Come For The Advice. Stay For The Friendship
Hannah Turner gives us an insight into her online disabled community and explains why switching off isn’t an option.
We all loved Instagram, until we hated it, but then still used it, and now we blame it for our declining mental health and vow to log off forever. Or at least for a month, a week, an hour…
The word detox is now more common as a precursor to digital than it is to its wellness ritual origins. However, what these time-outs and the constant commentary that social media is bad for our health fails to recognise is that for some, life online is their only way of finding any real connection. Some of the people who know me best live exclusively in those tiny digital squares so quitting Instagram would mean denying myself access to a virtual support system that has held me so close in the last few years.
“Mutual aid, shared knowledge and resource support is what keeps the online disabled communities together.”
Aside from the travel videos, outfit posts and viral recipes, there is a corner of instagram where you will find a blooming disabled community full of activists, writers, crafters and hackers who’ve found solace on the internet and with each other. I can be angry and grieve and shake with excitement with the internet friends I have never met, some whose faces I have never seen, avatars and dog pics fill their profile instead, all through our shared experience of illness and disability.
When I was ill in 2020, the worst I’d experience I’d had since I became sick in 2017, I spent many weeks in bed waiting for news and some kind of explanation as to how things had become so bad. A few years earlier, I had met a girl online and we chatted intermittently, ardently liking each other’s posts but it wasn't until I put a call out, in desperation really, about a persistent throb on my left hand side, that we really got to talking. Perhaps posting your intimate health details and new symptoms next to a photo of your bed could be classed as oversharing but this is common practice in the online crip and sick communities. This makes sense to me because more often than not my friends on the internet have more answers for me than a trip to A and E would ever yield.
Mutual aid, shared knowledge and resource support is what keeps the online disabled communities I know, together. Most arrive for the advice and then stay for the friendship, the solidarity; a place to grieve.
Now, my internet best friend and I talk almost every day. We exchange presents and cards and well wishes. We both live with multiple chronic illnesses, some the same, others vastly different. We have virtually held each other’s hand through two surgeries, swapped morphine high voice notes in lonely hospital wards and posted cuddly toys to greet each other when we are discharged. We laugh and cry and send a lot of memes but we’ve never met. We have planned to see each other in the flesh a few times but for one reason or another, usually sickness, it has yet to happen. We just about manage the occasional facetime, but mostly it is messages back and forth, responses to each other's close friends lists or waving through computer generated versions of ourselves in video games.
There is an unexpected freedom that comes with maintaining an online friendship as a sick and disabled woman. I suppose part of it comes from the foundations of friendship being built on something so vulnerable. There is no need for trivial niceties when we have discussed bodily fluids at great length. There is also an ease in compartmentalizing your life experiences, it’s a relief to not have to answer the “how are you’s” and “what treatment are you trying now?”
We may both be sick but there are a multitude of other interests and hobbies that connect us too. We don’t always chat sickness but when we do the shared language of solidarity makes it all feel less daunting. There is the appeal of a fresh slate too, the idea that someone didn’t know me before I was sick brings me joy not sorrow. I am still mourning the life I had before, but I am so glad to be loved so fully by someone who only knows the sick me.