Nothing

I am not nothing at the times when I am not defined by a continuous-narrative cognitive-dominant identity ¹I am not convinced that anyone is well defined primarily through an isolated, cognitive-dominant identity. It’s the way that many people talk about human existence, at least in White culture, but I’m not sure that story is true. I know for a fact it’s not the only truth, because it’s not true for me..

I am not nothing at the times my disability means I cannot be productive or even active.

I am not nothing at the times when I do not know a path to something better and cannot imagine a future that is different.

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Some of what I am and have been is cognition. But I also exist and want and do and feel, I interact and investigate and learn, I engage and respond and continue my life – even at times when I don’t have cognition setting my path or directing my responses.

In fact I have recently given up a cognitive-dominant identity I name Work. They were often the person I wrote about here, complaining about their tyranny while still submitting to their dominance on a regular basis. They aren’t the reason I wrote or the author, but they were a huge force in my life at the times when I did Screed.

Cognition-dominance is not inherently bad. It is one of the tools I want to use in managing my life. It is one of the tools that kept me alive in the past. It’s the will in the will power that let me make structural changes to my life at times when nothing else would do. And I imagine sometimes it’s a tool that helps me will a new world into existence around me.

It is also a tool that can betray me. It privileges my cognitive understanding over all the other things my mind and body know, over all the responses I have trained, over all the parts that disagree with this plan. It gives anxiety a final say in many decisions. It says that Knowing — whether the thing we know is true or not — will determine what we do and what we must accept.

Work had long since abandoned me, not with malice but in fear. They were part of the plan to get us out. Work has been around most days since the late 1900s and I willingly granted them not just the right to override conflicting desires but the right to decide what to learn and what to ignore. Work has not – will not – change their identity to match my much different life today. They never learned they safety I had in other places, they never wanted to do less and leave more space for others.

They never wanted to become – nothing.

Their view of the world couldn’t imagine me as anything without them. Nothing I wanted to be in any case. They feared that if they stopped showing up, if they ever tolerated anything other than linear progress, if they ever let other parts of my life interfere with their plan, that I would again be stuck in the life they were designed to free me from.

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For myself — for the broader me-s — I feared that without Work I would lose all the things they built for me. I chose their tyranny again and again because without it they might become nothing and I would have to continue without them. I feared a life without their skill and their knowledge and their identity, without the things that moved me from the life I had in the time before Work.

These fears are all valid. Work is in charge of holding knowledge and skills and identity. They are the story that organizes and relates all the pieces I needed to be a person who could work, who could escape, who could survive and advance a plan. They are one of the stories I needed to become me.

But Work isn’t knowledge or skill or identity, they are only the story that lets me find and activate those parts. I can be and have all those things with another story. Many of those things didn’t come from Work in the first place, and were pieces I gave them so they could continue to do the work I needed.

And those pieces don’t become nothing when Work gives them up. They become free to find new stories, free to pop up in other narratives – perhaps not always where I want them – and free to fade away if no one else needs them.

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I do give some things up when I stop inhabiting Work’s story. Inevitably some pieces will be lost or broken, some pieces will smash into other parts of my life and cause chaos and undesirable reactions and unwelcome feelings. The story that holds these pieces to each other, the attachment that story has to my bigger life, will fall away and become harder and harder to recover. 

I also become a person with space for new stories, and a person full of unclaimed parts ready for my imagination to assemble.

ZiB