

In light of this, this blog is not meant to be a guilt-trip; I understand why people might do what they do – both consciously and subconsciously – when it comes to dating. Obviously I’d love to feel more represented, and to feel that my disability 100% doesn’t affect my dating life, but I can’t change the world overnight with my ramblings.

What is important, is that you know that just because someone has an issue that you know nothing about, that that doesn’t then mean that you would be useless at helping them with it. Disability needs to be more visible and in all honesty, we need to see more relationships in the public eye where a disabled person has an ‘able’ partner.

The day I see someone ridiculously famous walk a red carpet hand in hand with their physically disabled boyfriend/girlfriend, I think I might actually shed a tear.