10:51am May 5, 2013

➸ Trying to find the right words: My personal experiences with orthorexia

Also this is why I have a serious problem with “don’t bother to tell your friends that there may be something wrong with the hugely restrictive diet they’re on supposedly for disability-related reasons, because everything a disabled person does is okay and shouldn’t be…

I don’t really know things about it other than…

I know a lot of people who get really heavily involved in trying to reconcile two things. And often the problem isn’t that there’s two things. It’s that neither of the two things are based all that much in reality.

Like one friend who wanted to figure out if it was possible to reconcile the libertarian tendencies of the psych survivor/ex-patient and self-advocacy movements with the interdependence stressed by the mainstream (primarily phys-dis) disability rights movement.

And another friend who wanted to figure out if it was possible to reconcile Ancient Greek heroic ideals with early Christian self-sacrifice. Or something like that. I forget exactly what she was talking about but it did have to do with ancient Greeks and early Christians.

I know what you talk about isn’t exactly the same, because its not a deliberate attempt to reconcile two philosophical ideals. But in some ways it has some of the same qualities. Like it’s an attempt to figure out what to do with two very different ways of seeing the world.

I can’t tell you what you should do in that situation. But my solution is generally to drop both ways of thinking entirely, like not even try to think about them or cater to them or give them any space in my head. And just work with whatever reality is left instead. Go situation by situation instead of trying to work out an overarching way to see the world or respond to the world that incorporates both. And that goes even if it’s not that you believe them, but rather you want to deal with people who believe them. I find I just can’t work within that sort of framework, so I try to step outside and find the best thing to do totally divorced from any of it.

I admit this is partly influenced by a reply I read where someone was trying to talk about what they’d do if they tried to put together a coherent way of thinking about the matter. Because to me, if you’re putting together a coherent way of thinking about the matter, you’re probably doing something wrong. Because a coherent way of thinking about reality is always going to be less real than reality, and so why not just drop down out of lots of ideas linked together coherently, into a few values you have and try to apply them to the world. Don’t know the word for it (and if someone tries to tell me a specific named form of ethics they think I mean, I will probably scream, because that’s not what I’m looking for and will only make tings worse). But I know what I’m trying to describe.

Notes: