12:50pm May 25, 2014

Please try not to have conversations like this with me, they will only frustrate both of us.

Me:  There’s all these people saying I’m an inspiration because I’m disabled and having killed myself yet.

You:  But actually you are an inspiration!  You’re a leader in the disability rights movement and your writing inspires people to take action!

Me:  But that’s not what I meant.  I’m saying people are calling me an inspiration in really ableist ways. 

You:  But why should ableists have a monopoly on the word inspiration?  You should accept the word inspiration in other ways, so that they don’t control the way we use language.

I just had a conversation very like this on my other blog, and I’m getting really frustrated by it.  Please understand though, I don’t want other people going over there and flaming the person.  

(I’m getting a little scared about that, because someone who unfollowed me said she was telling me in private because she was afraid of being “dogpiled by my fans”.  Which… I didn’t know I had fans, and I didn’t know my friends were the sort of people who would dogpile anyone.  But suffice to say, I don’t approve of dogpiling, so don’t do it in my name, ever.)

I have a feeling that she and I just have fundamentally incompatible communication and cognitive styles.  But I find conversations of this nature frustrating and upsetting.  (Which I’ve conveyed, at great length, on my other blog.)

Because… it’s like… to me the conversation is about the meaning behind the word.  And it seems like to her, it’s the word that matters more.  Finding a way in which the word inspiration can be used well, seems to matter more than listening to what I said.  Which was that I’m upset because people are trying to force-fit me into a concept of inspiration that I don’t actually fit.

(Actually, the conversation was about something completely different from inspiration.  I’m just using inspiration as an easy example of how a person could do this, because I don’t want to have the conversation about the actual topic all over again.)

So to me, the communication I’m trying to say is, “People are forcing me into a disability stereotype and this is awful.”

And then what she’s saying is “Here’s a way we can maneuver the words around so it means something good!  We’re taking the power of defining these words away from them!  This is good!”

And it’s like… I never said I wasn’t an inspiration in the second sense.  I just never asked to even have a conversation about the word inspiration.  Let alone taking back the word and using it in a positive way which is supposed to have some positive effect that right now I honestly don’t care about because WTF.

To me, it’s like as if I said “I didn’t eat a brick” and she said “Yes you did, you ate an apple!”  Because I’m going by the meanings of the words, not the letter of the words.  But I swear that if there was a word that meant both brick and apple, then I would be having that conversation with her right now, even if I had made absolutely clear that I meant brick and not apple, and she made absolutely clear she meant apple and not brick.  Why does it matter that two totally different ideas can fall under the same word?  Why does the word matter?

I can’t do this.

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