To be a person: growing up adjectiveless

[kiya]

There are a couple of discussions on The Cauldron at the moment about bullying, how to deal with it, etc. And I need to gnaw on things a little. And thrash about a lot, apparently, because I'm trying to get this spatial-emotional experience to turn into language, and it's not going at all well (possibly because I'm trying to translate it into visual-emotional and then describe that, and that's way too many levels of translation). Centrifuge. :P

Argh. *spends some time trying to talk this into English at oneironaut*

Whitney again has issues turning a visual-emotional image into language.
Whitney says, "Actually, it's spatial-emotional, and I'm trying to get it into language by translating it into visual-emotional and describing the results."
Tesla says, "Oh dear."
Whitney says, "I could talk at you in sentence fragments and see if you understand me?"
Tesla says, "I promise nothing. But you could."
Whitney does so, in the hopes that the reflection will help her translate in general.
Whitney says, "Maturity is developing a complex Venn diagram."
Whitney says, "Early life, all belonging-circles; adolescence gets major differentiation urges, need to create disjoint bubbles to indentify self in the node-overlap of overlapping adjectives."
Whitney says, "Development of antagonism to people in not-bubbles reinforces bubble strength; still defining self in terms of others, but doing so negatively."
Tesla says, "Hmm."
Whitney makes vigorous hand gestures.
Whitney says, "Develop new groups to belong to, generally first defined by not-family."
Tesla now has a rather interesting mental image involving a lot of intersecting ripply glass spheres.
Whitney says, "Yes! Like that!"
Whitney says, "And the grey bit is where self happens. It doesn't start out existing, it gets /constructed/."
Tesla says, "Right."
Tesla says, "I'm digging you."
Whitney says, "Some people never grow out of needing to have identity defined by their adjectives, rather than, y'know, being an identity that has adjectives."
Whitney says, "But the need to have distinct adjectives isn't the first thing, that comes out of the need to be not-other, that's adolescence."
Whitney says, "Blurry self-lines -> strong, sharply defended lines circumscribing developing sense of independent-self -> person."
Whitney, more vigorous gestures.
Tesla tries to figure out how to paint this mental image.
Whitney says, "I've got a pinkish one in the lower left, if it helps."
Tesla says, "Is it intersecting a blue one? Mine is."
Whitney says, "Er, lower left near, as opposed to far."
Whitney says, ". . . it's intersecting an approximate assload of other bubbly bits."
Tesla says, "Well, yeah. But I've got a very clear image of it intersecting a blue one."
Whitney has a very pale blue one, if that helps.
Whitney says, "And a green one center-back-right."
Whitney says, "Sort of mint green."
Tesla says, "If, for example, you were to kill your father, you would cease to exist." "*gasp* But existing is basically all I do!"
Whitney says, "The pink one is actually bothering me a little, as it's warm and pushing a bit on my left cheek. :P"
Whitney says, "I really need to have less substantial conceptual metaphors."
Tesla laughs hard.
Whitney says, "What I'm actually trying to write about is bullying. The thing is, okay, one of the things bullying is about is trying to define the bubble. The people there don't have enough personal mana to be, y'know, people without the group, and they don't know how to be a useful /adjective/ without enforcing the group, and they can't think of a better way to do this than define certain people as being not-group and enforcing -that-."
Whitney says, "And sometimes the not-group people can assimilate into the group by interacting just right with the bubble."
Whitney says, "But then you get people who . . . they're in the differentiation age, right? But they only have, like, the family-bubble, they need to differentiate from that, but all the other bubbles in their vicinity they're not-in. They have no adjectives, no identity."
Whitney says, "You know, rather than try to translate this for the journal entry I'm trying to write, I should just pull a log."
Tesla says, "Very lazy. I approve. (Though I don't know how I'd translate it, myself, because it makes sense already.)"
Whitney says, "All of which is background for me trying to articulate my experience as being the target of bullies. So I'm going to come up for air and let that be preamble."
Whitney says, "The thing is, okay . . . the thing is that I experienced bullying as unpersoning. Especially the sexual harassment stuff. It wasn't merely denying me a group to adjectivise myself in, to get some independent identity, it was actively removing identity."
Whitney says, "I wasn't even a /girl/ to the sexual harassers. I was a breast. Though after I was a breast pretty directly I became an elbow, so I was an elbow for a while, and the fellow who went for the boob was an ass, because that was what he landed on."
Eastman cackles.
Tesla cackles.
Whitney says, "I'm not kidding about being an elbow, mind; that was basically how they interacted with and referred to me for a couple of weeks after that."
Whitney says, "I was just parts. And I /felt/ like parts, because I didn't have any unifying adjectives. And at some level I needed to build adjectives, and I tried to bootstrap myself into the independent-of-group-definition phase, but that's fucking hard to do when you're eleven."
Tesla begins to leak steam.
Whitney says, "You can go beat them later, dearheart; I'm trying to geek out here."
Tesla says, "I'm being good. I am. Please continue geeking."
Whitney says, "So there's this discussion elsewhere about bullying, and someone said basically, 'Why not just get the kids to defend themselves? I used to get into fights all the time, and whether I won or lost didn't matter, I showed I could defend myself and got left alone. Sometimes I got friends from the bullies that way'. And I sort of look at that funny, because the physical stuff isn't all there is to bullying -- there's that unpersoning thing, the reduction of other people into object-target, in the worst cases the reduction of their capacity to develop selfness."
Whitney says, "And I'm still not sure what to do about the girl who invited me to a slumber party at an address that did not exist."
Tesla says, "Aaagh."
Eastman says, "Beat her?"
Eastman, helpful.
Tesla says, "There's always giving me her name and then pretending you've never heard of me when the cops call you."
Whitney says, "I think I've actually forgotten it, though I know her surname began with an M."
Whitney prods at the selfness thing. "That's the thing that I'm trying to get at, really, the whole development-of-self and the ways that bullying behaviours feed into that whole process. And the weirdnesses that happen in a self that doesn't have enough bubbles they're defined as a member of, rather than defined as not a mumber of."
Whitney says, "I'm wondering if this has anything to do with my tendency to collect adjectives. I don't /do/ anything with them, particularly, except identify them as accurate descriptions of the me. But it's a sort of shell against being undefined."
Whitney says, "Also wondering if it has anything to do with my tendency to be confounded by people who make their lives all about The Adjective. A combination of too-many-eggs-in-one-basket thing and having had a really defective interaction with kids who were doing the big deal The Adjective stuff in a timeperiod when I didn't have any adjectives of my own."
Tesla says, "... well, if you're right, you're remarkably internally consistent."
Whitney says, "This whole thoughtpattern was triggered by me pondering the guy who basically said 'Why not just let 'em fight and prove their strength to each other' and replying to him with, 'The guy I dumped on his ass after he grabbed my breast was not dissuaded by that. Or anything else.'"
Whitney says, "How so?"
Tesla says, "Well, it all hangs together. I can't do that with my head stuff, for the most part."
Tesla says, "One gets the impression that guy is pretty dim."
Whitney says, "Actually, I get the impression that he's very one form of Asatru-mindset. Strength-proving, demonstrate your worth, etc."
Tesla says, "That usually correlates pretty strongly to 'dim'."
Tesla says, "Not that I'm a judgemental bastard or anything."
Whitney says, "I can also see his point, to a certain extent; the establishment of order through that sort of ritualised thing is a big deal, and preventing it causes problems. But it's not always the -unpersoning- thing, and I think the people who experienced adolescent status wars as proving-worth and people who experienced them as unpersoning are communicating across this huge rupture-gulf."
Whitney says, "And the problem is that the kids who are experiencing the unpersoning thing get the message from the adults who experienced the proving thing that they're weak and worthless for being unwound. Which, of course, contributes to unpersoning."
Tesla says, "Ugh. Yes."
Whitney says, "And I don't know if they're qualitatively different experiences, if one can point at things consistently and say 'this is group bonding' and 'this is unpersoning'. Which makes the whole thing more tangled."
Whitney says, "But anyone who says 'Boys will be boys' should be beaten, nonetheless."
Tesla says, "With a stick."
Whitney thinks she's mostly run out of steam, pulls a log.

Comments

[kiya]

Lossy, er. Translation loses data, precision, every time; like static on the line. meaning fizzles, gets averaged out so nuance is lost or new, incorrect nuance is introduced. Lossy. Thingy.


As to the guy -- yeah, that wouldn't surprise me either.