Gratitude sucks.
Especially if you’re being asked to be grateful for something that is not so much some optional extra, like a double chocolate cake handcrafted by elves, delivered to you every day at exactly 30 minutes and 15 seconds after the strike of 4pm, so that you don’t have a diva tantrum.
No no, I mean basic things. You know, like being able to get out of your house, and take my wheelchair into work, and not have people say things to you like “you should be more accommodating of how hard it is for us to do disability adjustments, and you should be grateful we’ve done it at all”, conveniently forgetting that reasonable adjustments for a disabled person is the law, and no, I do not have to be grateful that you have chosen not to break the law, and I do not have to accommodate you on the occasions that you do break the law.
What would be grateful for those things mean, anyway? Don’t you find it insulting to have the standard for your behaviour set so low that I have to specially thank you for not being a useless ineffective law-breaking ignorant oppressive bully? Really? Does Hallmark do a card for that?
Worse still are the times that adjustments are done badly or not done at all, and I am still required to be grateful for them. And then I’d be having to say something like “thank you for only sometimes being a useless ineffective law-breaking ignorant oppressive bully”.
Of course, the problem isn’t saying it, it’s internalising the message. It’s believing you genuinely should be grateful for being treated badly, because you genuinely believe you don’t deserve basic human empathy.
–IP
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