Take this as a rant. It's supposed to be.
Syscourse is a swamp where reason and compassion go to die.
There are no sides or stances. Just a group of people willing to twist words to suit their fancy, and everyone else.
The pattern repeats at nearly regular intervals. It can be observed and catalogued like the mating rituals of some ancient, forgotten bird.
Always, language becomes a barrier. Almost always, the primary argument is an attempt to draw some imaginary boundary between what must be real and what can only be fiction.
Syscourse adds nothing to the community. More often than not, systems merely end up in its crosshairs because they dare to exist.
Conversation and discussion are tossed to the wayside. There's no room for multiple opinions, no space in which to explore the complexities and nuances of the human mind.
Syscourse is a world cast on a chess board and butchered beyond all recognition.
Here is an argument... follow it to its conclusion:
There is a disorder born of trauma during a critical time in a child's early development. It manifests in a dozen ways, and it can cripple someone's life. For many sufferers, its beginnings are horrific, and they have lived through hell itself to still be here today. This disorder sometimes creates varied personalities in a brain that might've otherwise been one.
From this perspective, those who are not disordered cannot possibly contain multitudes. No suffering and no trauma means no reason for the multitudes. End of story.
The logical conclusion then must be that everyone else is experiencing something different. They must because only one path leads to the end goal. And they, who do not tread the path, should not impinge upon the ways of those who have walked the scorched earth of their trauma. There is no common ground, no overlap.
I'm sure you can see where all of this fails to account for all the nuance that exists in the world. It does not accurately portray the lived experiences of actual human beings. It offers nothing to the community beyond more fences.
And there is where my rant begins in earnest.
Because in the throes of the story, human beings are ignored, lost, and forgotten. Experiences are ignored and disregarded. People are diminished for not adhering to the narrative. The complex is made simple, at cost.
It matters not that some claim no disorder. It refuses reality in favor of a some perfect truth. The messy human condition is reduced to a YES or NO question.
But plurality seems to be a complex web of experience. Some people come to it through trauma and disorder. Others through meditation, writing, creativity, and daydream. Still others find themselves living somewhere in the middle ground of it all. Some do not know and do not care, others know and choose not to speak. I cannot capture all the permutations, but when I listen to people, I hear them time and again.
And all of those experiences are valid and real, but not clear-cut, not easy to shove into little boxes.
And only one group is dead set on the damn boxes. Not a side, not an argument, just a group of people who have decided that a box must exist and only some will fall into its depths. Fuck everyone else.
And here the rant ends. As it must.
A manual for a disorder cannot guide those who are not disordered, though it might hint at how a thing comes to be. A lived experiece, no matter how strange, should take precedence. There should be no shame in the multitudes. Resources should be shared, not hidden away. No matter the starting point, solid mental health care should be available to all at no cost.
And in the end, we are better off building bridges even to that which we do not understand.
(I'm turning off notifications and not adding a sign-off because a fair few members of this system had a hand in this post.)
