7:11pm July 10, 2014

Comparing oppressions in mental institutions.

youneedacat:

They told me I was a useless waste of space. They told me directly and they told me indirectly. They told me every day that my spot in their precious mental institution could be better used on someone who would actually get better. Sometimes this implied I was too badly damaged to ever get better. Sometimes this implied that I could get better if I only wanted to enough. Always, they found ways of separating me out from the other inmates. Like putting me and another girl on an empty children’s ward together. Or putting me in the quiet room every day on the flimsiest of excuses. Or finding me a self-contained room where I never had to leave and other patients didn’t have to know I existed.

Why am I telling you this? Because it’s 4:15 in the morning, I feel really sick, and it’s the only thing my fingers will write about. I’m not telling you the worst or anything. Just cataloguing some facts.

Thought: My roommate was a rape survivor who compared forced drugging to rape. If she has made it out, if she was on tumblr right now, I am certain she would be dogpiled by a bunch of angry people who told her not to compare oppressions that way.

In the institutions, when we did manage to connect with each other, we spent all our time comparing oppressions that way. We talked about what it was like to be poor, what it was like to be a person of color, what it was like to be female, what it was like to be trans, what it was like to be LGB, and of course what it was like to be crazy, and we didn’t have any topics where anyone said “Sorry, you shouldn’t compare oppressions like that.” Because of this, we actually stood a chance of finding common ground despite what were often huge differences in our experiences and background. And when we did find common ground, we used it, to the dismay of staff, who would have rather we kept ourselves separate from each other.

It was staff who would have loved if we had adopted the idea that you can’t compare two kinds of oppression because they’re just too different. Staff loved anything that drove inmates apart, that kept us from identifying with each other, that kept us from building up any level of solidarity.

That should tell you a lot.

It’s not that I don’t understand where “don’t compare oppressions, they’re not all alike” comes from. It’s just that I look at its consequences. And then I look at the consequences of comparing oppressions and sometimes getting it wrong but often getting it right. And the consequences of comparing oppressions, even getting it wrong sometimes, are far better than the consequences of refusing to even try because you could get it wrong.

Because being in a mental institution, what they do, is they try to separate you any way they can. They try to make it so that you never identify with each other. They try to make it so that you can be in this big dayroom full of people, and yet feel totally alone and isolated.

And anything that shifts that isolation, shifts the balance of power.

So comparing oppressions? Shifts that isolation. Even if having people pull down your pants and shoot Thorazine in your ass isn’t exactly like rape, people making the comparison are doing something very powerful, especially in a place where this is happening to people day in and day out. Especially in a place where many of the people making the comparison are rape or sexual assault survivors themselves, as is often the case in mental institutions.

In that case, the comparison led to a girl actually trying to pull staff off of someone else who was being restrained. Which had never happened before on that ward, not that anyone could remember. The whole place went on lockdown after that.

Anyway, don’t be afraid to compare oppressions. You’ll get things wrong. But you’ll get things right. Just be careful. Don’t assume you know everything. But don’t assume you know nothing either. There were kids in that ward aged 10 to 18, and comparing oppressions got us further than I’ve seen many adults get who merely tiptoe around the issue to avoid offending anyone.

This post is really important.

I remember when things first started really going wrong with my body and I had surgery after surgery to repair the damage and I got really traumatized, never knowing if this would be the last time or if I’d have to do it all over and over and over again.

I remember needing a surgery and just wanting more than anything for everything to stop. I remember knowing that there was literally no way I could be okay unless I had the surgery.

I remember freezing up when it came time to sign the consent form.

I remember just feeling completely, horrendously, disgustedly sick to the core of me, because I knew that my name on that piece of paper was nothing but a formality. I knew that consent didn’t matter because if I didn’t give it the consequences would be horrible, maybe even that I’d die.

And I remember thinking that how I was feeling as I put that pen to that piece of paper and made marks on it and screamed inside, that what was happening to me was just like someone being told “give me what I want or I will kill you.”

You do it, but it doesn’t mean you consent. It means you know you will be violated bodily and there is no way not to be and “Yes” means “Yes, I know,” not “Yes, I want.”

When I was first facing up to how much all of this had messed me up, I called the whole set of repeated experiences, the whole set of people opening up my body and doing things to it and stitching it up again, after I said this meaningless “Yes” that only meant “I want to live,” “my rape.”

I knew I hadn’t been sexually assaulted. I knew my legs were not my vagina. I knew my doctors meant to save me, not harm me. But those four little letters were the only thing I knew that said this isn’t consent, this is a mockery of everything consent is, this is an invasion and you have to experience and endure it, and there’s nothing more to it than that.

And your name is on a piece of paper like you said “please let this happen to me.” And people can go look it up and look at it and find it, and it doesn’t mean what it tells them.

Those four little letters were how you say “I’ve been violated” without sounding like you swallowed a dictionary or you weren’t really there.

And then I got into feminist circles and “Rape is a unique harm. It’s unlike any other. You can’t compare anything to it. Don’t.”

I’m not saying it isn’t unique. I’m not even defending myself, exactly. But I am saying that if that word hadn’t been available to me when I was first trying to explain to loved ones and mental health professionals and other people who didn’t understand why I was hurting after I was all sewn up and my bones weren’t broken and I stood on them and I took steps, I would have had no word at all.

I was kind of okay with losing the word, many many years later. I didn’t need it any more, not like I’d needed it before.

But sometimes the harms done to people with disabilities are not nameable by language, because for so long people without disabilities have not noticed they exist or have assumed them to be “normal,” so when you say they hurt, you can’t mean they’ve shattered part of you and you need time to put you back together.

It’s getting better slowly. But that’s an experience I’ve had all my life, where the things that people have done don’t quite have names, and you have to tell the story on a slant to get people to even see that they happen at all, or that there are patterns to them, or that they’re not just what happens when a well-meaning person gets “tired” or doesn’t understand bodies that aren’t “normal” or “can’t handle the stress” of treating you like you’re human.

Look. I don’t think we should be reckless with analogies. There are several different things I can think of off the top of my head that a rape survivor could say about how their experiences are different from what happened to me, and different in ways that really do matter. (Like the bit I mentioned about how it’s extra horrible to know someone intends to harm you, especially if they’re someone you know and like. I at least knew no one was trying to violate me, even though they did it anyway.)

But I think we need, sometimes, to take a step back and think about whether people are grabbing for shocking words or not really thinking about what they’re saying, or whether people are trying to describe or explain an experience that there aren’t precise words for and groping for things that affected them in similar ways or felt similar or had similar consequences for their life and identity.

Thank you so much for talking about that, because you’ve made clear a lot of things that show a difference between when it’s wrong to make comparisons, and when it’s right to make comparisons, or at least less wrong to make comparisons.

I can tell you it was a rape survivor who screamed “You’re raping her! You’re raping her!” whenever she saw people being restrained in mental institutions. And because she was my roommate, I can tell you she was drawing a direct analogy with her experiences, not “mindlessly flashing back to rape every time she saw anyone held down”. And she meant it politically – absolutely fucking politically. And the things they did to her for it, I’ll never get over seeing.

She and I had kind of a code we talked in, snippets of conversations we’d had about other things, and the staff thought we were just rambling and psychotic or saying weird things to get attention. But we meant what we said, and any reference to rape was a reference to restraint or forced drugging or both. We basically created a language between us, which was no mean feat for two kids with communication problems and ‘severe mental illness’. She was the only kid in that entire place I ever managed to communicate well with. There was only one other who came close.

At one point they actually isolated us on our own ward so we wouldn’t infect the other kids with a politicized understanding of what was happening to us in the system. That’s… not how they put it though. They said we were too immature for the adolescent ward so we belonged on the children’s ward, which just happened to be empty except for us. Later, they separated us from each other, and separated each of us from everyone else, and tortured us. But sometimes we could still communicate with each other – by singing songs in code (each song had a meaning), while tied down in quiet rooms that were next door to each other.

Don’t get me wrong, though. People talk about the connections they make with other people in institutions. That happens. But mostly they keep you disconnected. I made a very very rare few connections, which were then forcibly severed by staff, and I made much fewer connections than most people because I was autistic, and even in a mental institution being autistic gets you pretty near the fucking bottom of the social pile. One time all I did was walk into my room and within five seconds my roommates decided I was a great target to bully. So yeah. Don’t get the idea that there’s all this camraderie in these places, because when there is, it’s out of desperation, and staff are doing their damndest to pull you apart. And most of the time there isn’t even that. At least not for people like me. For people like me, you’re alone in a room full of people. I think it’s that way for most people, but the more social people fare better. I was not one of the more social people, and neither was the girl I connected with the best.