an open letter to people who make fun of people with food allergies

by Morgan Dyer

It’s really trendy right now to shit on people with food allergies. All those special snowflake millennials with their funny diets! In a broader sense, people really like shitting on people with invisible disabilities. Tale as old as time.

 If you’re one of these people, look, I get it. You’re insecure about yourself so you need to find something stupid that you didn’t even work for to make yourself seem superior to someone else. But the real question is, who even asked? Or, perhaps, you are of the group that subscribes to the belief that if you can’t see the disability, it’s not real.

 You think your personal opinion on how someone else’s body works is actually important, and you don’t stop to think that they may have heard it a hundred times before. You think you’re special and interesting. I’ll let you in on a huge secret… we have!! We’ve heard “you only developed that allergy when you stopped eating that” one-thousand times before, and it’s still not true! We’ve heard all the jokes, and they’re not funny! 

You are akin to the people who say that if you don’t want to be depressed, you should smile more. Maybe drink more water, exercise, stop taking your meds. You’re like the people that walk around claiming vaccines give you the flu. THAT’S what you sound like. You don’t care about the fact that the person you are regurgitating your half-baked opinion on has to deal with this disability and the surrounding stigma and misinformation every day. 

You probably don’t even know that a single epipen costs upwards of $500, and you wouldn’t care if you did. You don’t care that it already makes them feel like a huge nuisance to everybody around them in really small ways that you would never think of because you got lucky. You only care about yourself! So if you make fun of people for having invisible illnesses or disabilities, ask yourself this one question; who asked you?