A feminist archaeology of self by way of words
This is the opening section of a longer, work-in-progress piece I am writing for an upcoming Dog Section Press publication - I'll also be reading the full thing at La Camionera on Monday 19th May.
Brainstorm
I am not sure whether this part is a recollection of my life cycle or a recollection of the news cycle, but - around 2005 - I recall the prohibition of the word ‘brainstorm’. I remember a teacher announcing that from here on we should refer to ‘thought showers’ rather than ‘brainstorms’, lest we offend people with epilepsy.
Upon further research now, it turns out this particular linguistic sensitivity was disseminated to local authorities by some early aughts civil servants. Eager to obey and desperate not to offend, I was immediately on board, silently disappointed in myself when I so much as thought of the word ‘brainstorm’.
Apart from a great-aunt in Finland who I scarcely saw, I did not know anyone with epilepsy, and the little my adolescent brain had absorbed about the condition probably retained aspects of its cultural and historical associations with mysticism and possession: being seized by spirits. It seemed terrifying and I did not want to add insult to injury with injurious vocabulary.
As ever, I had a troubling sense that everything rested on language, that words were make or break. I observed that the women around me tended to be more careful and also cleverer with their words: better curated rhetoric, more adept with silence. I learned to proceed with oral caution.
Five years after Brainstorm Gate, at nineteen, I had my first seizure. On a day trip to London with my university boyfriend, walking along, apparently I said something like “I feel weird” - and then collapsed unconscious into full-body convulsions.
From then, volition was no longer reliably enough mine. (Was it ever?) I was consumed by the sudden contingency of my consciousness and decidedly not offended by the word ‘brainstorm’. Sometimes, I found myself ruminating on it, grateful for the signifier. My brain was, actually, storming.
After a seizure (in the so-called postictal state), I was totally lost:
like lost in the world,
like lost for words.
Language escaped me in incomprehensible ways. I had no idea to say, how to say, or why - like when, as I do not recall, having recently regained consciousness, I told an attractive paramedic that my boyfriend who had called the ambulance was not really my boyfriend.
Though eventually managed by medication, for almost a decade, the storms wrought havoc. They surged infrequently, unpredictably:
brain upside down,
words all over the place,
meaning shifting beneath my feet.
