2:27am May 2, 2014

➸ The return of internalized ableism: When the disability is in your brain

dreamingondemand:

neurodiversitysci:

I wasn’t planning to write anything for Blogging Against Disableism 2014, but here we are.

…

I once went to an audiology clinic for an assessment, to find out why I was having such difficulties understanding speech amidst background noise, and why high-pitched, loud, or sharp metallic sounds…

This rang so true for me, not just about autism, but narcolepsy and other neurologically based disabilities as well. It’s easy to understand and accept those things about ourselves that seem externalizable in some way - like, I can’t run because I have rheumatoid arthritis, okay. But the fact that I have to sleep all the time? I should totally be able to will that away, despite the fact that my brain is causing it. Or the fact that a trip to the grocery store feels like the equivalent of an Iron Man Triathlon. Our culture has such an easy elision from what’s “in your brain” to what’s “all in your head,” and it’s so, so hard to keep from falling into that kind of bullshit “mind over matter” thinking even when you know better.

You too, hmm? (By the way: I love your dreaming on demand idea. And I’m also impressed! I’ve never been able to choose what to dream about before falling asleep like that).

I think the confusion between “you” and “your brain” come about because we as a culture think the only rational or scientifically-supported understanding of the self is that it is the brain. (Which I’m pretty convinced isn’t true, FWIW. I mean, even if brain activity generates my sense of self, it doesn’t follow that I AM my brain activity. Like, if I kick a ball it will roll, but that doesn’t mean its motion is my kick). Maybe if we all just let go of the “you are your brain” idea, we’d also have to give up on this particular form of ableism? (There’d still be other types of ableism out there, of course, but at least there’d be one less?). IDK, would that even work?

That’s very interesting…

I don’t think that I am my brain.

I am not even sure I think that I am just my body.

However, as far as the part of me that is my body, I am absolutely certain that my brain is not the only part of me and that seeing my brain as “me” is really limiting compared to how wonderful and complex I am.

I am all the cells in my body, I know that much. And all the parts of the cells. The cells in your body have their own intelligence. Their own desire to stay alive. Their own ways of communicating with each other, learning about their environment, reacting to things, and working together to make this whole thing work.

We are not our brain, we are not one thing. We are a vast network of teamwork that is staggering in size and complexity. Our brain is not even the only part of us that has its own intelligence. Our brain has one kind of intelligence, and it’s very good at that kind of intelligence. But it’s not the only intelligence we have – look at our immune system just for starters, just for the bare minimum of looking at intelligence that exists outside the brain.

We do ourselves a disservice limiting ourselves to our brains. And whatever you choose to do with the knowledge that you’re more than a brain (including reject it out of hand) is your business. But to me, it’s extremely important that who I am is not just a brain.

I also sometimes wonder if who I am is even limited to my body, or if the fact is that I am also part of my environment, I am the interactions between my body and all the things around me, and to some extent I am also the things around me. That I put myself into the things and people that surround me, that interact with me onto a daily basis, and they put themselves into me. This is a much more relational sense of self than most people have, but it feels right to me. I think a lot of what we see as separation between ourselves and other things is an illusion. Not that we shouldn’t have clear boundaries, that we should just bleed into everything indiscriminately – that’s a terrible idea. But that, even with those boundaries, we are a part of our surroundings, that feels right and true on a level that most people don’t seem willing to even entertain. (Especially since many people won’t even entertain that they are more than a very specific kind of mind, more than a very specific kind of brain, that they are a body and that their body is important and that the brain is only one piece of the body, supported by the rest of the body, and that they lose something in not seeing themselves as a body. They see their body as just the life support system for their brain, rather than an important thing in its own right.)

But to me, my sense of self has to have a sense of physicality, a sense of being rooted all over my body, and also being rooted in my relatedness to all kinds of things that are not my body at all. That’s the only way I can make sense of myself and the world around me.

Also sometimes, though I know it’s surely partly illusion, I feel as if I am one person in two bodies. I feel like I can be Anne as much as she can be me, and yet we maintain wonderful boundaries and don’t bleed into each other at all, because the level on which we can be each other is somewhere deep and far back, like we are two branches of one tree, two outgrowths of one thing. In reality we are two people who resonate so strongly with each other that even our senses of self get intertwined in a certain way. But it’s not an unhealthy intertwining, it’s not that bleeding-into-each-other thing that's always a horribly unhealthy thing to do. It’s hard to explain what it is though. It’s like – it feels like, anyway – we’re joined on some level of the self, while leaving other levels of the self intact.

I do know that everything I’m saying about any of this makes people horribly uncomfortable because a lot of people want to be disembodied minds, or they want to be brains and to disavow their links to the rest of their body, the fact that the brain is just one organ and they are many organs. I am partially a brain, but I am also a heart and a stomach and muscles and bones, I am the cells that make me up, I am the communications and collections between those cells.

My intellect is the intellect created by brain cells working together, sure. But even that is more than most people give it credit for. My brain-based intellect is not only the thought that most people consider conscious, it is also perception both conscious and unconscious, it is all the unconscious processes of the brain, those are just as important if not more so, to making me who I am, than conscious thought. When I was delirious and was going in and out of consciousness, I still existed as a thinking being even when I was unconscious.

And my intellect is also more than my brain. It is the intellect produced by other kinds of cells in the body, both working together and individually. It is the intelligence of the immune system. Unknown to most people, microbes do in fact have their own ways of ‘thinking’ and working together and communicating with each other, and that’s a lot of what our cells are and our cells do. And that wonderful kind of intelligence is just as much my intelligence as the intelligence created by very specialized brain cells working together. We forget this at our peril.

And that’s just intelligence. I don’t think intelligence should be the measure of what is a part of your self. And that’s besides my relatedness to my environment, which I also consider an important aspect of self. But even if you don’t believe in yourself beyond your body, it would do people good to start realizing that their bodies really are a part of themselves, not just their brains, and also that the brain is a part of the body, not this thing that’s magically separated from the body. This separation is an illusion.

I learned how much the brain is part of the body through my struggles with delirium, ever since my first experience in 2008. Delirium happens when your body is too messed up to support full brain function. And I’ve experienced extremely severe delirium. It was a terrible experience, but one thing it taught me is that your brain, and the way it works, is not at all disconnected from the rest of your body. The first time I got delirium was during a bowel blockage that had gone on so long that it was beginning to make my body toxic. The worst time that I got delirium, I had a nasty combination of pneumonia, starvation, and adrenal insufficiency going on. In every case, delirium showed me that my brain can’t function properly if the rest of my body is not functioning properly. It’s not this magical separate thing that sits totally detached from the rest of your body and functions from afar. It’s tied into everything about the rest of your body, and its proper functioning is determined by the rest of your body. Forget that at your peril, too.