All the wrong words
Every language I reach for comes pre-loaded. Biased. Stigmatized. Traumatized. Baggage.
Clinical language wants to diagnose. It hears “experience” and answers: pathology. It reduces the living to processes it can observe and name externally, or pretend to.
Literary language wants to aestheticise. It wraps lived truth in soft prose, diluting what overwhelms into what entertains, seeking clever metaphors for things that aren’t metaphorical.
Philosophical language wants to parse. It embeds ontology, epistemology, phenomenology. Frameworks that map the unknown to the known, assuming the coordinates always correlate. They don’t.
And no amount of mental or linguistic gymnastics can impose a Kantian architectonic on lived experience without mistaking the unassimilated for the unreal.
Every vocabulary has its uses. None of them are adequate for the blessings and burdens I now bear.
I’ve tried using the language of others: Jung, Corbin, Grof, Ferrer, Hillman, Nasr, Arabi, Bhārgava.
They all have their place. But here they are misplaced.
My search for meaning requires finding the right words.
Part of my journey is finding those words.
Another part is speaking them.
The rest is just life, however uncanny.