as small as a world and as large as alone

3:25pm June 3, 2013

josiahd:

youneedacat:

Trying to find the right words: The problem with shut up and learn on your own…

shwetanarayan:

josiahd:

is that…

…people can’t really do that…

I mean, it’s important to leave people alone. And to not expect every member of a group to educate you. And *really* important to back the fuck off when people tell you to.

But that doesn’t mean go fucking google it actually works as a way for people to…

I dunno… I agree that google doesn’t work unless you know enough to know what search terms you want; but I have learned an awful lot from following people who *do* choose to talk about their oppressions and their experience. I tend to default to keeping my mouth shut because I don’t want to add my cluelessness to the shit anyone else is dealing with, and even so I’ve certainly learned enough to be able to look things up.

Yeah that’s absolutely true, I’ve learned a lot that way too and tend to keep my mouth shut more often than not on a lot of things. But I think the point is that it’s not possible for everyone to do that. Only some people. And that it’s not entirely fair to expect everyone to automatically be able to do it, and to treat people as if they’re doing something wrong if they can’t.

It’s sort of like a different problem I encounter in similar contexts: I’m not able to just “find another word” for a lot of things, even though many people can. And there are people I will absolutely for instance accept the word “retarded” from (not as an insult, of course) because they literally can’t think up other words or remember the other words or keep up every time you’re supposed to change words.

My most serious trouble with that is within the trans community, which seems to change its terminology so much that I have no possible way of keeping up, and I’m scared shitless of even trying to describe gender because I was in the trans community when things like bio female was okay to say, and my brain refuses to learn the new terminology even though I have a pretty deep understanding of the nonverbal realities beneath the terminology. I’ve even heard people get in trouble for saying transgendered instead of transgender. Even when they themselves were trans. And I know I’d get shit for saying non gendered bio female to describe myself, but it’s the only thing my brain will do, I have a language disability and it’s a miracle I learned the terminology at all, my brain creates mini explosions with a lot of neologisms and acronyms.

I’ve been saying for a long time, that being unable to use the current right words isn’t nearly as important as having a deep understanding of the situation. And there are tons and tons of people who for tons and tons of reasons can’t say all the right words yet are not in any other way doing anything wrong, and may be doing a lot right. In fact I’d frankly rather deal with someone who calls me a slur or at least a word that’s highly out of favor, yet otherwise treats me with respect, than someone who is careful to use every single proper word but treats me as subhuman. Not that those are the only two options, but I do see both of those situations a lot and I definitely prefer the one where the person grasps how to treat me right, rather than how to say the right things.

And that’s connected to the original post because… There are always going to be people who are really good at being and doing the right thing, yet who can’t live up to the standards certain communities set for them. Whether it is not being able to use the right words. Or not being able to find and listen to and get to all the right conversations and google everything to find all the right information. Or not being able to remember everyone’s pronouns (that is really hard for me especially online and no I can’t just look them up). Or otherwise just not being able to live up to these standards that are taken for granted in certain communities. And people shouldn’t automatically be treated as bad or wrong when they can’t do these things, even when there are good reasons for wishing they could do these things, and even when there are obvious situations where things can go badly in the other direction (as the OP noted). That’s at least I think what the OP was getting at. Not that people need to be all teaching everyone, but that it’s just not possible for everyone to learn on their own no matter what the topic.

Yeah, I can learn from watching conversations. And reading fictional stories of the right sort. Can and do. Don’t always need to participate. Shouldn’t always participate. Important not to bother people or derail.

But there are a number of things I can *only* learn interactively. And the high-level philosophical conversations about privilege and intersectionality and stuff are almost entirely incomprehensible to me. I can tell in retrospect from actual conversations and examples that they have meaningful content. I can’t get it from reading them. Can’t. No matter how hard I try. And that’s not a moral failing.

And that”s common. Really, really common.

And it’s not ok to tell people they suck as human beings because they aren’t doing something that’s impossible for them.

And almost every time I’ve tried to talk about this, I’ve gotten dumped on by people calling me some kind of *ist. Including *ist against groups I’m part of, because their ideology says that if you don’t buy into “go fucking google it”, and you care about the inaccessibility of (for lack of a better phrase) social justice discourse, then you must just be too privileged to give a shit about anyone.

Yeah that.

I actually started compiling a list of words I can’t understand that are commonly used in that kind of conversation. Words that I not only can’t understand easily, but that create miniature explosions in my head every time I read them. It’s on my computer that has no battery right now. But it’s a really long list. Really long. And the words are commonly used. Really commonly. So basically these conversations are frequently inaccessible to me.

And I’ve gotten a lot of shit for that too.

I have gotten some very angry responses to the fact that I can’t easily understand the word intersectionality, especially can’t connect it to its meaning reliably. Very angry people. People actually trying to tell me I don’t understand how multiple oppressions and… opposite of oppressions and stuff connect, because I must not experience that.

Mind you, I’m disabled (cognitively, physically, emotionally, chronic illness, chronic pain, developmentally, progressively, etc.). I don’t really have a gender, can be read as male or female in different situations (or the ever popular “he… Uh she… Uh he… Uh… THE PERSON…” as a cab driver once said into his radio). I’m what would have been called bio-female back when you could say that without getting jumped on (see also language problems I described in my last post on this thread). I tend to identify as lesbian (please don’t tell me I can’t do that if I have no gender, reality is waaaay more complicated than that). I am poor and have a complicated sort of mixed-class background (family has been poor and working class forever but when I grew up parents had middle class money but jobs that were technically closer to upper working class and I went to a school with a lot of upper middle class and rich kids for four years and now my parents are poor again and so am I). I am non-Christian (don’t know the best word for my spiritual belief system, I normally shy away from pagan but that may be the best word, and it’s not a choice for me, it’s the only way my brain will work at the moment… I sort of have two religions one of which has gods one which doesn’t, each applying to a different working-mode of my brain sort of, and then an underlying spirituality that both the religions are just different interface systems for based on how my brain works). I am white in a family that was mixed a couple generations back (but still am definitely white now, I don’t identify as mixed). I am from the USA and speak English. And… Etc. It would probably take an entire book to describe all the little nuances of all this.

All that. And yet people tell me that because I can’t use certain words and they make my head explode, then I must not understand what it means to have multiple forms of oppression and lack thereof interacting with each other. In reality I think I have a much more nuanced understanding of these things than a lot of people who tell me that do. Because I don’t use the same intellectual system to understand them, at all, and it turns out very different results.

But because I don’t use the right language, don’t generally write a tidy list of my oppressions and lack thereof on the front of my blog, etc., people have actually told me I don’t understand any of this at all, and it’s extremely frustrating and condescending.

I’ve had people explain the definitions to me over and over and over and over and over as if the problem is I just haven’t been told enough. I’ve had people tell me I’m not really oppressed because if I did I’d understand their language. I’ve had people tell me I don’t understand the concepts because I don’t understand the language. I’ve had people tell me I don’t understand the concepts because my understanding of the concepts comes from a totally different cognitive state than theirs.

(And they rarely see that my cognitive states might create actual advantages, not just disadvantages, in the understanding of how oppression works. And that I might know lots of things I can’t talk about at all. And that if I never talk about them, it’s because I either don’t understand or don’t care.)

(And that’s besides the fact that sometimes I actually think their concepts have problems with them. And that sometimes the fact that I “can’t understand” something comes from the fact that it’s an abstraction that has more to do with being an intellectual or academic (whether they are connected to schools or not, these words are often extremely academic in origin) than understanding how things work.)

But if I don’t have the words, then all is lost, apparently. Especially since I do have words for other things. So I must have words for everything. I must be terminally eloquent. I must be someone with a wonderful grasp on receptive language because my expressive language can be very wordy at times. Never mind that the wordiness is actually a symptom of a language problem itself. But the point is they see me writing about some things and not others so they think if I don’t write about something I must not know or care about it.

A bit of important reality:

There are far more things I can’t write about than things I can. Things I can write about are on a small number of topics in a narrow range on each topic. All of which I’ve spent years coming up with and forming words for. Often years that felt like slamming my head against a wall and getting nowhere over and over again.

It’s sort of like the iceberg idea The things I can write about are the parts that stick above the water. But most of the things I can actually understand are below the water and never see the light of day. One of my friends once described my brain as like a bunch of caves, with huge amounts of stored sensory information in them, and things I know and think about, but that have very narrow entrances that are only open at certain times and extremely difficult to find and fit through and gain access to. She was completely right.

But most people ignore what’s under the water, pretend it doesn’t exist, make assumptions about it, etc. Assume if I knew about it then I could talk about it. Assume that my eloquence comes easily. At least, that’s people online. A lot of people offline assume the opposite, assume there’s nothing to me at all, but that’s another story. People who know me by my words assume that words are an automatic strength of mine rather than a hard-won thing that hurts and hurts and hurts to handle and that I do only because I know I have to. I’m different from someone who could never come up with words no matter what, but I’m also different from people where words come easy and they can talk about anything they can think about. My bane are those teachers who say you can’t know something if you can’t explain it. I’m someone who has worked hard to get past a language impairment using lots of non-language skills in order to handle language, not someone who came by it naturally. The huge number of words is because I’m usually unable to find words to be concise with so I have to describe everything in minute detail. Not because I’m good with words, because I’m bad with them.

And that means trouble in places where language is everything. And yes when I question the language stuff I often get told I am being oppressive or *ist. That’s totally what happens a lot of the time.

I know I’m talking mostly about language here, but that’s because language (as well as level of abstraction and academicness) is the main way that this kind of conversation people have is inaccessible to me, and the main source of conversations where I get accused of all sorts of weird things just because I can’t understand or use certain words.

One day I will post my list of words that bite my brain. I’ve been putting it off because I have feared that people will think I’m telling them not to use certain words. I wouldn’t do that. Because that would be sort of doing more of what the problem is, in many ways. People often decide that I’m telling them not to use certain words when I talk about those words being inaccessible. But I am not. Because my writing is inaccessible to some people too – INCLUDING ME SOMETIMES – due to length. And I have gotten very angry people telling me that if I can’t write in any other way them I just don’t give a shit about them. And that’s wrong too. I can’t write any different than I write. If its long its long if its short its short. I can’t change the length of my writing without literally tearing hair out and slamming my head on things and screaming and even after that I usually can’t do it. I once drove myself into meltdowns and shutdowns all day trying to do it for someone because she kept insisting I didn’t care about her and was just being lazy if I wouldn’t summarize my writings. Then when I asked if anyone could help me summarize she sort of sneered at me and told me I wouldn’t get any help because I don’t have servants here. It was horrible. I was crying and freaking out and she told me I was bullying her by refusing to summarize my writing and that I was now playing the victim when she unleashed her rage on me and I freaked out trying my best to do what she wanted yet couldn’t. I wouldn’t want to do to anyone what was done to me that way. I know sometimes people have no choice in their writing style.

And now I’m in so much pain I can’t remember what I was writing so I’m going to stop here.

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