Flash-bulb moment: musings on parking spaces and bipolar disorder

I was reading about the Australian disability parking scheme bruhaha at Hoyden About Town, when I read this quote (long, but worth it):

These existing schemes usually have some kind of distance measure, which says something like ‘person’s impairment would be unduly affected by walking 50m/100m.’ When you compare the “harmonisation” proposal with that, something becomes clear: what they’re doing is mandating what kind of impairment you have, rather than assessing the effect of the combination of the impairment and the disabling context of distant or inaccessible parking. We’re moving away from an acknowledgement of the way that parking requirements can be disabling for particular people, whatever their type of impairment, and at reducing that disability by accommodations. We’re moving towards configuring particular people as ‘deserving’ based on an assessment of the type of their impairment or their dependency.

One of the major problems here is that it requires PWD to provide evidence of dependency. You have to prove that if you push yourself too hard, if you work beyond your known limits and ‘act’ like an able-bodied person, not only that you can’t do it but that you will need physical help from another person to walk. It makes dependence, again, the supposed essence of disability, and it attributes this to the individual, rather that seeing it as occurring at the intersection of ‘normal’ parking and impairment.

And my eyes popped wide and my jaw went slack; something clicked for me.

I’ve long struggled with trying to resolve my identity as a person with mental illness, my current status as basically sane and stable, and the fact that I haven’t, don’t, won’t, and probably just can’t hold down a traditional full time office job.

Lots of people with bipolar disorder do manage it, just fine, both with and without medication. My dad’s work, the responsibility and need to drag himself out of bed every morning, was at times the only thing that kept him going at all. My brother, with the help of medication, thrives in a high stress, high stakes job in the financial industry. So why can’t I? is the refrain the crazy voice uses to castigate me with.

These quotes did two things for me: one, pointed out the fallacy of categorizing people’s need for accommodations based on diagnosis, rather than disability. That is, what does it matter that someone else with my diagnosis can work? I can’t. Saying “but they do!” isn’t going to change my own ability, and it’s ridiculous to try to make it.

Two, and the more “aha!” of the points, although you’d think I’d have learned this by now (I know I’ve brought up the spoon theory here before), is that, just like the person with an invisible physical disability who “could” walk farther, all that trying to pretend that I am “normal”, that I am not disabled, does for me is wear me out and make me sick.

Ironic (Alanis Morissettey definition) isn’t it, that as long as I acknowledge that I am sick, then I can be well. If I try to pretend I am not, if I park myself too far from my destination, push myself too hard, then I will get sick.

This is something I’ve known for a while (I don’t try to work full time, after all, and the Boychick is only a part of that), but I’ve never entirely been comfortable with it. Reading about others, who have “real”, physical, if too oft-maligned, disabilities, struggle with the same issue, if in a different plane, was eye-opening for me. It is only the crazy voice, which does its best to convince me I’m not “really” sick (does that amuse anyone else? the crazy voice saying I’m not crazy?), that would have me disassociate from others with disabilities; but if I acknowledge and accept my shared commonalities with people with physical disabilities, suddenly I feel, and act, much saner.

I don’t know the course of my disease, much less my life: I may yet wind up over the edge, hospitalized and incapacitated; I may yet wind up thriving in an office 40 hours a week. But one thing I am certain of: the more I push myself toward the latter, denying myself the accommodations I need and deserve, the more likely I’ll find myself in the former.

Further, and worse, as the HAT article points out is happening with physical disabilities in Australia, I am not offered accommodations by the state (or society at large), because as long as I don’t try to act sane, I remain sane. I do not meet, as WildlyParenthetical says, the medical/dependency model of “disabled”: as long as I do not seek to work in a traditional job, I am able to dress myself, get out of the house, make required phone calls, pay my bills (with money my partner earns for us), and do all those things that the state uses as markers for sanity/ability. I can even manage to do those things when I am unstable from working: I am “unduly affected”, and have panic attacks before every call and during every trip to the store, but I still technically could, and thus fail to meet the medical model of disability, so I am denied any work compensation or disability acknowledgments.

And I manage despite this only because I exist with so much privilege: my race, my class, my partnership with a man, my (for now) lack of any other cognitive or physical disabilities. Because of all that, I don’t really need the disability benefits I am denied: I have income and health insurance from other sources, access to health care providers, resources to purchase the substances that help keep me sane. Many others like me do not exist with such an abundance of privilege, and are, literally, driven crazy, and only then (and only if they are still lucky and probably privileged) are they “gifted” with acknowledgment of their disability and assistance from society.

I trust I do not need to explain just how horrifying this is, how wrong, and how no (hah!) sane society would allow this state of affairs to continue.

So I’ll take that parking spot, thank you, and I’ll fight anyone who tries to take away from me or any of my people. Will you join us?

ETA Those of you in Australia can act directly on this particular parking space issue with a letter to government or an open letter to organizations. Thank you!