A Handle on my Cup: On Labels and Identity (Misha Magdalene)

[lb_lee]

While ransacking the bones of Boomerangs (RIP), we got our hands on a copy of Outside the Charmed Circle: Exploring Gender & Sexuality in Magical Practice, by Misha Magdalene. She talked about labels and identity in a way I thought was super neat!

Labels [...] are like the handle on a suitcase or [...] on a coffee cup: they're things we attach to something much larger, something that's inconvenient to simply hold and carry in our hands. Maybe the thing we're trying to carry is too heavy, or too hot or cold, or simply awkward and unwieldy. Whatever it is, the handle gives us a convenient way to pick it up, hold it, carry it around, and set it down. A handle can be fancy or simple, but ultimately the point isn't the aesthetics. It's the utility. After all, a handle that doesn't help you hold the coffee cup isn't much of a handle, right? At the same time, the handle isn't what's important about the coffee cup. The cup itself isn't even that important. What's important is the coffee itself. You can drink your morning joe from bone china, ceramic, enamelware, or plastic, but none of the materials makes a lick of different to whether or not you're getting caffeine into your bloodstream.

[...] the point of a label is to give you a handle on something, a means by which you can carry something much larger, heavier, hotter, more awkward. When you make the cup all about the handle, you miss out on the entire point of the handle in the first place: to hold your cup so you can drink your damn coffee. [...] These labels are meant to serve us, to communicate something about our experiences and lives to other people. What they're not meant to do is serve as a choke-chain or a set of handcuffs binding us to some particular interpretation of what those experiences mean. We are the only ones who can interpret the meanings of our experiences with any accuracy, and the only ones who can say which labels are the best handles for those experiences.

(pg. 37-38)

(This is why none of us have taken up the autistic label. Some folks have mentioned it around us, but it's just not a useful handle for our braincup.)

Comments

[wolfy_writing]

I like this! I think people really lose sight of labels as tools and the question of whether they're usefiul or not, and instead treat them as molds to try to fit.

[lb_lee]

It’s so true! This passage was so handy.

[talewisefellowship]

[Janusz]

That's a really nice metaphor. My approach to labels has been to use common words most people can recognize, and feel meaningful to me, since part of the point of labels is to make me legible to other people and make parts of my identity easy to explain.

[lb_lee]

A handle that others can grasp! As it were.

[nevanna]

I really like that passage!

[lb_lee]

It’s good, right?

[sinistmer]

Ooo, I like this too!

[sorcyress]

While ransacking the bones of Boomerangs (RIP) NO!!!

:(

[lb_lee]

I knoooooow! T-T the world is cruel and unfair!

[writerkit]

I've often wondered about the autistic label and plurality and how those might interact-- because at least in my experience of singlet autism some of it is very physical and some of it is more mental, and so I wind up wondering how that would manifest, because it's presumably possible to have a system where only some of the members are autistic, but some of the more physical stuff would presumably arise from the *vessel*... (But this is a bit of a tangent as I wander off from that last sentence.)

[lb_lee]

Rogan: I've seen it manifest in different ways. I've met plurals who see themselves as vessel-autistic, so allistic headmates, when they come to front, still have to deal with the autism (and sometimes find themselves at a disadvantage, because they keep banging their heads against the neurological wall, trying to do things they feel they SHOULD be able to do, but cannot). I've met plurals whose rosters are all autistic, but that autism manifests differently in different headmates.

And then you've got people like us, who probably WOULD be considered aspec these days, but I haven't found it useful, since the traits other people perceive as autistic are more due to things like being multi, having brain damage, and other stuff that make better handles on my cup. For me, at least, calling that autism would be a red herring, distracting me from what I need dealing with. I learn a lot of relevant stuff from autistic folks, share a lot of things in common, and I tend to get along well with them and so have a lot of autistic friends, but I don't see myself as part of that culture or community, just maybe a neighbor to it. (Apparently back in the day, they'd sometimes refer to that as like, autistic cousins? More like that.)

[pantha]

Oh, THAT is a good analogy. Thanks for sharing!

[silvercat17]

Very much agree.