7:59am June 25, 2013

➸ "You don't need this junk. You need a cat.": I can't sleep so I'll write about why I hate medical ideas and language even though I need them.

youneedacat:

I am tired of something I don’t even know how to name.

People are always demanding diagnoses. More specifically, they want more than just even a list of diagnoses, which is hard enough.

They want explanations of each and every thing I can’t do, broken down by diagnosis. Worse, they want…

This is a long post but I’m reblogging as a link because the whole thing is worth reading.

Because people believe in words and stories, not experiences or reality. If something fits into the stories they believe, they accept it as real. If it doesn’t, they dismiss it. Most people never in their lives drop it if their stories for one second to wonder about it. Some of them have even created whole philosophies based on the idea stories are all there is, however ridiculous that sounds. I have stories too but I can get out of them sometimes. I’m told that makes me unusual. But the difference between stories and reality is its own kind of pain.

This is interesting and extremely frightening. Maybe I am doing the pulling-apart thing you are complaining about by just picking these words to focus on, but I am… scared. And there is a good kind of scared and a bad kind of scared mixed up.

The bad kind of scared is that it makes me panic that I am fundamentally wrong, that my brain is fundamentally and unfixably wrong, because I cannot think outside language.

The good kind of scared is about challenging my stories.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it as a cognitive style. I do think there’s something wrong with imposing it on everyone or actually believing there’s nothing else in the world. Like I know language exists even if my brain doesn’t ever want to deal with it, but a lot of people act like nothing at all exists but language or abstract ideas about the world even when faced with evidence otherwise and that can harm people.

Notes: