It's been a while since I published a blog post. I'm still alive and kicking, but I've had a lot of thoughts swirling around in my head and I have been taking some time to sit, think, reflect and process them (whilst dealing with a medical crisis or three in our family!) What's been kicking… Continue reading An Open Letter To My POC and LGBTQ+ Activist Friends …
A simple enough question for a doctor to ask a patient. But it causes me to pause and flip through my memories like I flip through the pages of my grandmother's hundred-year-old cookbook.
This may sound strange to hear But I don't want you to Cure me ...
Choice and Healing Choice and Healing A friend and I were debriefing after a course on mental health and we realized they were missing a really important healing method: choice.
Today I want to finish off our week-long series by looking at what we can do when this happens to help ourselves or our loved ones heal.
What happens when we can't prevent the procedures and experiences that we know might be potentially traumatic? When individuals and caregivers deal with lifelong disabilities or chronic illnesses, some portion of our lives is spent doing really hard things. Sometimes we get so 'used' to these things that we start to think of them as 'normal'. But no matter who you are, we each have a threshold over which we start to feel like it's all too much. Today I want to look at protection during potentially traumatic procedures and experiences that can't be avoided, and I want to look at protection through the avenue of support.
Advocacy is a bit of a 'buzz-word' in many circles, and that is definitely true when it comes to disabilities. But anytime you have buzz-words, you also end up with a lot of confusion about what advocacy looks like and how it works - especially when you are dealing with people who are vulnerable either because of their disabilities or because of the precise circumstances they find themselves in.
