Disability Narratives
Disclosure
Interview excerpt: Although John understands people’s attempts to understand his condition via comparisons with their own experiences, it can sometimes feel like they are trivialising his condition.
© Disability Narratives
Sometimes, if I feel about it's a very human natural thing to try to want to compare someone else's experiences to your own. And so if I'm - for example, I don't often do, but if I do talk about for example my, my health and my fatigue with someone. And someone for example saying that "Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm pretty tired at the moment, actually. I've been working really hard. You know, I can kind of feel, "No." [Laughing]. There's, there’s very, very different levels of tiredness. And so I do think that people kind of unintentionally, completely unintentionally, and completely that - I understand what they're doing, they're trying, trying to relate to my experience. That can feel like trivialising it, sometimes. And that's probably , you know - it's something that I have encountered, but it's something that I'm, you know – I understand that there's no kind of malice, or no ill-feeling involved, it's just a very human reaction.