10:25pm November 26, 2013

(This isn’t just about usage of the word crazy, it’s also about all the other words, because I just got a notification about a post discussing all kinds of disability-related terms that some people consider offensive.)

I am not ignoring that people are hurt by certain words.

I am hurt by the way some people use those words.

But saying “I am hurt if people use those words. You are not hurt if people don’t.” Is not accurate. Or not complete. Or something.

I am hurt, not by people not using these words, but by demands that everyone stop using these words.

Such demands can paralyze my entire way of using language into oblivion.

Because of that, I’m extremely careful about which words I eliminate from my vocabulary. Because eliminating one single word from my vocabulary takes years of work and effort and exhaustion and overload and language-collapse, over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. And even after all that work, which requires a constant drain on resources that could be used to keep me alive, there’s still a chance I’ll use those words. It’s an artifact of how my language system works. There are words that are awful enough that I will go through this process for them. But I can’t go through that process for every word that hurts anyone anywhere. I can’t even go through that process for words that happen to hurt a lot of people.

I have to have very very stringent criteria for what words I will do that for. Luckily, most of the words fitting that criteria are not words I would use in the first place under most circumstances. But some, like ’re**rded’, actually meant something different at the time in my life that I learned them. (I never learned it as an insult, I learned it as an actual normal word that everyone including people with intellectual disabilities used.) That is a word that has taken ages to remove from my vocabulary and it’s not completely gone but it’s closer to gone than any other word I’ve ever done that with.

I basically do this only with things that are either true slurs, or so damn close to true slurs that they aren’t distinguishable to a lot of people. (To me, re–rd is a true slur that I never used in the first place, re–rded has become close enough to be worth the effort.) I’ve gone into my criteria for what an actual slur is elsewhere.

I’m not ignoring that some people are hurt by these words. I’m saying demands that absolutely nobody use these words are not compatible with my brain. And also that there are disabled people who don’t find certain words universally horrible and hurtful and not just because we’re somehow ignorant and biased or brainwashed or some shit like that. (As in, this is a very different situation than someone who is simply too thick-skinned or oblivious to be offended by things that harm a group of people they belong to. Seriously.) Also that in some cases there are disabled people who need to use some of these words for various reasons that go beyond “reclaimed slur” and other “acceptable” ways of using “offensive” words.

Yes, the situation is complicated.

No, it won’t be solved just by saying everyone has to do it your way because you’re hurt by these words.

The thing that harms me is not people not using these words. I honestly don’t mind at all if some people stop using these words altogether. In fact, I think it’s a fairly good idea when you can manage it and if it doesn’t harm you in any way to stop using them.

What harms me is demands that everyone stop using those words.

My mind doesn’t have a simple “search and replace” function.

My mind doesn’t use words as single units that can be easily pulled out and switched around.

My mind doesn’t have other words for certain things, and all the supposedly-wonderful replacement lists people provide don’t even mean the same things I’m trying to get across when I use those words.

In order to remove a word from my vocabulary, it takes a kind of effort like you wouldn’t believe.

That’s not my only reason I think it should be okay to use those words. But it’s the reason that it goes beyond simple preference and well into the territory of yes this would definitely hurt me and I’ve talked at length in the past about why that is and how it would hurt me.

And I’m not unique in this way, I’ve talked to many other disabled people who have the exact same problem.

In fact, many people who have the exact same problem are also people who have been hurt by these words.

This kind of reminds me of arguments I’ve seen break out in two separate areas, many times over the years, in the autistic community:

1. Arguments between people who have sensory sensitivities, and people who have uncontrollable behavior that sets off those sensitivities.

2. Arguments between people with expressive language problems, and people with receptive language problems.

In both cases someone has always broken out the “This hurts me if you do it, it doesn’t hurt you not to do it.”

In both cases someone has always been drastically wrong.

In both cases someone has always assumed that the people doing the thing that causes harm to other people, are not caused harm themselves when people do the same thing.

As in, people with sensory sensitivities assume that people with uncontrollable loud vocal tics don’t have the same sensory sensitivities they have. People with receptive language difficulties assume that people who can’t write or speak in a way that they understand, don’t also have receptive language difficulties that make it hard for us to understand similar things. People who have trouble reading long pieces of writing assume that people who write long pieces of writing have no trouble reading long pieces of writing. You get the drift.

That’s happening here too.

You don’t actually know what I’m hurt by, what other people who use these words are hurt by. You just assume that if we were hurt by certain words, we wouldn’t use them or argue for the ability of people to use them. You don’t know what I’m hurt by, you don’t know my triggers, you don’t know any of that, because you’ve never asked and I haven’t talked about it in depth (and don’t necessarily want to talk about it in depth in a conversation like this one).

This is not simple.

I’ve never claimed it was simple.

I’ve never ignored that people are hurt. Other people have written about that at length, I didn’t feel like I needed to rehash it. I wrote about the things that weren’t being said, not the things that were.

I’ve never claimed it’s wrong for people to stop using certain words if they’re going to hurt people.

I’m having one conversation and you’re having another, and I don’t know how to make them meet, at all.

It’s important that people are hurt by certain words, it’s just not all of the story, I’m trying to tell the rest of it, as best I can. Not to excuse people being hurt, but because I am hurt by demands everyone stop doing a certain thing. As in actually hurt by it. If I tried to follow such demands, my language would be reduced to rubble in half an hour or less. That’s not meaningless. And I do think it’s important not to just look at “are people hurt by these words” but “how do these words hurt?” and “which words are more worth eliminating than others?” and “why are some words more hurtful in a broad sense than others?” and “why are some words worth keeping around even though they sometimes hurt?” and other things like that.

There’s no equation any of us can do to make these decisions for everyone. It’s not I’m hurt less than you are by demands to stop using these words, therefore everyone should just stop. It’s not I’m hurt more than you are by demands to stop using these words, therefore everyone should just keep using them. These are decisions everyone has to make for themselves using our own personal equations (please please don’t tell me equations are too mechanical and inhuman, I don’t have another word, and I don’t mean equations… ARGH this is what happens when I try to change words, I can’t and I just get closer to a meltdown) based on our own personal priorities. You can’t do some kind of ideology-driven top-down sort of approach of “this is always bad, so stop doing it, universally” without doing harm you can’t even perceive. And I… I can’t work that way. Like, can’t. Brain doesn’t function in that world that so many people here seem to move in. And people like me, get left behind.

I’ve worried so much about making other people stop using words without meaning to (because lately, anyone saying “this word hurts me” is automatically taken as meaning “nobody should use this word”) that I’ve rarely told anyone the words that harm me.

But a few of them…

Performativity. Hegemony. Heteronormative.

I’m not kidding.

I’m not making this up.

I’m not asking you to stop using them.

I’m not asking anyone to stop using them.

If they did, they’d just come up with another one that meant the same thing and eventually did the same violence to my brain.

Every time I hear or read those words, an explosion goes off in my brain that eliminates all thought and actually causes physical pain. It’s not the same as an emotional trigger, it’s something different, but it still does a good deal of harm. Positioned right, it can make my brain whiz into a mode where it can’t function well enough to solve simple daily problems, for the rest of the day.

But these are not words that exist to make a person not a person. That exist to hurt and nothing more. And they’re not irretrievably close to such words.

And that…

That’s pretty much (with some complications) the criteria I have to use to, personally, decide that a word is too harmful to use, so harmful that I’m willing to do a lot of harm to myself in order to get rid of it from my vocabulary.

It’s not that I don’t understand that words can hurt, or that specific words can hurt a lot of people. It’s that I don’t think that this necessarily means that everyone has to stop using these words. It’s that I don’t think that the process of stopping is something that has no cost to anyone. It’s that… a lot of things I can’t even name. And I certainly can’t articulate every single issue involved in this at once. You already mentioned how long my last post was. This one is longer. Imagine how long it would be if I tried to say everything.

And despite saying a lot, I feel like I’ve said nothing at all.

I feel like the structure of my words and concepts was created by something outside of me. A framework that isn’t mine and isn’t what I wanted to say. I don’t know how to get out of it and still say the things I meant to say. I feel like I’m being pushed and pulled by forces that have nothing to do with what I want. But I also don’t want to say nothing, which is my only other choice. Or to say something else other than this, something partial and incomplete, that would then leave you believe I’ve “ignored” a vast number of other things just because I didn't say them. I can’t explain how awful this entire framework this is taking place in is, the way it shapes my words into things they can’t ever be, my mind too.

This is why I don’t normally get into these conversations. Don’t be surprised if I don’t come back. I can’t do this thing where all the compartments have been made for me and my unwillingness to step into one means being shoved in another direction and argh. Mind you I’m not blaming you. it’s not you. It’s a structure that exists without you, but this conversation is part of it.

I want out. I’m stepping out. Don’t be shocked if I don’t come back. Because I can’t handle being trapped like this again. It doesn’t matter who or what does the trapping, only that it exists.