poll that i'm intentionally doing here and not @MindmeshLink

do you identify yourself as "disabled" primarily *to other people* in any context

like, not just saying *what disability* you have, ie "depressed", but do you tell other people "i'm disabled" or put "disabled" or "cripple" or any variant of it in your bios online

i am not asking "are you disabled and do you identify at all with the concept of disability" to be clear, this is a social phenomenon wondering, and nondisabled people are included and should say "never"

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so the reason for this poll is essentially the disconnect i've felt between how

• disabled people have Always been on fedi in pretty decent numbers
• i still haven't felt like there's disability community on fedi basically up until joining disabled.social, a dedicated space for disability

and basically my thoughts on it are that like. early mastodon was built on certain kinds of accessibility, for an audience mostly of PTSD-having white techy trans folks. content warnings, for avoiding sensitive topics, and intentionally building around full text search and quote tweets and the like to avoid harassment vectors that affected that group. other accessibility features snuck in (for example, alt text/image descriptions being built in, which basically felt like it was supported because twitter added it first and it's an existing tech standard

but i mean. i think disability community on fedi following all of that has just... been lacking. and i think there's like, two big parts of it i wanna post about here

1. a majority of you don't actually socially point yourself out as disabled and connect on that axis very much at all

so i said this was a "gate-opening" exercise to pre-empt the possibility of people going "ehhh are you trying to exclude people based on if they don't identify outwardly as disabled" and like no

i've had someone reply to the poll to tell me it caused them to go "oh, i should probably consider my relationship to that word" and another person say that because of gatekeeping they've experienced in other areas, they genuinely didn't know if their disabilities 'counted'

so here's your permission. if you need to take meds to maintain your mental or physical state, you're probably disabled. if you face inaccessibility in spaces for your autistic stim needs, adhd focus issues, depression, etc, you're probably disabled. i'm not the arbiter of this term but this is your invitation to think about yourself and where you fit in.

i do really really really want to just like. bap everyone upside the head and go "you're disabled"

but also here's the other thing

2. you do still need to actually do anything with the information that you're disabled

"do anything" is broad, of course, but: think about it. think about what you can do for other disabled people. act on some things. write some shit, examine your relationship to disabilities you don't share, use resources if you've got 'em. listen to a podcast like the disability visibility project (who i'm pretty sure are still good, i stopped bc my podcast queue got enormous but i still feel confident reccommending them)

talk to people about spoons theory, do the disability 101 education you know about that some of us are too fucking burned out to do and that you haven't seen explained in a minute

it'd be easy to just say "well, disability community didn't form on mastodon because no one identified themselves that way" but like also, i think like... a homogenous white techy crowd who suddenly all call themselves disabled are still going to do nothing so like

-shrug-

anyway i'm probably gonna follow this up by trying to boost people from disabled.social who have interesting thoughts considering my social graph here seems to not overlap there much at all

i've not got much else for yall, build disabled solidarity and be gay and do crime or whatever