A Reminder That You Are Only Human. Stop Bottling Everything When It’s Too Much.

(Tw for ableism and lack of autonomy)

I want to talk about the issues with touching somebody's AAC device, and how it feels when people do that to me.

I've spoken about this a bit before, but I have more thoughts on it now that I feel like expressing.

People touch my device a lot, and they very rarely have permission. Whether its because they want to prevent me from moving too far away so they'll grab my devices strap, or they press random buttons, or pull it toward them, or push in my puffy stickers, or to search through my private folder, or something else, people tend to touch my AAC device without my consent. It has gotten to the point that my lockscreen has to say "My communication device functions as a body part, do not touch it without my direct consent." And I have a label on the back of the case that says "COMMUNICATION DEVICE PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH!".

When people do these things it feels extremely invasive, like someone touching your mouth or putting their hands in your throat. Its gross, uncomfortable, scary and weird.

It is also super important to note that a lot of nonspeaking people have sensory issues. You have lotion on your hands? The lotion rubbing off may have just ruined that persons device until cleaned. Also, bacteria is very much a thing.

I have to wipe down my device with sanitary wipes a lot, because I set it on all sorts of surfaces, and lots of people touch it. People who probably have dirty hands.

I personally don't, but some people attach chewies to their AAC device, or bite on the case. That makes the sanitary issues even more intense.

I also stim using tangles a lot, and I also have a ton of anxiety around children touching me or my things. Last school year, a kid at my school touched one of my tangles despite me telling him not to, and then I was unable to use that one for at least a month. My point of bringing that up is just, please don't touch peoples things without permission, especially disability aids.

Ok so at this point I've had two people roll up to me in manual wheelchairs, well, one of them was somebody pushing somebody who was nonverbal at the time, but it still counts. They asked me why I had zip ties around my tires.

It's winter where I'm living and we have really bad snow. And the snow plow people are really bad at their jobs probably because there aren't snow plow people who clean sidewalks. As a solution I got to thinking about how I could increase the traction on my wheels. And the most redneck thing I could think of was taking a bunch of zip ties and tying them around my wheels. They last surprisingly long, and work surprisingly well. It's basically the same premise as chains for your tires during the winter.

I chose to space them out pretty evenly so there's about one for every spoke. You could probably do more or less depending on how many you want and how much traction you get but I wouldn't go more than three per spoke. I realize that it's a bit later in the winter, and I probably should have made a post about this sooner, but I came up with it about a week ago. So please share this, even if you're not disabled, because there are tons of people I know who are stuck in their houses because they can't get around in the snow. A pack of zip ties costs about $5, which compared to $200 knobby snow tires is a big save, and if you want to invest you could get colored zip ties.

It’s never too late to learn the right way to do things: button sewing technique via imgur → more…

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Please do not laugh if I misspell something or if my device pronounces a word wrong. I am doing my best. It tends to make me feel self-conscious about using my device, which can make it harder for me to communicate effectively in the future.

I understand that mispronunciations and misspellings can be funny in some contexts, but when it's happening to me, it's not funny at all. It's actually quite embarrassing and it makes me feel like my communication efforts are not being taken seriously. Communication is such an important part of human interaction, and when you have to rely on a device to do it, it can already feel like a barrier. So when people react negatively to something that's already a struggle for me, it can be really discouraging.

I'm not writing this to shame anyone or make anyone feel bad. I just wanted to raise awareness about how these little moments can have a big impact on AAC users.

Neurotypicals take drugs to experience everyday shit for neurodivergent people like “Bro I was so high I had to turn my tv down to taste my pizza” yeah that’s a Tuesday night for me