5:50am July 27, 2015

This is not going in the tags for really good reason.

It’s also going under a cut because it’s one of the most triggering things I’ve read in my entire life.

It’s triggering because it’s real.  Because I have had people look at me and think the kind of thoughts described.  I know because they’ve said it.  In front of me.  In front of others they thought this kind of thing about.

It’s triggering because it’s by an author who I otherwise adore and respect and look up to, who writes stories that are so close to the way I view the world – a world where literally everything is alive and can be talked to if you only know the language. 

And yet she wrote this.  And put it in the mouth of a character people respect, Dr. Crusher from ST:TNG.  And it’s used to increase and augment the horror level in a book where the horror stems from the idea of a creature that eats people’s minds and leaves them as empty shells.  So what does the author do?  Take a well-respected doctor character and put words in her mouth about how she could handle all sorts of horrible experiences but she couldn’t handle looking at people with severe developmental disabilities living in an institution because they were humans without minds and this meant they weren’t human and this haunted her until she nearly had a breakdown. 

And that’s so specific, and so much like things I’ve heard before from medical professionals, that I have to believe that it’s taken from someone’s real life experience.  The author was once a psychiatric nurse, so it could have been her own experience or that of a colleague or friend, but I have trouble believing that such a detailed, intimate description of this came out of nowhere.  Especially because I’ve heard it before.  Multiple times.

But it hurts really bad coming out of a book by someone I deeply respect, whose books themselves are usually filled with deep respect for everything and everyone living and the idea that even inanimate objects are alive in a sense and can be talked to and interacted with.  And I have trouble reconciling a world where rocks can be persuaded to do things, with a world where it’s possible to think there’s a kind of human who has no mind (and I mean no mind at all, not even a sensing or pre-sensing mind, because those are kinds of minds too in this context, even if some people use ‘mind’ to mean ‘abstract thought’) because of a developmental disability.

Also disturbing that in the seemingly utopian future of ST:TNG they apparently still have institutions, but I’m willing to concede that most people can’t imagine a world without them, so that’s really not my problem with this.

Anyway the book is called Intellivore and you can find the name of the author if you go digging, and you won’t have to dig hard because there’s only one book with that name to my knowledge.  But I am not trying to “call out” the author.  If anyone flames or hurts the author because of what I have said here, then they are not acting on my intent in any way, shape, or form.  Everyone has deep and hurtful bigotry somewhere inside them.  Everyone.  You.  Me.  Everyone.  She just happened to put a very bigoted idea in the mouth of a character without qualifying it in any way to make it look bad, and I think that’s an extremely horrible thing to do, and a huge lapse on her part, but I refuse to think of her as an awful person because of it, which is why I’m not naming her in this post.

The reason I’m putting this quote here at all, the reason I’m talking about this at all, is because it’s one of the most deeply hurtful and triggering things I have ever read in a book of any kind about anyone ever, and it’s in such stark contrast to the actual values of the author, and the way she builds worlds both in the Star Trek universe and in other universes she writes in (which overlap more than you’d imagine… I totally see wizardry happening in her Star Trek books sometimes).

Anyway, just be warned that the quote is truly awful before you go under the cut and read it.  When I first read it, I was not the same for at least a month, because of how badly it triggered me and how low my defenses were when I read it (because I trusted the author in ways I don’t normally trust authors and got the rug pulled out from under me but good because I have been in the position of the people being described and no amount of Not Like My Childing means I haven’t had the experience of being considered a soulless empty shell on a regular basis at times in my life).

I don’t normally trigger warn very effectively, but I can tell you a massive trigger warning for uncritical “empty shell” stories that sound like they were lifted straight out of real life.  Read at your own risk.  Maybe I’m making too much of how awful this was, but for me it was a soul-rending experience to read it in a way that I’ve rarely experienced upon reading any book of any kind ever, so I imagine it might hit other people the same way if caught unawares the way I was.   Put your defenses up before you read this, you’ll need them if you’re in any way aware of the enormity of what’s being said here.

So the following quote is from Dr. Crusher after they discover a creature that’s eating the minds of people and leaving their bodies behind as empty shells:

“A long time ago,” she said, “when I was just starting my training, they were taking us around to various facilities to show us the way various kinds of medical treatment were being implemented for people with different kinds of problems. I was"—she laughed at herself—"a pretty tough cookie, or thought I was. They showed us all frightening things—things that really upset some of the other students—and they didn’t bother me. I was kind of proud of that. Then, one day, they took us to a school for people with mental disabilities. Very young children, mostly. Some of them were well enough to ride around on little trikes or say a few words. Some of them weren’t that well at all. Most of them weren’t. There was a big playroom, and there were children there who simply stood against the wall—one or two who couldn’t be stopped from hitting the walls, so the walls, naturally, were soft. And there were a few who just stood, or sat, and looked. Looked out into space, didn’t see anything, didn’t hear you when you spoke to them. And it just hit me, suddenly, the waste of it all, the sheer waste. Here were children at the beginnings of their lives; they should have had everything to live for. Everything. But a misplaced gene, or a misdiagnosis in utero, or something else—in each of their cases something had gone wrong, something that not even our medicine could do anything about, not all our drugs and treatments and know-how would ever matter. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been there. Calling the place a school was a dreadful misnomer, or whistling in the dark, at best. Certainly these children had committed professionals around them, doing everything possible to make them comfortable, giving them affection and good care…but it would never matter. None of it would matter.” Crusher kept walking quietly. “And I broke down,” she said. “I cried for almost an hour—I just couldn’t stop. They had to take me away and calm me down, and for the next couple of days I would just start crying again, without warning, at the memory of that place. All my instructors were worried about me. I couldn’t explain to them that it was simply because, in that pretty, sunny building I had seen the most horrible thing in the world. Human beings without the thing that makes them human, without minds. Creatures meant to be thinking beings. What’s the line?  ‘A little less than the angels.’ And there would never be anyone inside, no matter what we did.”

I can’t even.  I have never felt by a book, so badly hurt, so badly slapped in the face, as when I read this.  And it was not just what was said.  It was definitely what was said, that was bad enough.  But it was the fact that it was put in the mouth of a respected and thoughtful character.  And it was the fact that nobody in the entire book questioned this view of the world.  And it was the fact that I trusted the author so thoroughly based on all her other works (I’ve read everything I can find by her, she’s in my top five authors of all time) that I never in a million years saw it coming.

I saw fatphobia (often of the “I’m just concerned with health” variety, but fatphobia nonetheless) coming, it’s in all her books and I can ‘read around’ it.  But with everything in every book of hers I’ve ever read, I never ever could have seen this coming in the context it came in.  It came out of nowhere and it made me feel like the entire world had turned into a void and swallowed me up and left me in hell.  For weeks, I had a strong urge to write her letters that would have only convinced her there was something wrong with me.  I couldn’t leave it alone, it became intolerable.  But eventually I just decided that after finishing the book, I would never again open that book, and I haven’t.

I don’t know if she’ll read this post.  I kind of hope she won’t.  I don’t want her to think I hate her.  I don’t know that I want to have the inevitable conversation I always have with people who say things like this to me.  The one where I say that I’m often viewed as an empty shell, and other people assure me that I’m different because clearly if I were ever the kind of empty shell Those People are, then i would never be able to tell anyone about it.  Neat trick, that, because when people see me as an empty shell they think I’m one of Those People, but when I speak out about what it’s like to have people see you as an empty shell, they say You’re Not Like Those People.  And I can’t have that conversation again, it’s wearying and triggering and exhausting as hell.  And I do mean hell.

And that’s without the conversation about what it’s like when you don’t have enough thoughts to string together to understand the difference between light and dark or other basic, basic concepts about the world.  What it’s like to be a “human non-person” by Peter-Singer-type standards, unaware of your existence through time, without a sense of identity, without a sense of much of anything.  And how even with as little of what most people call mind as that, you’re still a person, you’re still human, and I know because I’ve been there many times.

And also what it’s like to be fully aware and functioning inside but unable to show it in a way most people understand, and the way people react to you, and the things they say in front of you, and how sitting and staring with no apparent response to the world outside means nothing about your inner life at all.

Dr. Crusher – and whoever’s experiences that was based on, because I know for a fact that could not have come wholesale out of imagination alone – needs to read First Contact by Dave Hingsburger, at minimum.  Because oh gods is she doing the thing where you look at another person but can’t step out of the mirror enough to actually see them.

Because nobody who understands what a human being is could, at the same time as understanding what a human being is, look at a human being – “staring at nothing” or not, rocking or not doing odd things or not, banging their heads or not – and think those thoughts about them.  Much less have a near-breakdown because of it.

And I can’t tell you how much that passage hurt me, in ways I didn’t think I could be hurt anymore, when I first read it.  And how long it took me to recover from reading it.

So this is not going into the tags, partly because I can’t stand the thought of having to defend the fact that I found it so traumatic to read, and the author reads tumblr and I don’t want her to find it on her tag or anything.  She might find it anyway, but this is not a conversation I can have with her, the passage already hurt me too deeply to take that risk.  I still love everything else she ever wrote that I’ve managed to find and read, I still think she’s the only author who’s come close to describing the richness and fullness of the way I experience the world in a fictional context, there’s so much right… but this one thing is horribly wrong and I can’t un-wrong it and I’m not sure she can either.

Just remember, don’t attack her “on my behalf” (or on anyone’s behalf), and don’t assume I’m saying she’s an awful person.  Like it or not, I’m sure I have views somewhere in my brain that are just as awful.  And yes, I know, these are words that were put in the mouth of a fictional character.  But I also know that if the words were not, on some level, meant, then the topic would’ve been handled with some degree of sensitivity.  And there was no sensitivity at all to be found anywhere, just this passage, unquestioned and more horrifying to me than the actual horror stuff in the book.  Because I’ve been the person other people look at and say that’s an empty shell of a person who isn’t really human and isn’t really alive and can’t really think – both at times when my thinking was perfectly intact, and at times when my thinking was so severely compromised that most people wouldn’t call what was going on with me “thought” (and in some cases I have no memory of the actual time in question because I didn’t have enough going on to encode memories).  But I was never not a person, I was never missing what it was to be human, never.

I still need to make my “Am I a person yet?” video and this is reminding me of that.  But I have other videos I have to make even before that, so yeah.  Priorities and everything.

Anyway.  I wanted to put this out there so people knew about it, and so people knew how deeply statements like this can wound, and that it being in the mouth of a fictional character doesn’t make it better unless other fictional characters are actively questioning it and engaging with the ideas in ways that just did not even close to begin to happen here.  Plus I know that it is not really fiction.  Because I’ve heard too many real life people say this, this exact thing, in this exact way, about exact types of people (especially people considered and/or assumed to be severely intellectually disabled and/or severely autistic), for me to believe this came out of nowhere in someone’s imagination.  No, this had to be based on some level on the real experiences of either the author or someone the author had known or read about.  And people who write things like this never expect anyone who’s been seen that way, to come back and read the things they wrote, because they assume we never could.  Even though lots of people who were considered completely empty shells as kids (or as adults for that matter, or some of the time but not other times, because some people look “empty” sometimes and not others and get considered that way at some times in our lives but not others) go on to learn to read and write and speak and very much do read books like this. 

And it cuts deeper than I’ve ever been cut by something I have read.  And that’s just the truth.  I can’t put it any plainer.  This hurts, bad, every time I read it.  And that’s kept me from writing about it very often.  But I just mentioned it in another post and I had to write about it here for some reason.

Oh also please don’t assume anything about my entire life story based on what I’ve said here.  Chances are unless you actually know me, you’ll get it very wrong.  It doesn’t fit any of the conventional stories you’re told about people who get considered empty shells.  I was not, for instance, considered an empty shell throughout my entire childhood until I was one day discovered to actually be intelligent, or something like that.  But I’ve nonetheless been considered an empty shell many times over for many reasons, and I’ve dealt with severe cognitive impairments of various kinds, and… lots of things.  There’s no shortcut to knowing my life story, it simply doesn’t fit any conventional disability “narrative” (am I using that word right?  I feel weird using it at all, like I’m being a literary critic instead of a developmentally disabled person who’s been badly hurt by certain ideas about people like me) or even half of the unconventional ones.  The only way to know my life is to know me personally until you get some idea what it really is.

Anyway this post has exhausted me beyond belief to write.  So I’m going to post it now.  I hope I didn’t give anyone else flashbacks or panic attacks or that horrible feeling of the floor dropping out from under you and descending into hell or something.

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