12:09am August 3, 2013

➸ Urocyon's Jaunts: I don't want to be critical and on guard all the time.

youneedacat:

apihtawikosisan:

But that’s what I and so many others have to be.

My people have so many teachings about tolerance, respect, non-interference and autonomy within collective roles, and I constantly feel like I am at odds with those teachings when I question and challenge the way that others…

I get a similar tension, although possibly from different sources.

I feel like I’ve learned other people’s language and ways of communicating in order to survive. But it leaves me unable to communicate MY way except to people willing to take the time to understand me.

And it makes me feel like people who mostly know me through my writing don’t know me at all, unless they are able to look between all the words. They just see this segment of myself that was created because I couldn’t survive without learning to communicate in ways completely alien to me.

Some of which is cultural but a lot of it for me is disability related. Because I’m naturally this person who exists outside of language and understands things in a way that’s more perceptual than conceptual. But to communicate and interact, I’ve had to learn ideas and words. But that feels like a badly fitting costume, not who I am.

“Between the words” is definitely a thing. I also think of it in terms of like…words just being a carrier wave for other stuff.

And when I think of how you (youneedacat) and I (feliscorvus) initially got to know each other..it’s weird, because while it had to do with discovering each other’s writing, it was not the writing ITSELF that accomplished the getting-to-knowing. More like the patterns behind the writing. Patterns of experience and perception and ways of looking at the world, and of being in the world. It was all just bizarrely familiar. And real. Real to the point where I found it oddly reassuring that you even existed, because I hadn’t fully accepted that people “like me" (in certain very deep and hard to describe ways) COULD exist. If any of that makes any sense at all.