I had a couple ideas for a blog post but couldn’t decide on one so I’m doing both! Getting it all out there for the last post of the semester. 

This week has been one of the hardest ones of the semester for me, not for some overabundance of work or any change in course loads but simply for the fact that we just had a time change on Sunday. It should be better right? I got a whole extra hour of sleep on Sunday, that should be a bonus right? WRONG!

I took an English 493 course titled Science, Rhetoric, and the Body a couple years ago and it was a super enlightening class and a great introduction to disability studies for me. One topic we discussed a bit was the concepts of physiognomy and phrenology (the judgement of character based on facial features and the shape of the skull respectively). These used to be scientific concepts and were genuinely studied as a way to diagnose criminal behavior, but were ultimately judgements based solely in racism, anti-semtitisim, and ableism. While we may see ourselves as far past appearance based judgements (how many times as a child were you told “don’t judge a book by its cover?”), these concepts are still present in small but insidious ways in the media we consume, most noticeable in animation. 

I’ve felt bad for a long time. I am no longer able to keep up with what is seen as the daily motions of life the way I used to; I am exhausted by small events, I need days of recuperation for my longer periods at school and I rarely get that time to recover. I know there is something wrong with me, something internally isn’t functioning the way it should but I don’t know what. It may be mental, it may be physical, it may be a combination of both. But I don’t really have the time to worry about or fix it, I have school and work and other obligations. Even if I did have time, the waiting period for doctors is prohibitive in and of itself, not to mention the cost.