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Addiction advocacy and the inspiration paradox: A reflection at 6 years sober

Today I am 6 years sober from addiction. During those six years I have learnt many lessons, but in this reflection I would like to consider something that has played on my mind for the past three years of my advocacy work.

Inspiration.

While not overtly a bad thing, it is often misused to infantilise and minimise the achievements of disabled people while hiding behind a mask of feigned respect. This phenomenon is known as “inspiration porn”.

A good (hypothetical) example of such a thing would be a video of a disabled person doing something completely mundane, like dancing, but they would be dancing with a non-disabled person. The video would centre the non-disabled as some kind of saviour to the disabled person for doing something as basic as treating them like a human being. The implication of the video, albeit in subtext, would be “Look at the amazing things that disabled people can achieve when an abled person rescues them from their shameful existence”.

It’s dehumanising and wrong.

So, addiction advocacy.

As a recovering addict in the public eye, I do what I do because I want to help others overcome similar challenges to my own, and help reduce their suffering. This does in fact require inspiring people. If it weren’t for the sober addict who showed me kindness during my first stretch on a psychiatric ward, I might not have chosen recovery.

The fact that they had turned their life around, and become someone I wanted to look up to was inspiring, and that isn’t a bad thing.

What would be bad would be if people like myself are allowed to become another source of inspiration porn. It’s a difficult line to walk. I want people to have what I have found, not get off on the tragedies that have formed who I am.

Contrary to popular belief, addicts are people. We are not burdens, we don’t deserve our suffering. Regardless of whether or not we are in recovery, we deserve food, housing, health care, support, and kindness.

This is what I want to inspire in people.

So please, don’t look at me and think it’s a miracle that I recovered. My recovery shouldn’t be the inspiration. I was privileged to have a loving and supportive set of family and friends. I had good key workers (although the services they came from were woefully ill-equipped). I was in a place where I was ready to enter recovery.

What I want to inspire in you is the idea that all addicts deserve recovery. I want to inspire you to challenge the systems that keep people like me trapped in a world of suffering.

I want you to know that those with less privilege than myself need us to get in the trenches and help them fight this war.

If that is what I inspire in people, then I am happy with what I am doing. If, however, you look at me and see a walking miracle, then I have not gone far enough.

The tragedies and traumas of my life should not be celebrated. They should be wielded as weapons to dismantle the masters house, and rebuild it into something where we can all coexist and thrive.

Commentary on “Why requiring Autistic people to be diagnosed is a betrayal of the Neurodiversity movementWhy requiring Autistic people to be diagnosed is a betrayal of the Neurodiversity movement”

For this commentary to make sense, it may be worth reading my other recent articles on the liminal nature of the neurodiversity movement and the reality of Autopia. My recent articles have all come from my recent preoccupation with creating a utopian neurocosmopolitan society, and I have used my writing to try and imagine what such a world might look like for Autistics.

When I wrote the article that is the subject of this commentary, I was not intending to denounce diagnosis, at least not in the world we currently live in. What I was trying to do was highlight how forcing people through an ableist and bigoted diagnostic system in order to gain access to support, further pathologises the Autistic experience.

Like many supporters of the neurodiversity movement, I take offence to the medicalisation of my neurotype. I feel it is inherently wrong to treat autism as a pathology. I do not believe that any Autistic people require fixing or curing.

My reasons for this are complicated, but in a nutshell; I believe that our current society judges us on our ability to create financial value and drive up profits, when we can not fit into that requirement, society deems us as having deficits and views those deficits as reducing our value.

When we can not meet our cultures standards, we are forced into the medical system, to prove our neurotype in order to attain the support that we need to survive.

Not only are we a Autistics forced to do this, but our family and carers are required to jump through the metaphorical hoops, often with little to no support. They face institutional violence and parent/carer blame the whole way.

The article I wrote was me dreaming of a society where everyone is treated as equal, no one is considered “standard” or “typical”. Things like universal basic income exist, social care has been reformed. Autistic people are no longer treated as broken or defective. We are not forced to prove we need support because the support is freely available to whoever needs it.

It was utopian thinking, and never did I intend to make people feel as if they were doing the wrong thing, or that I believe diagnosis is bad on current society.

I hope that with this commentary, people can further understand where my line of thinking came from, and understand the point I was trying to make.

Diagnosis is necessary on our world at the moment, but can we not dream of a better world? Where all are equal and supported. Where no one has to feel broken.

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