For years, our central form of creativity has been writing. In 2017, we created our social justice blog Yopp, and we have since published more than 100 articles on social justice education, disability, chronic illness, and mental health on that platform. But that hasn’t been our only outlet for writing.
Below, you’ll find a selection of some of our favorite Yopp articles, as well as links to our Gluten-Free Recipe blog, Medium articles, external publications, and published poetry.
Disability
Redefining Disability: An Identity of Adaptation and Creativity
Ever since I joined the disabled community, I’ve been fascinated by the divide in perception of the concept of “disability” between people who are disabled, and people who are not. I wanted to distill this shift in perspective and make progress in redefining disability for a larger number of non-disabled people.
Accessibility, Social Justice, and Self Growth: How to be an Accessible Person
When I joined the disability activism community, I learned a new frame of reference that changed how I engaged with the world at large: Accessibility. I had no idea that this concept would expand for me from a branch of activism to a life philosophy and identity: How to be an accessible person.
Ableism Bingo: Things to Never Say to a Disabled Person
The unsolicited comments disabled people receive on a daily basis are so predictable, you can use them to play Ableism Bingo. This article covers those many of those comments and where they come from.
Chronic Illness
Why Chronic Illness Makes It So Hard to Leave Home
My chronically ill friends and I joke about the medicine cabinet worth of supplies we take with us on any trip that’s longer than an hour because we never know what we’re going to need. But why is such intensive preparation required for a simple outing? Why does chronic illness make it so hard to leave home, even for a few hours?
Say Goodbye to the Version of Me You Knew: A Letter to Friends & Family of Chronically Ill People
For years I’ve heard stories from my chronically ill friends of loved ones who abandoned them or who refused to believe that their illness was real. So, I wanted to write a letter to the friends & family of chronically ill people.
Spoon Theory: What Silverware Has to Do with Chronic Illness
Have you ever dealt with a chronic illness and struggled to explain to your healthy friends why you just can’t go out with them anymore? Have you ever heard someone say, “I don’t have the spoons for that,” and wondered what they were talking about? They’re talking about Spoon Theory! In this article, I’ll provide a basic overview of spoon theory, how it was created, how it’s used, and further expansions on spoon theory that I’ve found helpful.
Abuse & Trauma
Poetry & Trauma: It Is Hard to Write with a Broken Heart
In 2022, I published my poetry book, “Pet: the Journey from Abuse to Recovery.” The poetry sequence takes you through my experiences in an abusive relationship, my attempts to heal, my retrospective reflections on the relationship, and the larger-scale insights that came with long-term healing. To introduce it, I shared this piece about what it took to write that book in the first place.
I Think My Friend is Being Abused. What Now?
Being able to recognize that you are being abused, while the abuse is still happening, is mind-bogglingly difficult. I say mind-boggling because even though dozens of people trying to tell me that my relationship was abusive was completely ineffective for me, it’s still my first instinct when someone’s partner exhibits abusive behaviors to just try to tell them that. I know that this extremely straightforward tactic doesn’t work, but what other choice do I have? This article explores that question.
Recovering from Abuse: Was Everything My Fault?
I have a large number of friends who have been through at least one kind of abuse and I’ve noticed that if someone has gone through the process of recovering from abuse at least once, it becomes much more important to them to evaluate future behaviors as potentially abusive. But having the intense desire to avoid ever suffering abuse again, and actually identifying abuse are two very different things.
Social Justice Education
The Problem with Misrepresenting Oppression as Just Part of Life
When we undermine someone’s life-altering issue by framing it as something that everyone deals with, we dismiss the magnitude of the societal problems that contextualize bigotry, we disrespect marginalized people’s ability to assess their own problems, we discourage the pursuit of solutions for widespread unearned suffering, and we sign off on allowing that suffering to continue.
Power Dynamics Part 1: What Happens When Someone Has More Power Than You Do?
Power dynamics are an invisible force that we are all affected by on a daily basis that is such a normal part of our life that we follow the guidelines associated with our relative power level intuitively without being conscious of the fact that we’re doing it. Understanding how to identify uneven power dynamics and their impact on our behavior is key to understanding the nuances of social justice activism.
Hiding Behind “Good Intentions”: Why Good Intent Does Not Erase Oppressive Impact
For every blatantly malicious bigot, there are 10 people who “meant well” or “didn’t mean it like that” or “had good intentions” when they said or did something that actually had a harmful effect on a member of an oppressed group. This excuse is used so frequently that it’s hard to see a single online argument about social justice without someone having to explain that good intentions does not negate or remedy impact.
dissociative identity disorder
What Is Plurality/Multiplicity?
There is a form of neurodivergence that comes with a great deal of stigma and bias attached to it. Even among progressive, well-informed communities, there are low levels of awareness of this group.
It is my hope to significantly raise those awareness levels and to make a dent in the misunderstanding around group by replacing it with a more accurate reality, and to explain how the term “plurality” applies to me personally.
A Guide to Social Etiquette When Interacting with My DID System
A frequent request we’ve encountered is to create a guide to interacting with DID systems. When we asked other systems to weigh in, the only pattern we could identify was that every single system wanted very different things! Instead, we’re offering a list of our own preferences around social interactions and a list of conversation prompts to help you get to know the specific preferences of the system(s) you know.
Who Am I Today? How My DID System and I Figure Out Who Is Fronting
We wanted to share with you the strategies that we use on a daily basis to figure out who is fronting at any given moment. If you are plural, we hope these strategies might be useful to you, and if you’re not, we hope this article will further illustrate what the experience of plurality and/or dissociative disorders is like.
On medium
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The Joy of List-Making
The perfect list to me is one that is intuitively organized, clearly formatted, easy to understand at a glance, contains just enough information but not too much, and that consists of completable items that you cross of with a satisfying swish of a pencil or click of a mouse. Making lists like this can be a game changer in your productivity levels.
I have managed to find the perfect medium for creating this kind of list. It’s called Workflowy.
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My Disability Is Sometimes Visible
The SI-belt I wore for years to stabilize my sacrum had kept me in the perfect place between invisibly and visibly disabled. My disability was hidden enough that I could pass as abled-bodied most of the time and avoid a lot of social scrutiny as a result but it was visible enough that I had a reason ready to go if someone did scrutinize me.
Going without my belt meant having to re-examine my feelings about having a disability that no one would anticipate and that most people haven’t heard of. If I needed or wanted to out myself as disabled to a stranger, their only source of information was what I told them. The words coming out of my mouth were the only proof I had. What if that wasn’t enough?
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When the Heck are Women Going to Get a Shot at the Presidency?
It isn’t about just this presidential candidate, this woman, or the last one. It isn’t about these specific people and their actions or their qualifications. The problem isn’t merit-based. If it were, we would have a history of primaries filled approximately fifty-fifty with men and women candidates of varying levels of competence, the best would rise to the top, the ones that fall short would fade away. But a history book filled with forty-five male faces, with forty-four white, and one black, tell a very different story.
Poetry
External Publications
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The BeZine: “Could You Please, Just, Cease to Be?”
In collaboration with The BeZine, we published a collection of articles and poems on the theme of disability, chronic and mental illness.
You can read the full collection of disability, chronic, and mental illness pieces here.
‘Splain You a Thing: “Why It’s Hard to Reveal My Disability to Strangers“
In this piece, we discuss the complex evaluation process necessary to safely disclose an invisible disability, and the grief that comes with the onset of disability is later in life.
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Ms. Magazine Blog: “I Was My Boyfriend’s Servant: How I Escaped Financial Abuse”
A deeply personal story of how I survived emotional and financial abuse in a nightmarish form.
More
Poetry
- “Fetus” in the Original Weather Anthology– Uttered Chaos
- “How Could She Stay?” – Architrave Press
- “Two in the Morning” – Cast Macabre (Audio Recording)
- “Sick Leave” – The BeZine
Articles
- “Gifted and Disabled” – SENG Voices
- “Reasonable Expectations” – The BeZine
- “Windows” – The BeZine
- “Redefining Disability: An Identity of Adaptation and Creativity” – The BeZine
- “Using Social Interactions to Create Change” – The BeZine