hanging my tomorrows on the bones of yesterday

Indeed, people can have some personality traits that stay the same for decades … but then they change. And if people think that they don’t change that means they don’t notice when that happens. They represent themselves as being a way that they are not anymore out of a kind of false consciousness.

And yeah; that kind of ableist abuse of disabled children was one of the things I was thinking of when I was mentioning learned helplessness. It’s insidious stuff. I’m glad extraarcha does not have firsthand experience with being systematically denied the opportunity to be a person, but he could stand to admit that his experience is not universal.