Spread the Word to End the Word

I’m gonna review on a story from a book entitled The Gift of Fear by Becker which emphasized on survival signals.

Dylann Roof, brother of Amber Roof had been accused of slaying nine black churchgoers in a racial hate crime in South Carolina after Amber, recognized her brother’s distinctive bowl haircut on TV and called the cops to tip them off. Police apprehended her brother in Shelby, North Carolina - just 3 miles from where Amber’s fiance was living with his children.

Beyond the shock of her brother’s hate crimes and the grief for the victims who lost their lives, Amber was faced with a choice that no wedding planner has ever considered: What do you do when your brother shoots up a church just days before you walk down the aisle on the happiest day of your life?

Of course, Amber and her fiance called off the wedding and went into hiding. They were married weeks later in a secluded cabin, unable to salvage their original plans in their original venue. Amber and her fiance have yet to surface. Solace and normalcy were stolen from her, her husband, and her stepfamily.

Months passed, Amber stated in her Facebook that “The real victims are the ones who lost their lives that day. I should not speak, as it may come off as if I am comparing my pain and loss to theirs”
Well, the nine people who were killed by her brother were indeed victims. But her pain was profound, and she was a victim too. Her pain and their pain aren’t on a scale to be judged, as we can’t view our pain through a hierarchical lens.

Denying your personal pain won’t lessen other people’s suffering. Denying your personal pain will only increase it.

Denial is… a save-now-pay-later scheme, a contract writen entirely in small print, for in the long run, the denying person knows the truth on some level, and it causes a constant low-grade anxiety. Millions of people suffer that anxiety, and denial keeps them from taking action that could reduce the risks (and the worry) (de Becker, 2015).

#PTSD #positive #MentalHealth #attitude #AnxietyBooks #libraries #SpreadTheWordToEndTheWord #Love #selfhealing #psychology #Beauty #Education

Once upon a time, babies, children and adults were diagnosed as mentally r-tarded. They were thrown into mental institutions. Parents, siblings and spouses were told there was no hope for those they loved who were r-tarded.

That time really wasn’t all that long ago.

The words “mentally r-tarded” have been replaced more recently with words like “intellectual disability” and “developmentally delayed”. Those new words are a much more accurate description of what life is like for people who have those diagnoses.

Unfortunately the word “r-tard” was adopted as a slur, essentially used to insult someone or something by comparing them to someone who is “mentally r-tarded”.

Confession - I used to say things like “that’s r-tarded” a lot. In fact one of my earliest roommates used to charge me 25¢ every time I used the word. I’m pretty sure she would have collected $5/week from me if I had ever actually paid her.

At the time, I didn’t understand what the big deal was. I didn’t mean it as an insult to people with disabilities, it was simply a word that I grew up associating as a synonym to dumb, or stupid.

But newsflash? It doesn’t matter if I meant it that way or not. That is the origin of that usage of the word.

We wouldn’t accept an argument like that to normalize other slurs. Racial slurs, ethnic slurs, slurs about someone’s sexual orientation or their religion... it doesn’t matter where or how you learned it, but it does matter that it’s insulting to the people that it impacts.

It doesn’t matter how deeply embedded into your mindset and language it is. What matters is that it’s hurtful to an entire population of people. People like AJ.

And yes, we may have learned some bad behaviors in the past, myself included. Sometimes those things are even so engrained that we don’t always catch them before they’re out of our mouths. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t actively work to stop using it and to educate yourself and others about the why behind the movement to end the usage of the “r word”.

#DownSyndrome #IntellectualDisability #Rword #SpreadTheWord #SpreadTheWordToEndTheWord #developmentallydelayed #trisomy21 #t21 #t21fam

*side note for those who want to argue for using the word to mean slow down - as in a musical sense or a speed sense - technically, that’s still an appropriate use of the word, though it’s a bit of a stretch since most people don’t use those words commonly anymore*