vertiginous
vertiginous
whirling; spinning; rotary
Growing up, I picked up a lot of different labels. Adults from all walks of life were quick to identify things “wrong” with me. The kids too. Names were assigned to that which made me different. Some clinical, some cruel, all othering.
You learn how to hide parts of yourself when you keep getting told your survival counts on it. Masks help you blend into the crowd, targets stand out. You can’t keep it up forever though, I tried and it nearly consumed me. Genuine growth and healing took accepting my struggles, instead of covering them with a more acceptable veneer.
It’s easy to fall into a trap where we let these labels define us. Remember that these are arbitrary constructs with malleable definitions. The canon gets updated every few years, and even that’s still a decade or so out of date. None of this is carved in stone.
Don’t forget that “Normal” is also one of those morphing labels. It can be shifted, the last decade has certainly taught us that. We’ve been pressured to accept so much that we know is wrong. It’s tolerated though, because those flavors of cruelty have been normalized. This process can work both ways though.
More than anything else, my daughter enjoys spinning to regulate herself. Someone with good intentions once asked why I tolerated it, and suggested that I should get her to stop. They felt the behavior was aberrant and demanding correction.
Instead of forcing compliance to an imagined norm, I asked that person to challenge their personal definitions of “acceptable behavior”. Spinning instead of standing is such a mild deviation to get upset about. The only thing broken is the comfort of those who prefer everyone sticks to straight lines and right angles.
There’s a reason a computer can’t draw a perfect circle. Some of us weren’t meant to conform to arbitrary rules.
ContextFall
Curtains Up by Danny K. Whitty
On Writing—and Then Becoming—the “Other” by Mathangi Subramanian