9:08am September 3, 2012

That last post.

It hurt my head even to write it somehow.

I was fine and now I’m not.

And I wish people understood what it does to me, to watch my writing for a word and then change it. The way it takes so much energy away from writing. That painful clunky feeling as if words were huge wooden boxes that I carry on my back in order to both move them away and move them into the space left over. Until my back hurts too much to do anything other than lie on the ground and moan.

And I know that level of back pain. It’s horrible. And this is like the cognitive equivalent of that kind of literal heavy lifting. I probably permanently damaged my back lifting objects much too heavy for me. The pain made me writhe around on the floor screaming and crying, trying hard to twist my body into any position that might help.

And that’s what happens to my mind when I have to monitor my writing, move out “problematic” words, and move in “good” replacements. It’s terrible. And if I’m going to do even a little of this, I had better have a damn good reason. A reason better than any of the reasons I’ve seen so far for anything less than real slurs and words closely associated with them. I was willing to do years of heavy lifting for ‘mental retardation’ for really important reasons, although I still slip up a lot. But I rarely find words I use with that important a reason to stop.

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