When Kindness Isn’t Kind: Living Under Benevolent Ableism
- Elle Dee
- Sep 22
- 5 min read
Updated: Oct 8
Benevolent ableism rarely announces itself as harm.
It often looks like kindness. A smile. A compliment. A hand reaching out before I’ve even asked.
It sounds like, “You’re so inspiring” for doing something ordinary. Or, “Let me just take care of that for you.”
But what feels generous on the outside can hollow me out on the inside. It isn’t cruel in the obvious sense. It’s softer, trickier. And that’s what makes it so destructive.
The velvet cage
I’ve learned not to bring help into the projects that matter most to me. Not because I don’t want connection or collaboration. But because help rarely stays help for long.
It begins as support and ends with my entire vision rewritten. Their way “makes more sense.” Their method is quicker, easier, smarter.
Soon, the project I envisioned is gone, and I’m working on something I never cared about in the first place.
And once I’m in that place, the choices narrow. I can speak up and offend them or I can stay quiet and disappear.
Neither option protects what mattered to me in the first place. So I make the only choice that feels survivable: I keep my life small enough to carry alone.
That’s always been one of the costlier aspects of benevolent ableism for me. It quietly limits the different lives I'll even bother imagining for myself.
The scorekeeping of benevolent ableism
Unsolicited help doesn’t always just disappear after the moment passes. I've learned it often gets counted. Tallied up and kept on hand as ready proof of how much has already been “given” to me.
And that tally doesn’t just sit quietly in the background. It changes how I’m seen.
Instead of being recognized as someone who contorts myself more than I should to avoid needing help, I get cast as a high-investment relationship. In their minds, they’re constantly accommodating me. Constantly adjusting around me. Constantly sacrificing.
But what they’re counting as sacrifice are the very interventions I never wanted in the first place. Efforts that diminish rather than expand me. Acts that replace my choices with theirs.
But again, I’m forced into a choice. I can accept this unearned debt and live quietly within it or I can push back and be framed as ungrateful.
What I'd give if one of the options was simply asking for what I need.
This is what benevolent ableism does when it keeps score. Something it seems to do a lot. It turns generosity into a weapon. It rewrites too many of my relationships so I am always indebted, always less, always wrong for asking.
The loneliness of the pedestal
There’s a particular kind of isolation that comes when I’m applauded for simply existing.
On the surface, it looks like admiration. But inside, it feels like something else entirely.
A pedestal isn’t closeness. It’s distance. It puts me high enough to be admired but too far away to be held. And the loneliness of that distance is real.
And here’s the nasty little trap: once I’ve been placed on that pedestal, there are only two options.
I can accept the distance. Play the role. Keep shining in the way others want me to shine. Maintain their expectations of me as a symbol of all things good.
Or I can start showing up authentically. Which means they’ll compare the real me - the full me, the human me - to the impossible ideal they’ve built in their minds. A symbol designed to make it easier to overlook the parts of me that are less enjoyable.
Neither option is closeness. Both leave me alone. Because being admired is not the same as being loved. And being put on a pedestal is just another form of being kept apart.
What real care feels like
The difference between benevolent ableism and real care is stark.
Benevolent ableism always leaves me trapped: accept help that erases me, or push back and be punished. Live in debt, or be called ungrateful. Stay on the pedestal, or be torn down from it. With vigor.
Real care removes the traps altogether.
It doesn’t assume what I need and then count it against me. It asks. It listens. And when I speak those needs it trusts that they're real.
Real care doesn’t pity my struggle or polish me into a symbol. It meets me where I actually am, without turning me into proof of anything.
It offers support in the shape I ask for, not in the shape that feels satisfying to the giver. And it doesn’t rewrite my vision. It makes space for me to live it.
Real care feels like oxygen after being smothered. It feels like finally breathing in my own life.
It seems like an easy ask
The hardest part of benevolent ableism is that it convinces everyone - including me - that I should be grateful for it.
That my hurt is an exaggeration.
That my longing for something different is unreasonable.
But the grief is real because the cost is real.
Entire paths are abandoned, not because I lacked capacity, but because there was no safe way to protect them from being taken over.
Entire needs go unmet, not because they were more than I deserved, but because warped scorekeeping rewrote the story.
Entire pieces of my life have been lived lonelier than they had to be, not because I wanted isolation, but because the pedestal kept me at a distance.
The hurt feels this big because it is this big.
True kindness doesn’t shrink me.
True care doesn’t trap me under glass.
It trusts me.
It meets me where I am.
And it leaves me free to carry forward the life I choose.
That is the only care worthy of being called kindness.
-Elle
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