I’ve been a writer since before I could read. I’m still not exactly clear on how this worked, but I can distinctly remember the conversation I had with my mother about the fact that she wanted me to write about my day even though all I knew were the ABCs. She sat me in front of a typewriter and told me to just find the right letters, so I reminded her I couldn’t spell things either and she insisted that I could figure it out.
That’s pretty much how my childhood went: Figuring it out and raising myself. I was scared of people, especially her, so I made up stories in my head nightly to go to sleep. I only started writing things down around age 10, when I started writing poetry before school, which functioned a bit like meditation. I wrote nearly every day for six years, before an unfortunate incident with a very bad teacer ruined poetry for me.
This is not an entry about that. This is an entry about being a writer, and what I do with that these days even when I can’t write.
I invent terms. I usually invent terms for things which are really frustrating in order to make them make more sense. So, when I started to have more bad days than good for a while in terms of fatigue and what my body would allow me to do anymore, I invented, “going on safari,” for those days when getting out of bed/going into the other room/transferring from your chair were so exhausting on so many levels that it felt like going on safari. That phrase stuck, and I’ve passed it on to many a crip, and I wouldn’t be blogging about it unless I knew that by doing so I was passing it on to yet more crips. You can have it. It’s fine.
One I invented more recently is, “Psych brain.” This is how I describe my brain. I have a degree in psychology, and in getting it I realized just how much I didn’t fit inside the field. But I have an inherent interest in the kinds of research projects psychologists do, and I run little hypothetical studies in my head or among my friends for fun. Like the time I polled a bunch of people about what really happened in Newtown, CT, recently, after I met a new friend who was from there. As expected, most people couldn’t really remember what happened there, and I helped them backtrack. “What happens in Connecticut?” “I don’t know, it’s in New England.”
Yes, and it even borders New York. Nothing ever happens there, don’t worry.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, here, because Connecticut and what actually happens there deserves its own post. The point is, I found exactly one person who knew anything much about Connecticut, and he’d already been my friend for well over fifteen years. Instead of getting annoyed, though, I’m just fascinated by this kind of weird mind-thing that people’s brains do. I am endlessly fascinated by the human mind, and how to help people because helping them fascinates me. I think about it all the time and how I can better help my friends. And I make myself available to counsel them through ableism, health woes, stupid academic politics, and financial crises. I know enough psychology that I just learned how to talk to people and that’s what I do. I find it comforting. I think about these kinds of issues so much throughout my day some people might consider this a stim--not the counseling people part, but the “how can I make this better, what would make this work right?” It’s very calming.
I call this having psych brain. It’s a damn sight better than a lot of other labels people have given me. You can use this one too, if you like it.
So I guess, some years back, you could say I conducted a little psychology experiment.
I had been watching a lot of Babylon 5 with Phillip, the guy who knows more about CT than anyone else I’ve met who doesn’t live there. And one day I was turning over in my head one of the interesting factors in the show. From these musings would come a term.
Babylon 5 was a sci-fi show written by J. Michael Straczynski that ran for 5 years from 1994-1998. It spawned a number of TV movies and spinoffs, but ultimately several of the cast members died and this stopped Babylon 5 from becoming any bigger than it was already. One of the actors who died was a crip named Richard Biggs. He used his fame to propel forward education for deaf kids. I fell in love with his character of Dr. Franklin and am still sort of saddened that this really cool actor isn’t with us anymore. So, Babylon 5 left a bit of an impression on me. I sometimes wonder if Biggs was ever consulted or knew the people who consulted on this huge, honking disability parallel that was in the show:
On the show, there were natural telepaths. Sort of like XMen, though, the ability wasn’t considered an ability, really. There were two types of telepaths as far as the government was concerned. The ones working under government control, and the ones who refused and were then heavily medicated, sci-fi style, to control their abilities. The medication stole the lives of the telepaths who didn’t kowtow to the government.
Over time, though, it’s revealed that there is another faction of telepaths, the rebels. They’re unmedicated and don’t work for the government. And what better set of people to outsmart the government than a bunch of telepaths, or “teeps?”
I won’t spoil the show for you, except to tell you that this huge parallel reminded me, and still reminds me, of my crip friends. I was thinking it over one day when it came to me: What would the CPers do if they knew this story and how many parallels there are to disability? Would they like the term ceep?
Some didn’t. Some told me I was totally stupid for creating it. But some did. It’s been turned into more than one Keep Calm meme. And some people, they can’t get enough of this word.
I told the story once, and I just did what I usually do, a little, “I’ll just leave this here.” I watched what happened as the memes started being made. I watched who used the term, and what they did with it. For a while. One thing I noticed was that people got really confused really quickly about where it came from, and some credited the people who made the Keep Calm memes. I thought this was funny, because I love the Keep Calm meme. It’s actually a meme rooted in the history of World War II. I highly recommend you look it up, because the story is a good one. But I am a quiet person, especially when I could be watching psychology in the making. So I just noted that people were highly ready to take credit but didn’t really remember where it came from. I didn’t say much. I’d told the story one time.
Eventually, I left behind the CPer community, because my CP is not “mild,” and I find the propensity for the CPers to insist on this identifier ad nauseum kind of nauseating. I let them keep “ceep.” And they can still keep “ceep.” When I use it, I do so ironically, as a commentary on the dangers of groupthink. In the end, I’m the one who could tell the origin story of “ceep,” because I created it, because I care about disability parallels and spent two years of my undergrad career piloting my own disability studies work. During that time I wrote a thesis on disability and body image, studied eugenics, and taught myself film criticism to critique 20 films from around the world for one paper on disability representation in world cinema. It was a while ago, but it means I know some things, and one of those things is how to find disability parallels and common ground with disabled people.
But not when they’re trying to out-”mild” each other… so I let the CP community go, and I let them keep “ceep.”
I’m too neurodiverse for them, anyway.
No comments:
Post a Comment