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Of course the teens aren’t alright!

Of course the teens aren’t alright!

Don’t sound so shocked

I don’t know why everyone is so shocked.

Wars. Climate change. Racism. Gun violence. Book banning. Sexual harassment.

No, the teens are not alright! 

Yet the headlines are met with shock — shock! — that the girls are experiencing depression and considering suicide and the boys are angry and agressive and the LGBTQ+ teens are feeling everything.

In fact, the headlines themselves sound full of dismay. “We should be alarmed,” says an opinion piece in The Globe. 

First, sure, let’s be alarmed, but also recognize that while the data — the most complete the CDC has collected since the first time it conducted the High School Youth Risk Behavior Survey since it was first attempted in 1991 when participation was, to put it kindly, scant — is simply revealing hard truths.

Second, let’s also admit that many of us dealt with some of the same things in high school. 

I, a GenXer, happen to remember a little band from Athens, Georgia, named R.E.M. who wrote a song that described exactly how I felt. “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine!” I’d yell along to the chorus as I’d play the song in my room at top volume back then.

So, if you’re an adult reading this, try to remember what it was like way back when. 

But this? This is not for you, dear adult. This is for the teens. 

This is to tell you teens that I understand. To tell you that we, the adults, for as shocked — shocked! — as we act right now, know how shitty junior high and high school can be because we were there. And we didn’t fix it. Some things we’ve just let go. In many ways, we made it worse.

That sexual harassment and abuse girls experience? Not new. In a Washington Post piece, one teen girl described being sexually assaulted by a boy in her high school — in the hallway in sight of a teacher. The boy went unpunished. I cannot count the number of women I know with stories that range from comments about their breasts (or their lack of) from junior high and high school to bra snapping to being pushed against a locker and touched inappropriately. I know too many women who were raped in junior high and high school by a “friend” at a party. Of course, we didn’t know what to call it, so we didn’t call it rape. And other than telling each other, we didn’t tell an adult because at least one of us at some point had told a teacher or principal when someone was touched inappropriately or raped at school. The result was always the same: “Did you ask for it? What were you doing to lead him on? Boys will be boys.”

And you ask why girls are depressed, cutting and suicidal? Do you adults who find this shocking really think this wasn’t happening when we were teens?

Then there’s the boys, whose hormones are surging, but are not learning constructive ways to let out that energy. Oh, and don’t forget the media — in our day it was magazines; today it’s streaming on YouTube and TikTok and Twitch — to make sure they have all the machismo of a man. Many of them have no idea how to handle their feelings or energy, except maybe sports. And we encourage them to be competitive. We encourage them when they win. We admonish them when they fail. And we fill their heads with aggressive messages.

And you ask why boys are angry, aggressive and the most likely to commit acts of violence? Do you adults who find this shocking really think this wasn’t happening when we were teens?

What may be new to many adults is the visibility of LGBTQ+ youth. When I was a teen, I had friends my age who were open about their gender identity and sexuality with me. But they were not “out” in general. And I can tell you how much they struggled overall. Now, adults are fight over hard-won gains for the LGBTQ+ community. They are banning books in school that allow you, LGBTQ+ teens, to feel seen and heard. No wonder you feel like the earth will split open and swallow you.

And you, adults, wonder why LGBTQ+ teens have the highest rates of depression and suicide? You are creating the most hostile of environments for these teens.

Yes, there are pressures we didn’t experience as kids that you do experience. Schools are shooting ranges and we didn’t experience that. (While my high school experienced a few bomb threats that caused evacuations, we never trained what to do in the event of a mass shooter, and I cannot even imagine doing that.) But if our politicians had the will, we could fix that.

But when I was a teen girl, there was pressure to look a certain way, dress a certain way and fit in. And I didn’t do any of those things. I was too skinny, flat chested, with frizzy black hair and a style that read, “You aren’t from here, are you?” I was called “freak” regularly, got into at least one fight, was touched inappropriately in the hall more times than I can count, and hated every morning when the clock hit 7 a.m. 

When senior year rolled around, I had completed enough credits to start leaving campus early for work in the afternoons. It was the best thing that ever happened to me — until my male boss made me feel uncomfortable in the office. Every evening, sitting in my powder blue Plymouth Horizon in traffic on the freeway, I’d think, “I could keep driving north to Canada, cross the border and never look back.”

So no, my young friends, I don’t know where all this shock from adults is coming from because we went through much of this too.  Worse, no one is telling you what they’ll do to fix it. You deserve better. And I’m sorry.

Now back to the adults reading this: Put yourself in your way-back machine — but leave your rose-colored glasses at home — and remember your junior high and high school experience. Now, come back to today and take a long hard look at what these teens are telling you. Sound familiar? It’s about time we did something to fix what we went through back then and what the teens are going through now, don’t you think? 

And maybe it could start with something no adult ever did for us when we were young. Let’s start by asking the teens, “How can we help?” And then actually following up on it.



Let’s really talk about it

Let’s really talk about it

Ya know what? Let’s talk about it.

Black and Brown parents have The Talk with their kids. Little girls get a different kind of The Talk from the women in their lives. Jewish and Muslim kids get a version of it too. LGBTQ+ families have a version too. All for certain scenarios.

What do you do if you run into a situation where you are singled out for who you are and aggression — maybe even violence or death — is likely to come your way? The Talk is always given in a way where we, the potential victim, are told to do our best to be calm, collected, proper, polite. We are supposed to do everything right. Whether you are a Black father giving The Talk to your son about how to interact with the police or a mother explaining to her daughter how to avoid date rape or a Muslim family explaining how to avoid an anti-Muslim confrontation to your teen daughter newly wearing the hijab or an Asian-American parent talking to your child about what to do if confronted with anti-Asian hate: You know I’m right.

I know what I’d do because I’ve lived through several situations, some where I’ve frozen, some where I’ve ran and some where I’ve fought back. I know what I was supposed to do in each scenario, but my fight-flight-freeze response took over — because I’m human.

I survived in every situation. I’m lucky. My body froze when it needed to freeze. I ran when I needed to run. I fought back when I needed to fight back. But what if I hadn’t?

When I saw Tyre Nichols get up from the first set of beatings and run, I saw a person running for his life. I saw fear. I’ve felt that. But he was running from five police officers with weapons who caught him and beat him so severely that his injuries were fatal; there was no escaping that outcome.

Perhaps you’ve never been in a situation where you were confronted with the possibility of violence just because of who you are — just because of the color of your skin, or your gender, or your religion, or your disability, or anything that makes you different from those who hold power in a situation. If you haven’t, imagine yourself in that scenario and tell me what you would do. You imagine you’d do everything right, everything your elders told you to do. And still you are beaten. Still you are raped. Still you are terrorized. Still you are hunted. Still you are murdered.

This is the America – née the World — far too many of us know.

Bye, bye, Birdie: Twitter fires Accessibility Team

Bye, bye, Birdie: Twitter fires Accessibility Team

I didn’t want to write about the Twitter takeover by Elon Musk.

In fact, I was hoping I’d never write about Musk at all.

Not here in my notebook.

Not in a news article.

Not ever.

Ok, maybe the occasional snarky remark, but besides that? No.

But here we are.

On November 4, Musk fired a huge number of his Twitter workforce because he spent too much money on a social media company that he decided he wanted to buy, then didn’t want to buy, then bought in the end for money than it was worth and now he claims he has to fix the fiscal mess that Twitter’s in.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

In the process, he fired the entire Accessibility Experience Team, announced by Accessibility Experience manager Gerard Cohen on Twitter at 1:30 p.m. EST.

This team, some of whom identify as disabled themselves and often engaged people from the disability communities in their work, is responsibility for all the features that makes it possible for those with a wide variety of different needs to find Twitter very usable. These needs come from an array of disabilities.

These features are everything from an easy ALT text for screen readers feature that was oft-promoted to dim mode for low visual acuity. Cohen said in his thread there were more projects in the work.

I’ve used many social media over the years and quit using most of them. I’ve also had a few web sites and worked with a few designers. I’ve worked with a number of content management systems (CMS) and I can say that I found Twitter’s accessibility tools extremely user friendly on the creator end — like adding ALT text — and on the user end, when viewing ALT text. And it’s not always that way. (I’m still catching up putting back in the ALT text, one of the many broken things, since the Great StacyKess.com Goes Kersplat Because of Incompetent Web Host of October 2022 — but that’s another story for another time.)

I am very concerned for the people of the Accessibility Experience Team, their work and for those of us on Twitter they welcomed with amazing user tools.

I don’t know what will happen to Twitter without an accessibility team. Will the existing tools break? Probably not outright. If and when they do break will they be repaired? Probably not. But will new accessibility tools roll out? No. Will disabled users feel a difference without support? Yes. Is this a major problem? Yes.

My hope for the people of the former Twitter Accessibility Experience Team is that they quickly land on their proverbial feet — that they find a place that supports them, their work and their mission. I hope they go on to create even better social media and web experiences for disabled users.

For the disability communities of Twitter, I am wish I had a positive outlook. Social media has been a major part of our organizing since, well, social media became a thing. It’s also how our communities, dispersed all over the world connect with each other. After all, about a quarter of all people — I’ve even heard up to a third — identify as disabled for a wide variety of reasons.

Without accessibility at Twitter being supported, certainly Twitter should not be the social media of choice for disabled communities.

Likewise, as human rights teams, curation teams, pubic policy teams and other teams supporting tools that assist and protect communities have been deeply cut or eliminated, I am beginning to wonder if what the future is of Twitter.

What I do know is it will be resigned to the history books of social media and content sites collecting dust.

Will we remember it with rose colored glasses like MySpace?

Or will we remember it as it going down in disgrace?

Or will it be, “Hey, whatever happened to Twitter?”

I’m grieving too

I’m grieving too

I’ve thought a lot about grief.

When I was 15, I lost my maternal grandfather with whom I was very close. I woke up at approximately the time of his death — somewhere around 2:30-something in the morning — and could not go back to sleep. The faith in which I was raised had very organized rituals around death and grieving, but it didn’t help at the time.

And I still grieve his loss to this day.

In the past few years, I’ve lost a number of childhood friends to different cancers. In the past few weeks, a dear friend who was suffering from Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (EDS) and its related pain and destruction chose to apply for Canada’s version of physician-assisted suicide. I don’t blame her; she’s been under 100 lbs. from related gastroparesis for years in addition to dealing with the physical pain, organ failure, and so much more. Then, this week, a friend of my family who was like a second mother to me also died after struggling decades with another connective tissue disorder, systemic scleroderma.

I’m grieving the best way I know how: writing about it, distracting myself, humor and more distraction.

A lot of distraction.

I can’t even tweet about the hurricanes, to tell you the truth, because for the most part it brings back some painful memories that I try to not engage. I’ve been sticking with health news and a few funny things here and there.

I’m terrible at grieving.

Then again, I don’t think anyone can say they are “good at” grieving. We have this idea that grief comes in neat emotions: sadness, anger, denial, bargaining and then we come out the other side. Or something like that. There’s variations. Hell, even corporations have gotten in on the “grief” curve and adapted it to their purposes.

The thing is, grief is messy. Emotion comes how it comes: sometimes all at once, sometimes delayed.

When I was officially diagnosed with EDS, after four decades of living with symptoms of the disease and its related cruelty, I spent the first few weeks elated. I had answers. I had answers after decades of begging people to listen to me, to stop telling me it was all in my head. Then when I came back to my regular health care system with a list of recommendations from the geneticist/EDS specialist but couldn’t get the help I needed because doctors here either disagreed or saw me as a loose confederation of organs, the anger began to set in. The anger lasted months. And months.

And months.

Until it became all consuming.

That’s when I started exploring grief. I bought fresh copies of “On Death and Dying” and “Grief and Grieving,” by the late Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, and I went to an intensive therapy program. I tried to write a book about grieving diagnoses, be they chronic, terminal or both.

It helped personally, but I couldn’t finish my book about grief. (I blame this on the fact that I’ve never written an article more than a few thousand words. A book? Inconceivable!)

Now that I’m personally grieving and that so many are grieving following almost three years of a destructive pandemic, two terrible back-to-back hurricanes, the war in Ukraine, the never-ending civil war in Syria, the proxy war no one likes to talk about in Yemen, and so much more death and injustice around the world that I’m not even listing here, I thought it was time to try writing about grief again.

But all I can come up with is this:

Your grief is valid.

Your anger, confusion, sadness, bargaining, denial, crude humor, tears, awkward laughter and however you are muddling through it are valid.

Feeling it all at once is valid. Not feeling it for a while is valid. Distraction so you don’t feel overwhelmed is valid. Doing the next right thing, proverbially putting one foot in front of the other to get through the day and just breathing is valid.

Just surviving is valid.

Your grief is valid.

You are valid.

You are valid.

Lessons from a rescue dog

Lessons from a rescue dog

Four years ago, I had puppy-fever.

Whenever I saw a puppy, I cooed. I walked unabashedly up to the puppy’s human and said, “May I snuggle your puppy?” I repeatedly, wistfully said to my partner, “I want a puppy.”

At the time, we were living in a crowded one-bedroom apartment graciously shared with us by our 7-year-old dog who my partner had taken in from a rehoming situation only a few years prior and our almost 2-year-old skittish cat that we had adopted from the Humane Society the previous fall.

Let’s be real: It’s their world and we just live in it.

In the time we had been together, his dog became my dog. But wouldn’t a puppy just complete our little family?

“I want a puppy,” I’d say as we snuggled in to watch a movie and a cute little blob of fur waddled into frame.

“Ooooh, puhp-PEEE!” I’d coo as we walked by the pet store’s window display with pictures of baby dogs playing with toys.

One cold November evening, as I waited for my partner to return home from work and errands, my phone rang. “Come to the back door,” he said.

Oh no, I thought, what huge thing did he buy? I looked around the apartment and imagined rearranging for his new indulgence. That’s when I heard strange sounds clattering up the back metal steps.

He swung open the back door and walked in with a gangly puppy, nearly all skin and bones whose paws seemed to go in all directions. I gasped and dropped to the floor. The puppy ran over to me as if he already knew me and crawled into my lap and began licking my face in earnest.

“What’s this?” I asked?

“You said you wanted a puppy,” my partner said, “so I got you a puppy.”

I looked at the wild-eyed thing in front of me. His fur smelled of urine, he was wearing a Thunder Shirt, and every bone in his body was visible – even those under his Thunder Shirt. It would be days later that I learned the whole full story of how my partner picked out this puppy. And for that, I’ll tell it like he – a fantastic storyteller – tells it.

My partner and I both have a dedication to adopting. He decided as we already had one who had been rehomed (and prior to that was a side-of-the road rescue, then a graduate of a prison training program, then an underutilized adoptee) and another who was an adoptee from a no-kill high quality shelter, he would visit “the worst of the worst” shelters: the county pound. He said many dogs – big, medium and little – caught his eye. But there was this tiny strange looking creature in the back of a small cage who met his gaze. Every time he walked by, the dog was barking non-stop. As he and the pup locked eyes, the strange looking dog would stop barking – just for a moment.

“I’d like to see that puppy, please,” he told the shelter attendant.

The attendant – a 6-foot-something burly man with a shaved head and muscles as big as my partner’s head – told him, “That guy? You don’t want him. He’s crazy.”

My partner persisted, he related to me later, and the attended gave in, picking up the tiny dog, a golden miniature pincher, under one arm.

“This guy is crazy,” the attendant ominously warned again. In fact, it turned out, this puppy had already been adopted twice and returned to the shelter after only a couple days each time. A two-time reject. Before that? The scars on his body and in his behavior told the story: there was a healed tear in his ear and old scars everywhere, and they had the dog labeled as a year old. The dog, full of “behavior problems” and deemed unadoptable, was likely to be euthanized.

In a meeting “room,” the puppy bounced off the walls, occasionally pausing in my partner’s lap. But he said, he saw something in the puppy, maybe that he needed the kind of radical love we could provide, that we could provide him with a chance to live or even that the strange creature could provide us with something.

“We’ll take him,” my partner told the attendant.

Again, the attendant warned him off. “This guy? This guy is crazy.”

“Great,” my partner said. “His kind of crazy will fit with our kind of crazy.”

With a small payment and a name and address, the puppy was ours.

At his first physical exam at the veterinarian, we soon found out that dog was younger than a year. We called in a behavioralist and learned it was likely that he had experienced head trauma. The pound had sent him home on trazadone; we worked with first one vet and then another more familiar with traumatized and injured dogs until we came up with a medication regiment right for him. Still, what we knew about our dog is that what he needed most was time and love.

In that first year, the puppy learned how to eat and drink out of a bowl, how to walk on a leash, how to properly potty outside, to bark a whole lot less and how to play. It took two years to get him up to a healthy weight.

Last year, he finally started becoming more comfortable being apart from me, going off to his dog bed on his own to nap whenever he wants.

This November will mark the fourth anniversary since we adopted the unadoptable puppy. He physically and mentally still acts a lot like a puppy. We continue to have trouble with barking inappropriately. He still plays like a puppy. He still gets scared like a puppy. He still flops his legs around like a puppy. He even still looks like a puppy.

In these years, as a family, we have also learned a lot of patience and unconditional love. This dog will not develop on anyone else’s schedule. He is joyous and loving, and very smart, but he is going to grow up on his own timeline. And we’re not going to rush it in anyway.