Maybe I'm Crazy

At work today, I waded into a discussion of whether the word "Crazy" was, in and of itself, "ableist" and disrespectful to the mentally ill. Not in the sense of calling somebody crazy, but in the connotation of "very," as in "crazy fast" or "crazy busy."

The battle lines quickly formed, and the rhetoric started flying fast and thick. One person noted:

I think when we remember that human beings, feelings, and experiences are at the root of most culture change initiatives, it becomes easier to understand why what can feel like an overwhelming amount of "policing" is in fact a form of showing respect and attempted empathy for a perspective we may never have experienced ourselves.

I find this construction (What can feel like 'X' is in fact 'Y.') interesting, because it implies that the feeling is incorrect. But why can't it be both a form of showing respect and empathy and overwhelming simultaneously? And perhaps this is part of what drives the conflict; the idea that if something feels offensive or belittling to someone, then is should be considered as such, but if the effort to combat it feels overwhelming or exhausting, that's a failure of perspective. And I think that people tend to react poorly to the feeling that they're being asked for something that isn't being reciprocated.

And, perhaps, this is why both sides so often wind up talking past one another. Each posits the benefits to itself to be worth the costs that they are asking the other side to bear, with the understanding that the cost-benefit analysis that they have arrived at is a universal one. People who feel disrespected and "othered" by certain words regard the choice to use a different term as a cheap and simple action with measurable benefits to themselves. People who feel overwhelmed at the need to remember a seemingly arbitrary set of rules regard the choice to not take offense as the same. Each regards their experience as being indicative of an objective truth of how language or human sensitivity works.

Being a Black person in a predominantly White world often left me feeling what is now described as "othered," although the term had yet to enter common usage when the phenomenon was first visited upon me. And for a time, I tried to impress upon the people around me how important it was to me that they spoke and behaved in a way that didn't so clearly remind me that I was different. But in the end, it occurred to me that I wasn't really asking them for respect. Because I didn't know what their respect actually looked like. I'd never bothered to understand how they treated the people they respected. I realized that what I was asking for was obedience. I set requirements for them, and told them that I would feel hurt if they didn't live up to them. And what I had done was, paradoxically, given up control. I'd placed my self-image in their hands and demanded that they care for it. But if I wouldn't, or couldn't, how could they? And so I stopped doing that. Not as a favor to them, but as a service to myself. Because I realized that I had a choice of two tasks. The difficult one of controlling my reactions to the words and behavior of the people around me, or the impossible one of controlling how literally everyone I interacted with dealt with me.

I'm not going to say that I'm happier now that I've released the people around me from that expectation. But I am more at ease around them, because I no longer dread them saying or doing something that will remind me of how different I am. (After all, mirrors have that part covered.) And I do feel better for that. And guess that's what I needed to understand. That letting them off the hook was not something that I was doing for them. Refusing to hold them accountable for my feeling that I didn't belong in the world I inhabited was something that I was doing for me. And it was difficult. And there are still days when I have doubts about whether or not it was the right thing to do. But I feel that I better own my self-image now than I did before. And for that, it was worth it. Can everyone do that? I don't know. I don't know if I can say how I managed it.