Dear JusticeIs21@protonmail.com,
It was great to wake up to your email this morning, August 6, 2023. Exactly five months ago today, on March 6, 2023 I woke up feeling wrong, the right side of my body kinda wonky. I’d learn later that day that I had a Cardio Vascular Accident (CVA), what is commonly called a stroke.
Part of me feels badly for you. No one deserves a wallop of pain like that.
But part of me feels like this is your comeuppance, this is karma, this is what happens when you’ve been cruel, petty, and judgmental, gossiping about and being malicious toward others with disabilities or mental-health struggles.
And that’s the part of me that won out tonight. You wouldn’t and haven’t thought twice about being a dick.
So yeah, this email was a great way to mark this occasion. Since you are too cowardly to put your name on your viciousness, I don’t know if I have been a jerk to you in the past.
Against the advice of the people who love me best (sorry, EM), I am responding to your email in public. I know your kind of anonymous cruelty is unworthy of my attention, but my best/worst trait is how I love to die on all the hills. ALL OF THEM. The smaller and pettier, the better.
I don’t know a lot about Hinduism and karma, but I’m pretty sure this is not how it works. I don’t think the universe sends a debilitating stroke to people for being a dick. If that’s how it worked most Republicans and Turnip himself would have had much bigger CVAs.
Where did you get the idea that I’ve “been cruel, petty, and judgmental, gossiping about and being malicious toward others with disabilities or mental-health struggles”? I have zero doubt that in my past I have been thoughtlessly cruel. I was not the best version of myself in the 90s.
But recently? Say in the last 10-15 years? I don’t think so.
I don’t have it in me to be intentionally cruel. I’ve lived my whole life in a body deemed other, or as one doctor told me, “a statistical anomaly.” I’ve been bullied and suffered from intentional cruelty for as long as I can remember. I’m not the kind of person who wants others to suffer as I have. I’m the exact opposite. It’s why I so passionately believe student loans should be forgiven even though I’ve already paid mine off.
To say I “wouldn’t and haven’t thought twice about being a dick,” is not true, especially when it comes to the disabled. I’ve spent the last four years or so actively trying to educate myself about disability. Here’s my partial reading list:
Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist by Judith Heumann with Kristen Joiner; Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones; Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy; A Face for Picasso: Coming of Age with Crouzon Syndrome by Ariel Henley; Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body by Rebekah Taussig; Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker; Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century edited by Alice Wong; and Golem Girl: A Memoir by Riva Lehrer.
JusticeIs21@protonmail.com, I have spent a lot of time thinking about my own ableism. I’ve said before that one of the hardest things about this stroke is reckoning just how ableist I was and am. I’m not perfect, but I’m working on it.
So, anonymous coward, I really hope you don’t believe a stroke “is your comeuppance, this is karma, this is what happens when you’ve been cruel, petty, and judgmental. . .” Because if it’s what you really believe you’re in for a doozy of a payback.
Sending that email was intentionally cruel and petty. I’m not sure what your intent was. Did you want to kick me when I was down? Did you want to make me feel somehow worse?
Sorry, I’m recovering from a stroke. It’s impossible for me to feel worse than I already do. I’ve been stripped bare. I’m an exposed nerve. I don’t have a lot of dignity or humility left, but at least I’m not the kind of asshole who intentionally tries to hurt people.
Love and kisses,
Jodi