As a disabled magic user who works nearly 40 hours a week regularly, sometimes I literally can’t do spells. Sometimes I’ll have a spell planned out, but I spent too much energy on my job or taking care of myself, and I wind up not doing the spell I wanted.
My disability doesn’t stop me from doing spells in general, because there are some days where I don’t work long shifts, and the days I have off are good for spell work. But like, being disabled does affect my practice.
I am just saying this cause I feel like so many issues are seen as kinda black and white? It’s either, “your disability doesn’t affect your magic at all?” or “disabled people can’t do spells like abled people!”. And, that feels very simplistic.
Before I worked so much, I used to do a lot more spells. Cause I had more energy though out the day, so even when my disability was acting up, I generally still had energy left over. I don’t now because I work and am disabled. I never do spells on work days, unless it’s a very simple and small energy work spell.
My disability affects every facet of my life, including my magical practice. That’s not to say it’s a bad thing! It is just a fact. I can’t do as many spells as I want, cause I don’t always have the energy and time to do them! But oh boy, when I do spells, they almost always wind up working out how I had wanted!
I just wanted to put my own two cents on the topic as a disabled magic user, since I have been seeing more posts related to it recently!
This is a shock. A revelation. Before today I had never known my age.
My disability realizes it has chosen the wrong body. It slowly slips off of me and slinks away, in search of an older body to haunt. My wheelchair disintegrates into nothingness. I am free.
My body whenever I do anything like, you know, eat:
[Image is a Gif of Korg, voiced by Taika Waititi, from the movie Thor: Ragnarok. He is a character made up of grey rocks, and is currently wearing some sort of leather harness with a shoulder plate, and holding a very steampunk esque looking gun – possibly a shotgun – looking slightly off the camera and saying “The revolution has begun!”
Miek, his insectoid friend with knives for hands, stands just outside of the frame and walks inside it, nodding along. He is ready for the revolution as well.]
A few words about Afflicted, because the spoonie community has got so many words to get out about this shitshow.
If you’ve missed it, Afflicted is a new docuseries on Netflix that follows several people experiencing chronic illnesses and the measures they take to find relief and, dare it be said, cures. A comment frequently made by the subjects is that Western medicine has been woefully inadequate for what they have been going through, and so they are shown exploring alternative medicines, substantial changes to their ways of living, and tests and treatments that aren’t well known beyond conventional modern medicine. As the series go on, supplemented by edits of commentary from ‘specialists’, it becomes clear that these measures are being used by the documentarians as reason to mock them and dismiss any legitimacy to their conditions.
All the documentary’s subjects have since come out on social media, upset by the way they were portrayed in the final edits, and discuss how they and their supports were manipulated by the people who claimed to have an interest in sharing their stories. Most recently, Jake hosted a livestream Q&A that you can watch on YouTube.
One of the only things Afflicted did successfully was validate and encourage the stigmatization of people who are chronically ill. The scrutiny, skepticism, and dismissal we experience on a daily basis from the medical and social communities alike has already been painful and a totally unnecessary burden. Afflicted doesn’t give people with chronic illnesses a voice – it amplifies the voices of people who want to tell us it’s “all in our heads” and supports comparisons on “who’s really sick”. It lets people talk even more about us and not to us. It merges us into one character in a cautionary tale about overactive imaginations and attention-seeking.
It promotes a supposed specialist telling viewers that we become attached to our ‘roles’ as chronically ill people and that failing to be cured by routine medicine means we have committed to a subconscious need to be sick.
It tells viewers that we should be pitied for our inability to exist in a reality that doesn’t match theirs.
It warns our loved ones that we are probably just manipulating them in one way or another, either to cling to them or reject them entirely.
It portrays the chronically ill as merely being victims of trauma and labouring from the inability to just get over it.
We are reduced to oddities, burdens, lunatics.
Our illnesses and the things we do to try and have any semblance of control over them when all else fails are indulgent and entitled.
“In the early 1970s a group of children and adults in Lyme, Connecticut, and the surrounding areas were suffering from some puzzling and debilitating health issues. Their symptoms included swollen knees, paralysis, skin rashes, headaches, and severe chronic fatigue.”
“These families were left undiagnosed and untreated for years… If it wasn’t for the persistence of two mothers from this group in Connecticut, Lyme disease might still be little-known even today. These patient advocates began to take notes, conduct their own research, and contact scientists.”
“Finally, by the mid-70s, researchers began describing the signs and symptoms of this new disease. They called it Lyme…”
Heatherwitch 