Over the past couple of weeks, as I've not been posting here, you might assume something is wrong with me, medically speaking.
I do tend to surprise--myself as much as others--with the rapidity of the conditions I have to deal with having. Pneumonia came out of left field to me, but once I looked at the list of effects it has, I see how it simply lay dormant in the mud, awaiting its own version of Spring Thaw, signaling its presence in ways I was to obtuse to connect. There are new growths under my arms and on my chest, and it looks as if I'll never be free of the Wound Care Center to deal with them, nor of Home Health to bandage the results. Sobering conclusions to suprise events do not make for good or interesting writing.
I did write a post, by the way, but ultimately I let it sit a few days--and I'm very glad I did. It was whiny, self-pitying, self-important, in ways that I don't believe I am day-to-day. I have my moments when I could pass for an entitled Millenial, but they've grown fewer and further between; I've learned.
I don't do much initiation anymore. I used to always be the one to push the agenda, but this no longer matters much to me, and doesn't hold any appeal. I can only except those events where as a patient, I have to choose which fork of the road to take.
This is why I get incredibly frustrated reading online commentary and looking through the comments sections. In the local Bloomington paper there exists a fairly small but very consistent group of people, many of whom know each other in the "real" world. They extol the same outlook, the same thinking, posture in the same political space as always. Their comments, no matter the topic of the Letter to the Editor upon which they comment, inevitably reflect a type of rigidity that they accuse the opposite side of possessing.
That frustration is born out of the feeling that I'm still expanding, I'm learning, I'm grasping things I didn't even know I didn't know. I want a world that rends its own fabric for the opportunity of knowledge, that enjoys adopting perspectives for test drives, to better understand they why of someone, the genesis of the emergency, the tipping point where change is used as a noun and not a verb.
I do this with handicaps. I fight against self-obsession with My Cancer. I do it without speaking, I cannot have dinner while discussing, at least not Peter Luger's in Brooklyn style. I can't know but I strongly suspect that many commenters, content with a pretend Hyde Park, and a pretend box upon which to stand and deliver, aren't dealing with this suite of limitations.
Yet they adopt grievances at rabbit pace; they revel in shaming others, all the while maintaining the rigid corseted world they inhabit. Today it was a gay man writing about how one is an asshole if one uses the phrase "straight acting" in reference to any gay man. Admittedly not my favorite phrase either, but honestly, I'm way less worred about what someone says. Often enough, I shrug and think, "so what?".
I would, honestly, like to understand what has happened to our society concerning this obsessive policing of verbal space. How is "straight acting" more offensive than what Kim
Davis spouts about me as a human being? How does that stupid phrase really hurt more than another day's worth of Evangelical hate speech against gay men and women?
I'm at a point where I wouldn't pose any question to a transexual about their experience of the world, or of the change they are navigating, for simple fear of saying a word, or a reference, or a reference to the compromises they are forced into accepting. I don't need to have my name pasted across the internet as a man of unchecked privilege, lack of compassion, cis-obsessed, whatever what might fit the crime of my mouth and brain. I'm conflicted, because it's so far from who I am to not work to the next step of understanding, but it's not reasonable to set oneself up for scarlet lettering.
At a time where it's so wonderful to forget cancer and just engage the world in all its stunning variety, to stop onto the phenomenological planet another person inhabits as it lunges past in a very large universe, I sense a shut down happening around me. Drawn lines abound in sand, and an ever-smaller space to stand is uncomfortable and easily transgressed.
Once I can sleep better--when this batch of effluvia passes through my trach tube, when the tumors recede from high tide, when I'm more right, more normal (yes! normal! my own construct!), I might fight the creep of creepy language policing. I might force people to understand that you don't cure racism by banning a flag, and you make very little safer by forbidding any but approved descriptions, and it is--after all--far more important, what you do, rather than what you say.
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