Monday, April 21, 2014

The Journey to Finding Words to Fit



How do I write a story without the words to write it? How do I tell my story if the words and even the concepts elude me? This is my life. So many of the root causes of the troubles I have seen have been pre-verbal or of such an extreme and, hopefully, rare nature that I do find it hard to grasp what I have been living. It is especially difficult to get help for specific troubles, such as health issues, if there are no words along with no recognition of the symptoms presented because of the rare or deliberately ignored types of problems I faced. Then I discovered I was not so extremely rare after all. I began to meet and hear about others who had similar stories to various parts of my story. I began a decades’ long journey to discover what was going on for me and to heal. It has been and continues to be a steep learning curve with a long process of unraveling the layers in my life, my body, and my psyche.

And, yes, somehow my size was always put as the frontispiece of my woes – either through the sheer cruelty meted out to me from what felt like everywhere from as early as I can remember or through the deliberate neglect or resistance to giving me the help I desperately needed from the beginning, especially when that assistance was available somewhere. Was my size the real issue or only the cover issue for something harder to define? Perhaps it is all this and more. There is nothing quite like prejudice informing those who think they know it all. The trouble was, I did not know better and usually believed them on too many levels. Why? It was mostly because my problems started too young for me to know any differently AND because I was and continue to be fat. Apparently when a person is fat, all troubles, all problems, and all the many types of hatreds spewed upon the fat person are the fat person’s fault. Hence, the fat person does not deserve good treatment of any kind.

Of course, this is utter nonsense parading as societal wisdom. Another name for it is bigotry. I had learned to self-impose this mindset deeply and to accept mistreatment. So, I have had to un-learn most of what I thought I knew. This was not a one-time effort either. The process of finding those deeply buried and beyond normal knowing facts and beliefs was difficult in and of itself. There was much personal research and work involved, but the work did begin to become more enjoyable and less tedious as I grew in wisdom, knowledge, self- and other-acceptance. The process is still on-going and will most likely be lifelong.

Some of the new areas opened to me to search for answers to many of my life and health problems included, but were limited to, abuse and PTSD/cPTSD issues, autism spectrum issues, RAD (Rare Adipose Disease) issues, as well as learning about societal privilege and bigotry issues. All of this and more I will begin to address in future blog posts. Meanwhile, the learning to put words to experiences continues.

I will put the size acceptance parts of my journey here with our ISAA (International Size Acceptance Association) blog and the rest on my own personal blogs and pages. I do hope you are along for the journey with your own as well.
Thank you.
Daphne Yvonne Bradshaw
© 2014, Daphne Yvonne Bradshaw. All rights reserved.
Published in conjunction with ISAA (the International Size Acceptance Association.)
http://womeasure.wordpress.com/2014/04/21/the-journey-to-finding-words-to-fit/