ReadFanon

ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 47m ago

Makes a Faustian pact

Ends up in hell

"How did we get here??"

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ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 1h ago

It's really not - I just went through the alphabet and came up with as many words as I could for each letter. You can see the patterns where I bounced off one word and came up with other similar ones. And, yeah, I do use words like ridiculous or absurd instead of crazy or stupid in my day to day life.

I talk this way because shit's not gonna change unless we start making change. I'd rather sound, whatever, odd or archaic or something than to join the chorus of ableism that is the background radiation of society.

ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 1h ago

Don't fret, I'm trying to get better at the whole "if it's worth doing, it's worth doing badly" thing because I struggle with perfectionism. A badly edited mess of useful points in a reply is better than a perfectly written, well thought out response that never gets typed out.

One of the things that I look for in a therapist is a degree of constructive tension between us. Not conflict or irreconcilability but rather a perspective that I can respect and have sympathy for but which doesn't fit perfectly into how I understand the world and relate to it.

If a therapist shares a foundation in values and approach but has different worldview which isn't antithetical to my own, I personally find it to be the most productive; I'm not looking for a partner, I'm not even looking for a friend, and I'm certainly not look for a yes-man. I'm looking for certain qualities and I'm looking for what can drive the most positive change in my personal development, and for me that means someone who challenges me in the right ways and who is willing to challenge me.

I think maybe if I use the metaphor of carving marble it might make sense here. Polishing marble might feel nice but it doesn't actually chip away at anything obstructing the final piece, so that means nothing gets revealed and the act of polishing isn't just unproductive but, in a sense, it's counterproductive. The opposite of that is taking a sledgehammer to a chunk of marble and destroying it. But to carve something out of marble requires the right amount of force applied skilfully in the right places at the right time. And that means this process requires a degree of conflict or tension between the chisel and the marble. But I'm overextending the metaphor so I'll stop here. (Caveat to say that this is all metaphor - therapy should not be forceful or violent, instead I'm trying to explain that I think too much agreement can cause a lack of progress in therapy.)

ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 2h ago

I'm gonna disagree with you on this because the construction of disability is based on a foundation of normativity and since the norm is to not be able to see infrared it means not being able to see it isn't considered a visual impairment.

The flipside is that disability is not necessarily only a lack of certain function, although I understand why that's the go-to understanding, but also an "excess" of function or ability can also be considered part of disability; as an example, sensory processing disorder is characterized by either a lack of sensory sensitivity in domains but very often it's a heightened sensitivity in certain domains too. An obvious example of the heightened sensitivity would be people who cannot tolerate loud noises without it wreaking havoc with their nervous system.

Another example is any autoimmune disorder (or at least any that I can think of) - they aren't characterized by a lack of immune function but instead by an overactive immune function, or an excessive immune response. So is hypermobile disorders which are characterized by much higher levels of flexibility.

So I get what you're saying here and not to put too fine of a point in it but if I said "I have a visual impairment because I can't see beyond my peripheral vision and thus I have a disability" people would treat me like I was trying to make a joke because it breaks down the inherent normative assumptions in matters of disability.

ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 2h ago

Basically all ableist terms carry a slew of connotation with them and it acts as a mirror for how our society relates to and represents that particular disability.

If we take a common ableist term like crazy, the connotations are that it's out of touch, ridiculous, foolish, naive, counterproductive, ineffective, exploitable (and in fact that it's virtuous, or at least beneficial, to take advantage of, e.g. "Our prices are completely crazy" [!!!]), harmful, wasteful/a waste, dangerous, laughable, best to ignore, against the common good and so on.

And how do we see society treating people who are deemed "crazy"? You already know the answer.

Society treats those people as dangerous, out of touch, foolish, to be ignored, a waste, against the common good, that they know better than the people deemed crazy, and in a huge way as people to be exploited. I'm not gonna quote crime stats at you but I find it extremely implausible that there could be no connection between how common it is in mainstream discourse to use "crazy" as a selling point to encourage exploiting something and how exploited people with psychiatric disability—"crazy" people—are in society.

You're not wrong to say that there's a wide variety of implications with how a word like that is used but the connective tissue here is that all the way the word is used is a lens into the way society views the particular disability being referred to.

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ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 2h ago

Atrocious, antithetical (to...), awful, appalling, craven, cowardly, classless (the bad kind), despicable, dreadful, dire, deplorable, detestable, ghastly, ghoulish, gall/galling (personal favourite), horrific, horrendous, hateful, heinous, inimical (to...), ignorant, insipid, Milquetoast, mealymouthed, loathesome, laughable, nasty, odious, obnoxious, objectionable, reprehensible, revolting (the bad kind not the good kind), rotten, risible, repellant, tasteless, tactless, vile.

Loredrop:One time in grade school my teacher threatened us with having to read the dictionary if we forgot to bring out book during reading time.

Me, having been raised by wolves and needing to test boundaries in order to feel some sense of security and to establish trust in authority figures for being consistent and reliable while not acting punitively, did what I did and tested the boundaries. So I ended up reading the dictionary during the reading period. Turns out I found it fascinating. I didn't do it every reading period but I definitely did it for quite a few of them. So now you know where this comment originated from.

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ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 2h ago

I'm not visually impaired but this is the position that I'd take:

What you said takes a disability and uses it in a metaphorical way. This is how ableist language and framing creeps into discourse.

Why metaphorical? Because you are using the concept of "seeing" as a placeholder for awareness. Thus, the implication of using blind in this sense is that blind people lack awareness. Obviously I'm not gonna belabor the point but the reality is that it's not the case whatsoever.

So if we get to the root of what you're communicating here in what you are directly implying (i.e. not in your awareness) then we arrive at some alternative words that lack ableist subtext (and all done dialectically, in fact):

"I was unaware of..."

"I was oblivious to..."

"I was ignorant of..."

If using a word like blind in this context casts blind people in a certain way, you can ask what it implies about blind people by you saying it. By doing so, you peel back the layers while unpacking some latent ableism and you arrive at words that are more suitable - your phrasing unintentionally implied that blind people are unaware/oblivious/ignorant etc. and thus those words are central to the concept you were communicating. This means we can cut out the ableist middleman term and go directly to using those words instead.

This reply isn't meant to drag you or anything, I'm just elaborating on an approach that I use to do this work in my own life. I've found that the more I practice this, the more I get into the habit of using a word like oblivious instead of reaching for a word like blind.

(This also happens to have interesting implications for the internal discourse within the disability community for a term like "time blindness", but that's a discussion for another day and I'm usually too burned out on addressing more harmful and overt forms of lateral ableism within my own communities of disability that I'm a part of so I never quite seem to have the spoons for tackling this discussion and, honestly, I'm not sure that they are remotely close to ready for this discussion yet.)

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ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 24h ago

A good therapist doesn't invest too much in your story. They listen, they show empathy, but they take a position of equanimity and they will gently challenge assumptions and test your perspective without being invested either way - neither in you being right nor in them knowing better.

They will make you feel welcome and they will establish trust such that you can feel safe to share things with them. (Careful not to project and confuse your own internal feelings of being unsafe to share or being judged onto the therapist here.)

They will listen to you. If you tell them that you don't want to talk about something or that you don't see the point in going into a topic, while they may challenge you (e.g. "Is it because it feels unsafe to address?" "Is this your better judgment on the matter or is this a way to avoid digging into the deeper issues?" sort of thing) they will also take you seriously.

I think a good therapist should focus on the somatic aspects as well, such as asking you if you are feeling tension or noting that your breathing has changed etc.

There is a lot more but my communication battery is completely zapped. I'll try to come back to this to flesh it out more or you can ask me stuff and you'll probably prompt me to give you more of a response.

I like to think of good therapy as existing within a fairly narrow window. Just like if you're at the gym and you're doing stuff that feels like you could do it all day without breaking a sweat, you're probably not making progress but on the other hand, if it's excruciating then you're probably doing damage rather than working out and if it takes you days or weeks to recover then you're probably going at it too hard. Good therapy is like that - it pushes you outside of your comfort zone and it's a strain but it's not something that depletes you in a major way and it's not something that should cause an injury (a psychic injury, I guess? Lol)

I have a tendency to intellectualize (shocking news!) and I know when the therapy is in that goldilocks zone because I will slip into intellectualizing but it won't be a complete shutdown/dissociate/full-tilt intellectualizing response but instead it will be drawing out my defense mechanisms but it won't be associated with panic or terror, it will just be the sort of avoidance like when I'm trying to do a tedious task and suddenly I remember that I need to reorganize my media library on my hard drive or some shit. If I'm "wandering off" in a metaphorical sense then I know I'm digging deep enough to be making progress but also I'm not digging so deep that I become an emotional wreck blubbering on the floor.

No shame to anyone who has become a blubbering emotional wreck on the floor of a therapist's office btw. Sometimes breakthroughs come that way and sometimes it's the only way that they can occur but generally speaking it should be uncomfortable enough to make you want to have a cigarette break or to comfort eat or to just space out and stop talking or whatever your go-to coping mechanism is but without it feeling like you must do it or you're gonna have an emotional breakdown.

A good therapist will circle back on things you have previously raised ans they will connect dots that maybe you haven't connected before too.

Edit: Should have read the body of the post instead of just the title before responding. Ohgodohfuck. Sorry. I'll try and get to a red flags list later. My brain is pretty exhausted.

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ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 1d ago

Oh nice, I just grabbed the best looking link on the subject - I didn't watch it through and vet it before posting it.

Turns out there's occasionally some videos on YouTube that aren't infested by anticommunist brain worms? Well, I'll be damned.

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ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 1d ago

I had an exchange with a back-to-bruncher who was just starting to wake up to things and they talked about how the US was descending into fascism and that it's maddening to be sounding the alarm but to have noone listening.

I was probably a bit unsympathetic in my response but they were acting very self-important in the way the worded it and I said that we're glad they could make it and that we've been here for a long time and the frustration will subside - it's important to channel it and to not be overwhelmed by it or otherwise you're not gonna be able to communicate your message very well and you also need to focus to develop a strategy for how to address the root cause of the problem because this has been in the pipeline for a very long time and there's no voting your way out of it.

They flipped their shit at me because I cleary wasn't going to pander to them, they were clearly wounded by the argument that it will [E:] not all blow over when the Dems get back into power next, and they said that they've been sounding the alarm for a long time and they got really insulting. I asked them if they've been sounding the alarm for such a long time then were they protesting and raising awareness when Bush passed the Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Act which enabled this current state of affairs or were they unaware of it for years despite our efforts to get people to listen. (Or were they even alive and politically aware at this point in time?)

Then I said that if this is how they are responding to a white person sounding the alarm in the recent sharp descent into fascism in a post-911 political landscape then how are they going to respond when a person of color like a descendant of slaves or a native American tells them that they've been sounding the alarm on the fascism in the US for generations and that this been ignored up until now because the flames have only just started at the feet of white people.

I know I'm not doing the best job of describing this exchange but it was quite a while back, soon after Trump got reelected, and the person was desperate to center themselves and act like they were the tip of the spear for this realization but they hadn't even managed to diagnose the problem, its root causes, or to have a clear position on how to fix it. It was a sympathybait post, a geniune one but one nonetheless, and they wanted to get lauded with praise and mutual commiseration (you probably know this attitude from the extremely fresh baby leftists who think they've got it all figured out and they straight up refuse to engage with any of the discourse or the history, they just latch onto a vibe or a slogan and they can't for a second figure out that there is a whole body of work that has been produced over generations addressing these issues.)

I get so tired of people saying "This is fascism!!" and their solution is to wear pink hats and vote about it; if you really believe what you think you do then please act like it.