I also get really tired of expectations of living your life as some piece of political performance art for other people’s benefit, at a much higher priority than being a human with actual needs and feelings that matter.
Tag: widgets
Also reminded of this again, which was one post I could find with a quick search. With my tag commentary:
#tell this to too many professionals
#I was actually relieved when my parents broke the news
#I asked my mom if they might get divorced before that
#reassurance that they wouldn’t was not at all what I was hoping to hear
#yes please no more crazy yelling
#I can tell you hate each other
#abuse mention
Yeah, not too surprisingly, I did have some problems after they split, with basically no opportunity to talk about what was really bothering me.
The socially acceptable explanation, heavily pushed by what professionals I was briefly forced to see until my mother said no more (for her own reasons)? Child obviously feels responsible, rejected by the parent living elsewhere, and blames self for the divorce. These inevitable factors will always make children unhappy in predictable ways after a divorce. (Also, very likely one parent shit talking the other, for no good reason beyond their own personal animosity–which needs to stop for the children’s good.)
The reality? Pretty much everything suddenly going wrong in my life besides that. Which nobody wanted to hear about. Including some escalating abusive situations and a terrible school environment.
I really don’t have the spoons to go into that more now, but it makes me angry that this is still far from an uncommon situation for kids.
That was also pretty much a preview for some later “Troubled Teens™ are inevitably having specific problems, expressed in very specific ways, for one particular set of reasons, all of this highly gendered–no matter how badly this pet theory corresponds to what said kids are trying to say about how they’re experiencing the world and what’s bothering them” BS. But, again, no spoons.
“Why box yourself in with labels instead of just being you?” is an idea i see a lot and it’s very distressing to me and I’m not quite sure why.
“why are you interested in having words to understand and talk about your experiences”
“Why be able to identify others like you when you can feel different and alone?”
“Your labels make me uncomfortable because they impede my ability to blindly ignore any need for representation or accomodations you may have, and challenge my assumption that MY state of being is the only ‘natural’ one.”
What bothers me about it is the power that the anti-label people give to words. It’s like they think of words that are just a collection of letters that we use to signify a group of traits as these really powerful talismans.
And then when you observe their behavior and how they talk about these words, you realize that to them, yes, these words are powerful talismans, and when you say something that to you is just a collection of letters and sounds that you use to simplify communication about a group of traits, what they hear is…well, I guess it depends on the person and their individual history with that label. But they’re putting a lot more weight on that collection of letters than you are, and they’re investing it with a lot of cultural symbolism and social meaning and media portrayals that they’ve seen and stereotypes that they know but that you’re not aware of, and then they’re unable to separate you as an individual from all the images they have connected to that collection of letters.
I guess, for an example….
Like when I hear that someone has a learning disorder, I’m like “Oh, okay, so you have some traits that fit into this pattern that we’ve noticed and named, and you need some accommodations, and we can try out some ways to help you that have worked well for other people who have shown this pattern of traits.”
It would appear that when the people who give labels a lot of power hear that someone has a learning disorder, they think something like “This person is fundamentally flawed in some manner and they will never succeed at anything that my culture sees as having value, and everyone else will hate them and judge them. Also I can only think of this person now as being this word that is commonly used to describe a pattern of traits that they fit into. I can no longer see them as an individual. I can only see all the images and prejudices I have about this word. The dissonance between my previous view of this person and the view of them that I now have because of this word makes me really uncomfortable, and for some reason instead of changing how I think of the word I will just demand that the person remove the word, so I can go back to thinking of them the way that I did before the word”
And then too there’s people who have more experience with the type of people who imbue words with great power than I do, and so I think their fear of labels may come from that. Like even though they know words are just words, they also know that other people will completely change how they see you and treat you based on certain words, and they don’t want that to happen to other people. Like people who have been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and who’ve been treated horribly by professionals because when those professionals hear the word “borderline”, they can no longer see the individual in front of them and they can only see all the prejudices and stereotypes that they’ve collected around the word “borderline”, and that leads to dehumanization and maltreatment.
I don’t know. I think there’s a very basic difference in how people who see labels as a collection of words that are useful for communication about certain patterns and how people who see labels as these big huge scary things think about language and how they use language to construct their idea of reality.
Like I know that for me, language is a tool to describe reality. It’s a fluid that can be easily shaped and changed and adapted as needed to fit with the underlying reality, but it’s taken as given that it is never the reality itself. People who give labels immense power seem to see language as a solid, as a permanent structure that defines reality, rather than as an attempt to describe it.
I guess in the end it goes back to all those developmental theories I’ve studied. I should google around and see if I can find a developmental theory that applies to use of language. Because I think that it’s possible that the people who see words as great permanent immovable reality defining things are at conventional/concrete levels of development, and people who see language as more of a fluid imprecise and ever changing attempt to describe reality are at post conventional/abstract levels of development.
I am not really comfortable talking in terms of development, especially given some of the ways similar rhetoric continues to get used. (Even though I know you’re not going in the same directions with it, at all. Not suggesting you were.)
But, those are some very different perspectives, and that’s an excellent description of the “don’t define yourself by X!” way of thinking which has always amazed me. When what they really seem to be saying is “Once I am reminded of certain labels, I cannot think about anything else or see the person they’re attached to as a Real Person”. And that’s somehow the labeled person’s problem.
A lot of that does seem to rely on a very narrow acceptable range of what qualifies as Real People who deserve respect. Propped up by a whole slew of widgets. AFAICT, the weird reification stuff mostly comes straight out of real complicated human beings bashing up against that.
It strikes me as kind of like the people who insist that the world must be literally 6000 years old, or everything else they want to believe about how things work falls totally apart. Only it’s their own sense of worth that’s at stake. If the boxes they’ve been busily shoving the rest of the world into–safely away from themselves–may not be exactly what/how they’ve assumed? It calls a big chunk of their worldview into question. Including a lot of what’s been making them feel superior as Real People.
Even trying to emulate that enough to wrap words around it makes my head hurt. But, that’s the best approximation I can come up with right now.
If anything, that also seems to be a very culturally driven thing. Not just the exact specifications of those boxes, but how important maintaining certain divisions (with whole categories of Unpeople) even becomes to maintaining the status quo. Much less which widgets commonly get used for that, to the point of being hard to recognize as such for the ones relying on them.
Which helps make a lot of things more frustrating, but I have just about run out of steam for now. There were several other points I wanted to at least try and talk around, but maybe later.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 