What Is In A Word?
Language is powerful. It can give life, gather hope, and offer compassion.
But language can also be limiting.
Which is why choosing our own language to give words to our experiences, can be such an empowering part of our journey. I find this particularly true when it comes to my own experiences with mental illness and recovery.
Authorship can feel hard fought for and there are certainly moments it can feel faraway from one’s lived experience. (Privilege and disadvantage of course, shape our opportunities for authorship as well.) But in a simple sense, each time we find the words that describe our journeys; each time we speak them into being - the more shape we give our stories and their unfolding.
I say this, still learning to find and give strength to my own words. But each time I gather them up in my ink-stained fingers and bring them to the tip of my tongue - the easier I find they come.
It takes practice to pave this path. So I keep writing, speaking, and shaping my story.
Trying On Language For Our Experiences
The older I get, the more important I find language. Sometimes this awareness is paralyzing because I never want to dilute the meaning of a word or to put a description to my own experiences that takes away from others. I am still learning that while I hold language as sacred in its own way, we are always allowed to explore it for ourselves and finding words for our experiences is an ever-unfolding process.
You never owe anyone (or yourself) a solid identity where you cement your sense of yourself in a particular description. We are all complex, ever-shifting and evolving beings, and your language for your journey through the world, is allowed to change as well. This could be in how you relate to past or current struggles, exploring your sexuality or gender identity, or in difficult experiences that were traumatic for you, but you are still unsure if your experiences really "qualify" as traumatic.
At the end of the day, it is always okay, to explore aspects of your life experiences and language for those things. Do your best to let go of needing a solid place to stand, never moving from a word or identity, or "qualifying" to use certain language in your life story. Keep trying out words, keep communicating with safe and supportive others, keep exploring yourself and your healing.
Imagining Ourselves Complexly - You Are Not A Diagnosis
Having grown up with many of my early experiences captured in diagnoses, it has taken me a long time to develop an identity outside of DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) criteria. There is a reason the DSM has often been referred to as the psychiatric "bible;" its rule can feel very hard to escape when your experiences fall (to some degree) within its many pages.
The thing is, diagnoses are somewhat arbitrary, provide a framework from which to view the world, and are subject to societal bias and change, as our understandings of the human condition evolves. They can give a name to what you're facing and offer a path forward; in that way they can be hopeful. However, they can also reduce the complexity of our experiences, temperament, and the things we have faced to bullet points and clinical descriptors. They can feel like a sentence handed down by a judge, a forecast of what's possible for us before we have even had the chance to try.
Whatever you have felt in the face of a diagnosis applied to your name, please remember that a diagnosis is a tool - its usefulness determined by you and whether it can help support you in your individual journey. Diagnoses are situated in the context of human beings and we are all far more complex and capable than bullet points and descriptors can capture. Remember that societal attitudes and understanding shifts over time as well, what we may consider "deviant" at some point in time, may be a reflection of bias and fear more than truth (for example homosexuality was in the DSM up until 1973). Take this all as information, keep exploring how these pieces fit in your life, but most of all, keep seeking your own definitions of struggle, healing, and yourself.
When we have lived with mental illness for a long time, we become so accustomed to telling our stories of struggle (over and over) to practitioners, but what if we framed the stories that we tell ourselves in different words? The ways you have survived, the pieces of gratitude you have found along the way, the things you have learned, unlearning, or are still in the process of exploring? I don't mean to imply these words will come easily, they may take a great deal of time and certain frames of mind. But I'm curious, how would you tell your story if you weren't recounting yet again, a list of symptoms and painful years? These things exist of course and have undoubtedly shaped us. But there may be other things too, things we leave out when we're so used to describing ourselves by the struggles we have lived through.
Just a thought. Take it or leave it. Come back to it at a different time. Whatever you need. I'll be here, trying to practice telling my own story in this way too.
- S.
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