Why Don't You Believe Me?

Many of you have probably seen the Facebook page, Your Allergies Are Bullshit. They are an anonymous person with a couple hundred supporters claiming that food allergies are made up for attention. According to them, allergists function for money, parents invent their children's allergies so that they can get attention, and those old enough to know better are inventing their own allergies for attention. Unfortunately, Facebook, despite having policies against these things, is letting the page stay up. Apparently it doesn't qualify as "abusive behavior directed at private individuals," "hate speech," "harassment," or "[attacking] others based on their . . . disability or medical condition." All of these violate Facebook's community standards. I personally think that several of their [highly offensive] pictures (which I will not post, as I don't want to condone or promote them) completely violate these terms; but, upon review, Facebook still will not remove them.

On that lovely note, I will get to the point here: food allergies are not a joke. Nobody with food allergies would wish this condition on their worst enemy. I could get shot in the chest and potentially live, but touch a lunchroom table and potentially die. Why would anybody fake that? How would anybody fake that? You can't exactly force your throat to swell shut. You can't induce hives (without some sort of an allergen, at least). You don't call cancer fake, you don't call diabetics whiny, so why do it with food allergies? The author of this page obviously doesn't know anybody with food allergies, so they don't have to put up with those of us who do talk about it a little too much (sorry, but it kinda impacts my entire life). So why don't they believe us? Are they bitter because they went to a nut-free school? Or maybe they just don't want to face the harsh reality of our situation.

In the face of this issue, the food allergy community must band together for support. There is a new page, Our Food Allergies Aren't a Joke (renamed from Our Food Allergies Aren't Bullshit) which already has three times as many likes as the original page. So I guess my rant has come to down to this: somebody tried so hard to make fun of our disability that they just made us rise up stronger. We now must fight even harder against food allergy bullying than we already were. With food allergies, we learn who our real friends and supporters are. I now know some pretty badass allergic teens who I wouldn't have met otherwise. Thanks to Lily and Reed for setting up a petition against the page to try to get it removed. Just remember to keep fighting for what you know is right. If you want to take a stand against the harmful page and others who may not treat our allergies with respect, consider using one of these pictures as your profile picture or cover photo.