3:54am September 21, 2014

My berserk button: Language dickery.

I think that language dickery is my most major berserk button. Or at least, it’s very high up there.

There’s a tl;dr at the end, but Jim Sinclair’s poem is worth skimming through the rest to read.

Thank you so much, Amorpha&, for writing the language dickery post. It’s very handy to point people at. Especially when I’m in the throes of “I can’t even barely type a coherent sentence because I’m so angry.”

And yes, I know that some language dickery is just a bad communication setup between two people who really shouldn’t be trying to hold a conversation. But most of the time it’s someone not realizing that they’re making a lot of assumptions about the language usage of someone who generally grew up with (or acquired) a severe enough mixed receptive/expressive language disorder and all that this entails.

And that after having this happen hundreds of times in a lifetime, you get just a tad bit tetchy and impatient with people when it happens again. Because it’s not just the one incident. If it was the one incident, I could brush it off, I could explain myself as best I could, I could do a lot of things.

But it’s never one incident. It’s ongoing. It’s people telling me what I mean by things. Over and over and over. And it’s always about “You used this word and this word always means _______.” And the moment I see that sort of formulation, my brain just switches into “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on” because… so many times, and it always plays out the same.

Honestly, I like a challenge. I’d love, one day, to build the kind of bridge I built in the poem The Mind Bridge with my friend Anna. Except to build it with someone for whom this kind of language crud is second nature. But that requires a huge degree of mutual trust and good faith. And I have so far never established even a normal degree of mutual trust and good faith with someone once the conversation starts down that road. I don’t trust them because they keep telling me what I’m thinking and refusing to listen to what I’m actually thinking. They don’t trust me because, to them, I keep saying I’m thinking one thing and then saying I’m thinking another when they try to pin me down. Or something like that, I’m not sure how it looks from their perspective but that’s one possibility, and it would not inspire the kind of complete trust in another person that bridge-building takes.

Otherwise you get a bridge situation that’s less like my mind bridge poem, and more like Jim Sinclair’s poem “I Built A Bridge”:

I built a bridge
out of nowhere, across nothingness
and wondered if there would be something on the other side.

I built a bridge
out of fog, across darkness
and hoped that there would be light on the other side.

I built a bridge
out of despair, across oblivion
and knew that there would be hope on the other side.

I built a bridge
out of helplessness, across chaos
and trusted that there would be strength on the other side.

I built a bridge
out of hell, across terror

And it was a good bridge, a strong bridge, a beautiful bridge
  It was a bridge I built myself,
  with only my hands for tools, my obstinacy for supports,
  my faith for spans, and my blood for rivets.
  I built a bridge, and crossed it.

But there was no one there to meet me on the other side.

And that’s a perfect description of what happens to me every time I run into language dickery. I build a one-sided bridge, entirely out of my body and mind, using only the materials I can find on hand, putting everything I know and everything I have into the communication. And then on the other side, there’s nobody there. Or worse, there’s somebody there to cut the bridge down and tell me what a horrible bridge it is and that I shouldn’t even call it a bridge because bridge has a meaning and it’s not that, and so on. And then they’ll tell me what I meant by the above poem, in graphic detail, get it all wrong, but insist that really I meant to imply something totally different.

Which is also an experience Jim Sinclair seems to have had with that poem, because xe felt the need to explain with the following:

[This was the first of my poems to be published, in the spring 1989 issue of “The Maap,” appended to a letter to the editor about empathy . It was later reprinted in a few other publications. It’s also the poem I have most often wished I had never permitted to be published, because people so consistently misinterpret it as being about loneliness, or rejection, or other neurotypical social concepts that have nothing to do with what I was feeling on the night I wrote it back in 1986. This is about hurt, frustration and anger that come from dealing with people for whom nothing I can do is ever enough. I hope that in context of the other writings on this site, it will be understood as it was intended to be.]

Which, yes, is exactly the context I’m using it in. "This is about hurt, frustration, and anger that comes from dealing with people for whom nothing I can do is ever enough.“ It’s not about loneliness. It’s not about rejection. It’s not about being unable to handle disagreement.

For me, it’s about the fact that every time I write something I’m building that kind of bridge. I may have the Gift of Seshat, as I’m calling the mangled assortment of intertwined blessing and curses that allow me to communicate in language at all, despite not being built for language. But I still have to do serious work in order to communicate in language.

So when I build a bridge out of my own flesh and bones, and then someone comes along and pours language dickery all over it and the lights it on fire, it hurts, it pisses me off, and the cumulative effect of this over the years leaves me on a hair-trigger when it comes to this stuff. I wish I could chalk it up to a simple misunderstanding. But 9 times out of 10, the person doesn’t even want to know what I really meant and will stand there and argue with me about what I’m "really” thinking. And will act like my attempts to revise my language to make it more precise and comprehensible for them (more bridge-building, I’m autistic, all we do is build bridges all day long, especially those of us with significant communication impairments in any area at all)… they act like those attempts are attempts to weasel my way out of having to be “accountable” for my original words. So there’s no good faith here most of the time, and no assumption of good faith on my part. And without good faith, I can’t carry on a conversation.

And that’s why I’ve never managed to get to know anyone engaging in language dickery, well enough to build bridges with them. Because every bridge I build is burned on sight, then I get told I’m not good enough, that my attempts to build bridges are dishonest, that I really mean exactly what they say I mean because nobody could write certain words and not mean them in a certain way, etc. etc. etc.

You know… there was a time when I thought that if I could only learn to communicate consistently in language. If I could make my words match my thoughts as closely as possible. Then this would go away. I thought this was all a byproduct of my own communication failings. And I worked harder than you can imagine to drag language kicking and screaming into line so I could work with it and mold it into the shapes it needed to be in order to best convey my thoughts and experiences. And I did a damn good job (and nobody was there to congratulate me, so I did it myself), and I was so happy that now the misunderstandings would end.

They only got worse.

It turns out that there is a person that people – even many autistic people – expect to be inside of you. They expect that this person functions in certain ways, means certain things by certain words, etc.

And if you are not that person. And if you are autistic and have finally once and for all learned to communicate who you are in language. Then the misunderstandings only get worse. I’ve heard time and time again of autistic people who either learned to talk, or learned to tame their own “wild horse” expressive language problems (I’m one of the latter). And who then shocked everyone with the fact that they were much more unusual on the inside than the looked on the outside. As Jim Sinclair often says (xe first talked to communicate at the age of twelve), “First they wanted to institutionalize me because I couldn’t talk, then they wanted to institutionalize me because of the things I said when I could talk.”

And the things I say when I can talk… there are people who refuse to believe them because to them, a real person can’t work like that. A real person can’t be like I really am. So at best I’m mistaken and at worst I’m dishonest, and at any rate the “best” response is to tell me, in detail, what I really meant by the words I used. Because there’s no possible way I could have actually meant them the way I meant them.

And you know… madeofpatterns is right. This sort of thing makes it very hard not to resent the entire class of people that the language dickery comes from. It’s usually highly verbal people of the sort that used to get called aspies. Not all aspies, just specific types of aspies. And it’s not that they’re so connected to words. That’s not it. It’s that they have so much faith in words, that they think they can tell what I’m thinking based on the words I use. And, most importantly, they give signs that no matter what I say and how much I explain, it will never be good enough because their minds are already made up.

I built a bridge, and crossed it, only to find someone had burned the bridge down, leaving me stranded, and telling me there was no bridge there in the first place, because I should have no need to build bridges when they already know what I mean.

That’s what it’s like.

That’s why this is my berserk button.

Because after years upon years of this. After all these bridges built and burned behind me. After all these people telling me “But you don’t need to build a bridge, I understand you just fine,” and then going on to almost deliberately misunderstand me. Not because of the initial misunderstanding but because they refuse to listen to any explanation that it was a misunderstanding. Or because they make it clear from the outset that their perception of my words matters far more than my meaning when I wrote those words.

By the way, when Amorpha& wrote “Disambiguation Post: On Language Dickery”… I eventually posted it to tumblr. I thought it was an amazing description of something that happens to me way too often. I thought people would like it. I thought people who experienced this would like it. I thought people who didn’t experience this would learn from it.

One of the very first responses I got?

“Interesting post, but I don’t like the way they used ‘dickery’…”

I could not facepalm, headdesk, and throw things fast enough to keep up with how wrong that response was in response to that particular post. Amorpha& have language problems much like mine, they try to write about them, and someone has to nitpick the words they use. Way to not get the point. I now have another friend who is afraid to link to that post or use the term, even though the term language dickery would be very useful to them, because they are afraid of being chastised over the word dickery.

That’s the other side of language dickery. When you don’t just get told what you mean by using a certain word. You also get told that some of the words you used – and usually they’re the only words you were able to use at the time – are horrible words that should never be uttered, for one reason or another.

The moment someone tells me rude is classist because of its class-bound origins, I’m going to scream. (People do the exact equivalent of that with words they deem ableist. Anything whose etymology can be traced back to disability, is going to get included on the ableist word list we all have to memorize or face the consequences. And yes, rude has classist origins, but the word rude is not classist, unless it’s being used to specifically describe working-class and poor manners which may be different from middle and upper-class manners. But most of the time that’s not how it’s used, and even in that context, it’s not classist because of its etymology, it’s classist because of how it’s being used.)

Anyway, language dickery causes me an extreme amount of stress. Because it makes me feel trapped in my own head again. It reminds me of what it was like to only have communication that sounded plausible, but didn’t communicate anything much of my thoughts or inner experiences. And that felt like being trapped behind a glass wall – and that was when I could speak at all. The years of intermittently being unable to speak and nobody offering me AAC methods. Glass walls all around me.

Every time language dickery happens, it’s like a flashback to the glass walls, a flashback to when I couldn’t communicate in language no matter how hard I tried. The wrong words always came out. And language dickery reminds me that no matter how good I get at choosing the right words, no matter how hard I worked to get here, no matter how hard I work every time I use language, it’s not good enough. They have divined what is in my head, from the language I used, and will accept no explanations.

*headdesk* *facepalm* *WTFWTFWTF*

TL;DR: I use words as tools. I have a communication impairment. This means that when I pick up a word and use it as a tool, it does not mean that I am picking up every single meaning or ideology that you happen to attach to the word. Then people insist they know what I mean, singling out specific words as “proof”. At that point, no amount of explanation ever makes anything better. It only makes it worse. They contine arguing with me about the contents of my own mind, which I find intolerably rude and which is also my berserk button. Or one of my top berserk buttons anyway. Right now I’m under a lot of stress and if you do this to me I’ll probably gripe at you about language dickery and then possibly put you on ignore so I don’t have to see even more language dickery. The sad thing is I would love to build a two-way bridge between my world and the world of someone who thinks like this. I love getting to know people that wa and I love a challenge. But doing that kind of bridge building (as in the poem I linked above) requires trust and the assumption of good faith. I can’t see how someone can be assuming good faith if they basically accuse me of lying about what I really mean. So yeah.