I find it really frustrating that people take the first attempts of disabled people to do something as an indication of whether they can do it or not, without realizing that anyone can fail when doing something for the first time just because they have never done it before. This is a huge double standard that I don't hear people talk about often for some reason. Today I saw a parent forbidding their blind child from cooking because she once accidentally spilled salt on the counter. The fact that the girl is rarely ever allowed to cook and doesn't have much experience somehow slipped their mind. Not to mention that such things can happen and do happen to literally anyone. I've also been in situations where people wouldn't let me go somewhere on my own, because they saw me get lost once. The fact that it's normal to sometimes get lost and not know the exact route if you have never been to that place before, again, slipped their mind. And God forbid if I tell them about this one time when I didn't get to the right place with Google maps. I keep being reminded of it every single time I want to go somewhere. I understand that those people are worried and everything, but damn. This only makes things worse because it's normal to learn from mistakes, and it's normal to make such mistakes. Maybe... I guess not for us.
@Caoimhe Very good point. It's not like sighted people don't get lost, do clumsy things, drop stuff, burn food... But for them it's an incident, whereas for a disabled person it's assumed to be a permanent limitation.
@modulux Exactly!
@Caoimhe Oh come on, you and I know it's just an excuse. A good 99% of the time, the person in question would prefer you not do whatever it is anyway. Focusing on the error is just an excuse to try to prevent your doing something which worries the other party in some way. There are two ways I've found it best to handle this. The first and usual is just to ignore whoever it is and do it anyway, keeping in mind you proceed at your own risk. As an adult, I usually found that works fairly well. For children, it's less doable though surprisingly doable if the child is willing to try it and if the risk is not high. I, for example, did this as a child with making hot drinks and making things in the oven but not with making stuff with splattering oil on the stove. The second option is to make the person's life miserable. This only works if the guy attempting to prevent says "let me do it". Generally, I try not to bother people, I don't ask for anything unless I absolutely have to. In this case, I turn that on its head and ask whenever I want the thing done. I find people eventually get sick of my asking and will tell me to do it myself or help me figure out a way for me to do it and, if they decide to take their time, it's another reason for me to go to option 1. This, of course, requires quite a thick skin. Both of these options may result in your getting hurt, but again, the balancing of risk has got to be part of a blind person's box of tools. Dealing with this sort of thing is really an annoying way to live, but if you were to pay attention to every founded and unfounded worry, you would end up doing nothing. @pixelate
@Caoimhe They expect disabled people to also be super memorizers, and then get disappointed when they can't instantly remember things. I have that one happen to me a lot.
@Caoimhe Oh yeah. I've had it happen loads that if I spill something or whatever then I end up beating myself up about it, as if sighted people never do anything like that.
@KaraLG84 Well it's not really good to beat yourself up about something, but we're our own worst critics, so it at least makes sense. My problem is that other people take our failures as a sign that we are not capable of doing it at all just because we couldn't do it when we tried for the first or second time. They just ignore the fact that anyone can make a mistake, especially if a person doesn't have much experience or has no experience at all.
@Pawpower@mastodon.social@Caoimhe This is so well said It is so true. i fight this battle on behalf of my students so much! Because the parents freak out if one little thing goes amiss and rather than just chalk it up to the learning process they immediately forbid the kid from doing the thing the whole while bitching about why the kid can't do the thing when it's so easy and it's just a bad cycle. The biggest lesson I teach in my classroom is that it's ok to make mistakes.
@Angela2000 @Pawpower @Caoimhe to others in the community. We have all been there or have things we don't know how to do or aren't good at. There are some who are very judgemental of others and I will admit to having been that way some too but as you get older, your perspective changes a lot! We all have things we can learn or get better at!
@bmoore123 @Pawpower @Caoimhe yep a lot in the comunity have been harsh, so its been hard and family too. I wish we had the resources we had when I was younger cause now I am kind of ready to learn more.
@Caoimhe A lot of us come from a sketchy background of being taught by parents, grandparents, etc. that we have to anticipate everybody's needs instead of asking about them.
It puts us in a really messed up mindset where even observing failures makes us really uncomfortable and we feel responsible for having let it happen.
It's not an excuse, by any measure, but it's at least a reason you maybe didn't have before.
@gooba42 oh yeah, I didn't think of that. That's definitely an interesting way to look at it.
@Caoimhe I met a 35 year old blind guy and had to teach him how to pour liquid into a glass, because nobody had ever let him do it. And yeah, he spilled, but we tried again and then he was successful. Being able to fail is part of learning. Heck, it's part of life.
@Caoimhe screwing things up for the first time or the 20th is how we learn. Its okay to get lost or spill something or even have a fire. I have done all of the above and usually learn a route or a better way of doing something. We can't do everything perfectly and how we learn thing might be different from how someone else does it but we still have to learn.
@Caoimhe @KaraLG84 If people only saw some of the dumb and sometimes more serious mistakes I made while going through the process of getting things done. I remember around three years ago I was cooking potatoes and ended up spilling scalding hot water all over my right hand. I ended up finding my way to the hospital in the middle of the night to get it looked at. I also managed to find my way to my doctor's office the next day to get a prescription. Not fun to say the least. Needless to say, I never tried to get potatoes out of hot water that way again.
@lunar_fang@mindly.social@Caoimhe I hear all these horror stories and ask myself. why has that never happened to me. my mother encourages me to cook, to try new things. and if I need help or something goes wrong. she helps me. along with my step father. if I get lost somewhere they show me how to get somewhere. am I just some kind of oddball that I don't have any blindy horror stories?
@Caoimhe Oh yes. God forbid the blind person fuck up. Because OMG blind person is blind and must! Never! Fuck up! Fucking ableds. grumbles
@Caoimhe the dreaded paternalistic view of disability, keeping people safe rather than enabling. I worked for a couple of years as a disabled access advisor for a big charity and this attitude, from staff not the charity, made me want to scream
@Caoimhe not just about disabled people, as a perfectly abled person, faced it many times from my parents as well.
@HistoPol@mastodon.social#VisionImpairment #Inclusion #Parenting
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"Today I saw a parent forbidding their blind child from cooking because she once accidentally spilled salt on the counter."
One of my friends has been blind since he was a teenager. He lives in a house by himself. He is one of the best hobby cooks that I know, knowing all recepies by heart. He even produces his own sausage.--oh, and no, he isn't working as a cook and belongs to a much different profession.
These parents are...
@HistoPol@mastodon.social#VisionImpairment #Inclusion #Parenting #Cooking
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...damaging their child's prospect of becoming an independent adult.
//
Disclaimer:
I wouldn't let a pree-teen cook on his/her own on a gas stove either, though if this were the reason.
@Caoimhe This comes up in my life as being misunderstood by a person I'm trying to communicate with and being labeled as difficult because I try to clarify what I may have misunderstood from them. Apparently no one except autistic people have misunderstandings and it's unreasonable to expect us to learn another's style if we don't get it the first time 
kon mute @MindmeshLink@tenforward.social@Caoimhe This also plays so much into the way abled strangers think it's okay to "help'' us without asking. If you're perceived to struggle or make a mistake at all, it's immediately the hands, not the words, patronizingly doing things for you.
And to your point about mistakes being normal for everyone but us: often, they don't know what they're doing either! On the bus the other day, I was having trouble getting my wheelchair detached from the securing mechanism, and the person in the seat behind me just reached and started pulling on a strap repeatedly to absolutely no avail, literally just doing the same thing I was doing without so much as a "Here, let me try."
Eventually the bus driver, who actually knows the mechanism, stopped in and released it (didn't show me how, but that's its own can o' worms), but I was so worried they were going to break something.