![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
We're a Cyborg, and So Am I
We're a Cyborg, and So am I
Series: Essay
Summary: "When I tell people I am a cyborg, they often ask if I have read Donna Haraway's 'A Cyborg Manifesto.' Of course I have read it. And I disagree with it. [...] The manifesto coopts cyborg identity while eliminating reference to disabled people on which the notion of the cyborg is premised. Disabled people who use tech to live are cyborgs. Our lives are not metaphors." --the Cyborg Jillian Weise, "Common Cyborg"
Word Count: 3100
Notes: Winner of the December 2024 fan poll by a landslide! If you want to support my work and help me keep uploading stuff, hit me up on LiberaPay or Patreon. Mentions of violence, ableism, and racism, but this isn't an intense essay.
Rogan: Our vessel became a cyborg when we were seventeen, more than half its lifetime ago. That was less than a year after my individual creation, so I have been a cyborg for basically all my life. My cyborginess is important to me, more so than the others here, because far as I know, I was the only one there for the whole process.
Series: Essay
Summary: "When I tell people I am a cyborg, they often ask if I have read Donna Haraway's 'A Cyborg Manifesto.' Of course I have read it. And I disagree with it. [...] The manifesto coopts cyborg identity while eliminating reference to disabled people on which the notion of the cyborg is premised. Disabled people who use tech to live are cyborgs. Our lives are not metaphors." --the Cyborg Jillian Weise, "Common Cyborg"
Word Count: 3100
Notes: Winner of the December 2024 fan poll by a landslide! If you want to support my work and help me keep uploading stuff, hit me up on LiberaPay or Patreon. Mentions of violence, ableism, and racism, but this isn't an intense essay.
Rogan: Our vessel became a cyborg when we were seventeen, more than half its lifetime ago. That was less than a year after my individual creation, so I have been a cyborg for basically all my life. My cyborginess is important to me, more so than the others here, because far as I know, I was the only one there for the whole process.
ETYMOLOGY LESSON
"Cyborg" was a term first coined in 1960 by Manfred Clynes (a research scientist) and Nathan Kline (an associate professor of psychiatry) as a portmanteau of "cybernetic organism." They first used it, far as I know, in an article about "altering man's bodily functions to meet the requirements of extraterrestrial environments" (26).
Nowadays, people mostly think of cyborgs as having shiny metal hardware, but Clynes and Kline focus most on drugs. They also mention hypnosis, and how "there is much to be learned about the phenomena of dissociation, generalization of instructions, and abdication of executive control," and how "we are now working on a new preparation which may greatly enhance hypnotizability, so that pharmacological and hypnotic approaches may be symbiotically combined" (74)! Did they imagine multiples as cyborgs? Who knows. Would multiples strike them as cyborg? Maybe!
The original cyborg was one of adaptation, of human beings rebuilding themselves to survive the unsurvivable, both physically and psychologically. Just keep that in mind. There was a reason one of our first favorite fictional characters, as children, was the Tin Woodman of Oz. He is, in my mind, the quintessential cyborg: chopped to pieces by a human who wished him harm, who then rebuilt himself, embraced his new mode of being, and chose to be kind anyway.
METAL
We are not a flashy cyborg. Our irremovable hardware: a McGee stainless steel piston. Don't be fooled by the hardcore name, it looks like a tiny J made of wire, about the size of an upper-case letter in a paperback. It is a prosthetic stapes bone, meant to replace the original in our middle ear. (You remember the stirrup, anvil, and hammer from childhood anatomy lessons? It's the tiny osseous domino chain meant to convey the vibrations of sound from the eardrum to the inner ear, and the stapes/stirrup is the one deepest in.)
Our J was meant to return our right ear to proper hearing. It failed.
The first surgery, we underwent voluntarily, and it failed because of malpractice. Our surgeon (named, inevitably, Dr. Slaughter) put in two prostheses and left shards of bone in our middle ear, leaving our hearing worse than he found it. He also didn't give us antinausea medication, with the inevitable results. (Your inner ear also manages your balance; dicking with it causes nausea, vertigo, and dizziness.)
The second surgery, we did not undergo voluntarily, but we were not given a vote. The second surgeon (who is not the villain of this story) fixed everything up as best he could, and as far as I know, he did a good job. Our recovery went much smoother... at first. But then our mother slammed our head into a door frame a few times, we got a major concussion and a perilymph fistula, and our auditory nerve was permanently damaged. Our hearing loss became irreparable and total. A hearing aid could do nothing. Our parents asked about possible future surgeries, but here our bushy-bearded surgeon put his foot down: no, the hearing was gone, it was not coming back, there was nothing more to be done, for god's sake let the kid heal and deal.
It was not our overgrown stapes bone that disabled us. It was human incompetence and cruelty that disabled us. I cannot separate my experience of becoming a cyborg from violence.
It is a high irony that after all that sturm and drang, all our parents' desire to have a normal child, that our hearing impairment has proven so minor. It can even be a boon; we can sleep through damn near anything by rolling over. We didn't even realize how much we had learned lip-reading until the pandemic (and masking) made our speech comprehension drop terribly. We have trouble locating sounds, but that only becomes truly inconvenient with chirping smoke alarms or ringing phones.
A friend's husband, learning our inability to locate sounds, once asked us, "But where do the sounds come from?"
"Where all sounds come from," we replied, and then we both sat there, pondering the accidental koan. (Where DO all sounds come from?)
BROKEN CYBORG
I enjoy the irony of being a "broken" cyborg. The myth of the cyborg is that of superhumanity: "we'll rebuild him, make him stronger, better than he was." At its worst, the cyborg is the eradication of disability, the magical cure that will solve disabled people, a thing Ashley Shew called technoableism: "they think they're gonna solve all your problems and cure you through technology. But they also end up branding their tech, talking about their tech, [...] and it ends up lauding any tech for disability without even considering what disabled people want, usually." (Wong, Shew, and Weise)
I did not become a cyborg by choice. But by god, I enjoy being spittle in the face of human ambition. My parents' attempt to "fix" me, against my will, failed, because of course it would. Their desire to break me long trumped their desire to fix me. They gave me tech I did not want, and I made it my own.
My McGee piston talks to me constantly. It drove me crazy at first, the constant hissing, broken-ice-in-a-lake staticky tinnitus. Now I don't even notice it. Sometimes I tune into it, my body's own little radio station, listening to its alien (and yet so human) music.
INTERLUDE: HEARING-EAR CAT
The only time I truly regret having unilateral hearing is when one of the smoke alarms need batteries. The chirping is the worst--constant enough to be annoying, but short and sporadic enough that I can't locate it by swinging my head back and forth or moving around to triangulate. And we move houses so often that inevitably, we don't know where the alarms are until it's too late.
The first time this happened to us, our roommate wasn't home and wouldn't be for quite some time. We must've spent ages circling the apartment, desperately trying to locate that chirping bugger. We couldn't find it. It wouldn't stop. WHERE WAS IT?
Finally, out of desperation, we turned to our roommate's cat. He hated the sound as much as we did, and every time it came, he'd whip his head around and glare at it. So we picked him up and followed the glares.
It turned out to be a carbon monoxide detector in our roommate's room. We never would've found it, or even thought to look there, without the cat's help. (RIP Scurvy, bodhisattva of cats.)
MEDS
Our metal J is the most obviously "cyborg" part of us, but we accumulated other parts over time, in true cyborg fashion. At 24, we went on psych meds: anti-despair pills. (People call them antidepressants, but "depression" is no longer a useful term for me, so I don't use it.)
My anti-despair pills do not work wonders, nor do they suck out my soul. All they do is gently boost our emotional floor, just a little bit. They give us just a little more energy. They are psychological painkillers, allowing us to live through the chronic emotional pain that comes with being us. They get us through the choke points, the really bad periods where we're psychologically exhausted from our mind's relentless (and necessary) pace. A tiny quarter pill extra can make the difference between going to buy groceries and lying on the floor crying.
Maybe one day, we will reach a point where we no longer need the pills. But that day is not today.
We have also taken anti-anxiety meds on occasion, or nightmare meds, but they never stuck around. The nightmare meds didn't make our nightmares better; they just made us stop caring about them, and that was not useful. Our nightmares are important, and we need to be aware of them. (Also, the meds sometimes made me weak, and once I collapsed in the train station at night and had to crawl the blocks home, because my roommate and neighbors were in bed and there was nobody to help me. Not worth it.) The anti-anxiety meds proved useful for very specific, limited circumstances, like prepping for an unpleasant conversation or a surgery, but that was it.
Our meds doc, watching us stagger through an unprecedented choke point, seemed almost desperate. "You don't have to be in this amount of pain. We can try something. We have anti-psychotics."
"The pain is important," I said. "It can't be skipped."
I felt bad for her. She saw pain and she wanted to fix it. She saw a nail, and she had a hammer, and why wouldn't I take it? Was this some kind of weird Puritan nobility-through-suffering thing? What she didn't understand, and what I couldn't explain to her, was that my brain wasn't just torturing me for no reason. It was not my enemy. The pain was important. The only way through it was to eat it, digest it, compost it. Adding to the painkiller dose would only prolong the process, and that would be truly unbearable.
Our psychological pain can be managed, but it cannot, MUST not, be erased. Been there, done that, so much worse.
ELECTRICITY
At 30 or so, we reached a point that we needed a home electrostim unit to control the muscle spasms in our neck and shoulder. (I tried muscle relaxant pills and CBD goo, and while both were useful in times of utmost crisis, I didn't like using them. Physical therapy and lifestyle adjustments helped on a daily basis, but their effects were subtle and gradual, of limited help when deadlines loomed.)
Our little Flex-MT Plus, a boring little gray box with some buttons, plug-in wires, and sticky pad electrodes, has a TENS mode and an EMS mode, and the latter is the one I use. (TENS hits nerves, EMS muscles.) When my muscles clench up too tight and start hurting themselves in a vicious cycle of clench, pain, clench harder, my little zapper reaches in and shakes them loose with little electric fingers. It is not subtle, and it is not elegant, but the relief is indescribable. (Massage also helps, but my insurance doesn't cover that.)
Friends, watching our shoulders jump up and down in response to the voltage, would sometimes look worried. Did it hurt?
"Nooooo," I'd say, "it feels gooooood." I was a cyborg! I needed resetting!
As I underwent physical therapy and learned the therapeutic affects of electricity, I learned new ways to understand my cyborg body. I learned to recognize what certain pains meant, and what to do about them. I got cyborg tools to help: my zapper, my masochist pillow, my back hook, a racquetball. I learned to work standing up, to stay warm, or to keep a hot water bottle in my lap. (Cold bodies lock up, and the muscle tension perversely makes them colder.)
The zapper is admittedly, more high-tech. But all contribute to my cyborg life. I wouldn't be able to work much without them.
CYBORGS AND TRYBORGS
Once I embraced my cyborginess, I found myself wanting to find more people talking about it (so I wouldn't have to do it myself). I found the machinekin people, but I felt like an old stick-in-the-mud who didn't understand the youths today. It wasn't my culture, wasn't my place. I tried Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto," multiple times, and never did manage to get through it. It just felt like it had nothing to do with me. I kept wanting to say, "No, no, I don't IDENTIFY as a cyborg. I AM a cyborg."
I found my fellow cripborgs--the writing of Jillian Weise, Ashley Shew, and Alice Wong--and they were huge for me, joyful and liberating, but I also felt something... lacking. As validating as I found other cyborgs not thrilled about Donna Haraway, I found the binary of "abled tryborg" and "disabled cyborg" false and limiting. Part of my type of batshit is an eternal feeling of fakery, and the McGee piston in my head didn't work. I didn't need it to survive--indeed, it didn't DO anything but sing in alien tongues 24/7! If my meds and zapper were taken away tomorrow, I would be pretty uncomfortable, possibly miserable, but PROBABLY not dead.
Then I found Calvin Arium, AKA Deadleg Cyborg on Twitter. A trans Francophone, he came from a different place: "We're all already cyborgs[.] Cyborg is accepting new things to be a part of your body and identity and deciding you have the right to modify it to suit your needs. Try the binder, try the testosterone, try the cane, try the piercing, try the meds, try the colored hairs [sic][.] You don't end where your skin end [sic]. You end where your conscience [sic] of yourself end, and the version of you who exists in your head is as valid as you are in shared reality[.]" Twitter is now of course unusable, but I think I recall someone in the comments coming in and trying to discuss the tryborg/cyborg binary, and Arium kinda shrugged it off. He didn't seem to care, saw it as an American thing, and I liked that about him.
For me, being cyborg isn't just about being disabled. I feel cyborg not just because of the metal in my head and the electricity in my shoulders, but because as an alter, I am seen as a mix of thing (personality state, subhuman) and person (but I look and act like a human). This ambiguity inspires a visceral sort of revulsion, terror, and rage in some people, which I doubt they fully recognize or understand; all they know is that I BOTHER them. Being trans, having modified my body with hormones and surgery, can inspire a similar uncanniness. As a result, I cannot separate out my cyborginess from my being trans, being multi, being stranger... and passing.
PASSING FOR HUMAN
Leilani Nishime got it. In her "The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Future," she writes, "As a hybrid, the cyborg is not completely the Other. Rather, its narrative power comes from its ability to blur boundaries by blending the Other and human. [...] This uncanny mixture infects the portrayal of both mixed-race people and cyborgs. It is only a short leap, then, to read anxieties about the incoherence of the body of the cyborg as a parallel to the confusion and concern that centers on the body of the multiracial human" (35).
Black people too, were so long considered things, not people. They were also considered intrinsically disabled, feebleminded. To be human, to be abled, was to be white. And yet, we avoid looking too closely at that. Nishime knows this: "Within a cultural logic that equates human with white European, this simplistic conception of cyborgs most closely followed the infamous 'one-drop' rule. [...] No matter how white (read human) one may have appeared, one's essence remained unchanged" (38).
Nishime talks about three kinds of cyborg: the good, the bad, and the mulatto. The bad cyborg is the faceless bad guy of a million B-movies--the first Terminator, the monster out to destroy/conquer humanity (and also maybe go after the white women). The good cyborg is the hero who forever pines to be human, to become "real"--I love Cyborg in Teen Titans, but he is absolutely of this type, as is Briareos in the first two Appleseed movies (though not the comics). (Both are also dark-skinned and of African descent... though Briareos is bleached up for the movies.)
And then there's the mulatto cyborg, who refuses to see themselves as lesser, rejects the whole person/object dichotomy, and embraces their own cyborg nature. "In films with mulatto cyborgs, biology may not be real but it is always relevant" (37). Robocop is an example of this type; so is Murderbot. They are who I want to be, who I hope to be. Am I a thing? Am I a person? Why does this distinction matter?
Packbat writes, "kyriarchy talks about 'person' vs. 'not person' like it's the supreme distinction - people matter, everything else either matters to people or is nothing" (2024, January 9). "why should we put the people who traumatized us in the category with the friends who help us survive? why should we put the machines that exploit us in the category with the machines that help us survive? why is this the split we are asked to make? why "are you human" instead of 'are you good'? why not 'are you good'?" (2024, January 3)
Nishime, Alium, Weise, Packbat. All of them helped me see and embrace my cyborg self.
CYBORG FRIENDS
My headmate, Bob, is in his seventies. Before he came here, when it was just him in his own body in the other world, he had a heart attack. They cracked him open, put in bypasses and stents, and wired him back together again. If I get close to him, I can sense it under his skin; it feels like a metal spider in his chest, guarding my foster's heart.
Bob is also a futurist. He loves the shiny and new, loves cyberspace, would absolutely upload his personality to the Internet were it possible. He would be, in Weise's parlance, a classic tryborg. But he also has metal in his chest and a bottle of pills he needs to survive. He can't eat any fun food in his own body. (When he discovered our young, healthy body could, he looked like a child at Christmas and now takes bites of every greasy fried dessert we get.) He is old, and he is frail, and he too is a cyborg.
One night, as we were sitting with each other, I asked, "Can we be cyborg friends?"
He looked surprised for a moment, then laughed with delight and said, "Sure, kiddo. We can be cyborg friends."
REFERENCES:
Clynes, Manfred and Kline, Nathan. (1960, September). Cyborgs and space. Astronautics, September 1960. Retrieved from https://web.mit.edu/digitalapollo/Documents/Chapter1/cyborgs.pdf
Arium, Calvin [deadleggycyborg]. (2021). https://nitter.net/deadleggycyborg/status/1400900474535034882?cursor=ewaaapaehbkwoc9zdm9gpemjqisfqqaaa#r Reposted at https://www.tumblr.com/calvin-arium/700129829061885952/written-the-04062021-you-are-already-a-cyborg
Nishime, LeiLani. (Winter 2005). "The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Future." Cinema Journal 44, 2, pg. 34-49
Packbat. (2024 January 3). no more turing tests [blog post]. Retrieved from https://packbat.dreamwidth.org/338639.html
Packbat. (2024 January 9). humanity, personhood, personal baggage (Indiepocalypse.Social repost) [blog post]. Retrieved from https://packbat.dreamwidth.org/338938.html
Weise, Jillian. (2016, November 30). "The Dawn of the 'Tryborg'." The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/opinion/the-dawn-of-the-tryborg.html
Weise, Jillian. (2018). "Common Cyborg." Retrieved from https://granta.com/common-cyborg
Wong, Shew, and Weise. (2019). Disability Visibility Podcast Episode 66: Cyborgs. Trans. Cheryl Green. Retrieved from https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/podcast
"Cyborg" was a term first coined in 1960 by Manfred Clynes (a research scientist) and Nathan Kline (an associate professor of psychiatry) as a portmanteau of "cybernetic organism." They first used it, far as I know, in an article about "altering man's bodily functions to meet the requirements of extraterrestrial environments" (26).
Nowadays, people mostly think of cyborgs as having shiny metal hardware, but Clynes and Kline focus most on drugs. They also mention hypnosis, and how "there is much to be learned about the phenomena of dissociation, generalization of instructions, and abdication of executive control," and how "we are now working on a new preparation which may greatly enhance hypnotizability, so that pharmacological and hypnotic approaches may be symbiotically combined" (74)! Did they imagine multiples as cyborgs? Who knows. Would multiples strike them as cyborg? Maybe!
The original cyborg was one of adaptation, of human beings rebuilding themselves to survive the unsurvivable, both physically and psychologically. Just keep that in mind. There was a reason one of our first favorite fictional characters, as children, was the Tin Woodman of Oz. He is, in my mind, the quintessential cyborg: chopped to pieces by a human who wished him harm, who then rebuilt himself, embraced his new mode of being, and chose to be kind anyway.
METAL
We are not a flashy cyborg. Our irremovable hardware: a McGee stainless steel piston. Don't be fooled by the hardcore name, it looks like a tiny J made of wire, about the size of an upper-case letter in a paperback. It is a prosthetic stapes bone, meant to replace the original in our middle ear. (You remember the stirrup, anvil, and hammer from childhood anatomy lessons? It's the tiny osseous domino chain meant to convey the vibrations of sound from the eardrum to the inner ear, and the stapes/stirrup is the one deepest in.)
Our J was meant to return our right ear to proper hearing. It failed.
The first surgery, we underwent voluntarily, and it failed because of malpractice. Our surgeon (named, inevitably, Dr. Slaughter) put in two prostheses and left shards of bone in our middle ear, leaving our hearing worse than he found it. He also didn't give us antinausea medication, with the inevitable results. (Your inner ear also manages your balance; dicking with it causes nausea, vertigo, and dizziness.)
The second surgery, we did not undergo voluntarily, but we were not given a vote. The second surgeon (who is not the villain of this story) fixed everything up as best he could, and as far as I know, he did a good job. Our recovery went much smoother... at first. But then our mother slammed our head into a door frame a few times, we got a major concussion and a perilymph fistula, and our auditory nerve was permanently damaged. Our hearing loss became irreparable and total. A hearing aid could do nothing. Our parents asked about possible future surgeries, but here our bushy-bearded surgeon put his foot down: no, the hearing was gone, it was not coming back, there was nothing more to be done, for god's sake let the kid heal and deal.
It was not our overgrown stapes bone that disabled us. It was human incompetence and cruelty that disabled us. I cannot separate my experience of becoming a cyborg from violence.
It is a high irony that after all that sturm and drang, all our parents' desire to have a normal child, that our hearing impairment has proven so minor. It can even be a boon; we can sleep through damn near anything by rolling over. We didn't even realize how much we had learned lip-reading until the pandemic (and masking) made our speech comprehension drop terribly. We have trouble locating sounds, but that only becomes truly inconvenient with chirping smoke alarms or ringing phones.
A friend's husband, learning our inability to locate sounds, once asked us, "But where do the sounds come from?"
"Where all sounds come from," we replied, and then we both sat there, pondering the accidental koan. (Where DO all sounds come from?)
BROKEN CYBORG
"They are trying to give me tech I don't want," a cyborg says.Our McGee piston is damn near the most simple technology on earth: a lever. And it doesn't even work. That's the best part: we're not just the most low-tech cyborg on earth, WE DON'T EVEN WORK. All that money, all that effort, and for nothing! Truly, my Frankenstein body mocks man's aspirations.
"Oh fuck. I had hoped for better news," I reply. (Weise, 2018)
I enjoy the irony of being a "broken" cyborg. The myth of the cyborg is that of superhumanity: "we'll rebuild him, make him stronger, better than he was." At its worst, the cyborg is the eradication of disability, the magical cure that will solve disabled people, a thing Ashley Shew called technoableism: "they think they're gonna solve all your problems and cure you through technology. But they also end up branding their tech, talking about their tech, [...] and it ends up lauding any tech for disability without even considering what disabled people want, usually." (Wong, Shew, and Weise)
I did not become a cyborg by choice. But by god, I enjoy being spittle in the face of human ambition. My parents' attempt to "fix" me, against my will, failed, because of course it would. Their desire to break me long trumped their desire to fix me. They gave me tech I did not want, and I made it my own.
My McGee piston talks to me constantly. It drove me crazy at first, the constant hissing, broken-ice-in-a-lake staticky tinnitus. Now I don't even notice it. Sometimes I tune into it, my body's own little radio station, listening to its alien (and yet so human) music.
INTERLUDE: HEARING-EAR CAT
The only time I truly regret having unilateral hearing is when one of the smoke alarms need batteries. The chirping is the worst--constant enough to be annoying, but short and sporadic enough that I can't locate it by swinging my head back and forth or moving around to triangulate. And we move houses so often that inevitably, we don't know where the alarms are until it's too late.
The first time this happened to us, our roommate wasn't home and wouldn't be for quite some time. We must've spent ages circling the apartment, desperately trying to locate that chirping bugger. We couldn't find it. It wouldn't stop. WHERE WAS IT?
Finally, out of desperation, we turned to our roommate's cat. He hated the sound as much as we did, and every time it came, he'd whip his head around and glare at it. So we picked him up and followed the glares.
It turned out to be a carbon monoxide detector in our roommate's room. We never would've found it, or even thought to look there, without the cat's help. (RIP Scurvy, bodhisattva of cats.)
MEDS
Our metal J is the most obviously "cyborg" part of us, but we accumulated other parts over time, in true cyborg fashion. At 24, we went on psych meds: anti-despair pills. (People call them antidepressants, but "depression" is no longer a useful term for me, so I don't use it.)
My anti-despair pills do not work wonders, nor do they suck out my soul. All they do is gently boost our emotional floor, just a little bit. They give us just a little more energy. They are psychological painkillers, allowing us to live through the chronic emotional pain that comes with being us. They get us through the choke points, the really bad periods where we're psychologically exhausted from our mind's relentless (and necessary) pace. A tiny quarter pill extra can make the difference between going to buy groceries and lying on the floor crying.
Maybe one day, we will reach a point where we no longer need the pills. But that day is not today.
We have also taken anti-anxiety meds on occasion, or nightmare meds, but they never stuck around. The nightmare meds didn't make our nightmares better; they just made us stop caring about them, and that was not useful. Our nightmares are important, and we need to be aware of them. (Also, the meds sometimes made me weak, and once I collapsed in the train station at night and had to crawl the blocks home, because my roommate and neighbors were in bed and there was nobody to help me. Not worth it.) The anti-anxiety meds proved useful for very specific, limited circumstances, like prepping for an unpleasant conversation or a surgery, but that was it.
Our meds doc, watching us stagger through an unprecedented choke point, seemed almost desperate. "You don't have to be in this amount of pain. We can try something. We have anti-psychotics."
"The pain is important," I said. "It can't be skipped."
I felt bad for her. She saw pain and she wanted to fix it. She saw a nail, and she had a hammer, and why wouldn't I take it? Was this some kind of weird Puritan nobility-through-suffering thing? What she didn't understand, and what I couldn't explain to her, was that my brain wasn't just torturing me for no reason. It was not my enemy. The pain was important. The only way through it was to eat it, digest it, compost it. Adding to the painkiller dose would only prolong the process, and that would be truly unbearable.
Our psychological pain can be managed, but it cannot, MUST not, be erased. Been there, done that, so much worse.
ELECTRICITY
At 30 or so, we reached a point that we needed a home electrostim unit to control the muscle spasms in our neck and shoulder. (I tried muscle relaxant pills and CBD goo, and while both were useful in times of utmost crisis, I didn't like using them. Physical therapy and lifestyle adjustments helped on a daily basis, but their effects were subtle and gradual, of limited help when deadlines loomed.)
Our little Flex-MT Plus, a boring little gray box with some buttons, plug-in wires, and sticky pad electrodes, has a TENS mode and an EMS mode, and the latter is the one I use. (TENS hits nerves, EMS muscles.) When my muscles clench up too tight and start hurting themselves in a vicious cycle of clench, pain, clench harder, my little zapper reaches in and shakes them loose with little electric fingers. It is not subtle, and it is not elegant, but the relief is indescribable. (Massage also helps, but my insurance doesn't cover that.)
Friends, watching our shoulders jump up and down in response to the voltage, would sometimes look worried. Did it hurt?
"Nooooo," I'd say, "it feels gooooood." I was a cyborg! I needed resetting!
As I underwent physical therapy and learned the therapeutic affects of electricity, I learned new ways to understand my cyborg body. I learned to recognize what certain pains meant, and what to do about them. I got cyborg tools to help: my zapper, my masochist pillow, my back hook, a racquetball. I learned to work standing up, to stay warm, or to keep a hot water bottle in my lap. (Cold bodies lock up, and the muscle tension perversely makes them colder.)
The zapper is admittedly, more high-tech. But all contribute to my cyborg life. I wouldn't be able to work much without them.
CYBORGS AND TRYBORGS
Once I embraced my cyborginess, I found myself wanting to find more people talking about it (so I wouldn't have to do it myself). I found the machinekin people, but I felt like an old stick-in-the-mud who didn't understand the youths today. It wasn't my culture, wasn't my place. I tried Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto," multiple times, and never did manage to get through it. It just felt like it had nothing to do with me. I kept wanting to say, "No, no, I don't IDENTIFY as a cyborg. I AM a cyborg."
I found my fellow cripborgs--the writing of Jillian Weise, Ashley Shew, and Alice Wong--and they were huge for me, joyful and liberating, but I also felt something... lacking. As validating as I found other cyborgs not thrilled about Donna Haraway, I found the binary of "abled tryborg" and "disabled cyborg" false and limiting. Part of my type of batshit is an eternal feeling of fakery, and the McGee piston in my head didn't work. I didn't need it to survive--indeed, it didn't DO anything but sing in alien tongues 24/7! If my meds and zapper were taken away tomorrow, I would be pretty uncomfortable, possibly miserable, but PROBABLY not dead.
Then I found Calvin Arium, AKA Deadleg Cyborg on Twitter. A trans Francophone, he came from a different place: "We're all already cyborgs[.] Cyborg is accepting new things to be a part of your body and identity and deciding you have the right to modify it to suit your needs. Try the binder, try the testosterone, try the cane, try the piercing, try the meds, try the colored hairs [sic][.] You don't end where your skin end [sic]. You end where your conscience [sic] of yourself end, and the version of you who exists in your head is as valid as you are in shared reality[.]" Twitter is now of course unusable, but I think I recall someone in the comments coming in and trying to discuss the tryborg/cyborg binary, and Arium kinda shrugged it off. He didn't seem to care, saw it as an American thing, and I liked that about him.
For me, being cyborg isn't just about being disabled. I feel cyborg not just because of the metal in my head and the electricity in my shoulders, but because as an alter, I am seen as a mix of thing (personality state, subhuman) and person (but I look and act like a human). This ambiguity inspires a visceral sort of revulsion, terror, and rage in some people, which I doubt they fully recognize or understand; all they know is that I BOTHER them. Being trans, having modified my body with hormones and surgery, can inspire a similar uncanniness. As a result, I cannot separate out my cyborginess from my being trans, being multi, being stranger... and passing.
PASSING FOR HUMAN
Leilani Nishime got it. In her "The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Future," she writes, "As a hybrid, the cyborg is not completely the Other. Rather, its narrative power comes from its ability to blur boundaries by blending the Other and human. [...] This uncanny mixture infects the portrayal of both mixed-race people and cyborgs. It is only a short leap, then, to read anxieties about the incoherence of the body of the cyborg as a parallel to the confusion and concern that centers on the body of the multiracial human" (35).
Black people too, were so long considered things, not people. They were also considered intrinsically disabled, feebleminded. To be human, to be abled, was to be white. And yet, we avoid looking too closely at that. Nishime knows this: "Within a cultural logic that equates human with white European, this simplistic conception of cyborgs most closely followed the infamous 'one-drop' rule. [...] No matter how white (read human) one may have appeared, one's essence remained unchanged" (38).
Nishime talks about three kinds of cyborg: the good, the bad, and the mulatto. The bad cyborg is the faceless bad guy of a million B-movies--the first Terminator, the monster out to destroy/conquer humanity (and also maybe go after the white women). The good cyborg is the hero who forever pines to be human, to become "real"--I love Cyborg in Teen Titans, but he is absolutely of this type, as is Briareos in the first two Appleseed movies (though not the comics). (Both are also dark-skinned and of African descent... though Briareos is bleached up for the movies.)
And then there's the mulatto cyborg, who refuses to see themselves as lesser, rejects the whole person/object dichotomy, and embraces their own cyborg nature. "In films with mulatto cyborgs, biology may not be real but it is always relevant" (37). Robocop is an example of this type; so is Murderbot. They are who I want to be, who I hope to be. Am I a thing? Am I a person? Why does this distinction matter?
Packbat writes, "kyriarchy talks about 'person' vs. 'not person' like it's the supreme distinction - people matter, everything else either matters to people or is nothing" (2024, January 9). "why should we put the people who traumatized us in the category with the friends who help us survive? why should we put the machines that exploit us in the category with the machines that help us survive? why is this the split we are asked to make? why "are you human" instead of 'are you good'? why not 'are you good'?" (2024, January 3)
Nishime, Alium, Weise, Packbat. All of them helped me see and embrace my cyborg self.
CYBORG FRIENDS
My headmate, Bob, is in his seventies. Before he came here, when it was just him in his own body in the other world, he had a heart attack. They cracked him open, put in bypasses and stents, and wired him back together again. If I get close to him, I can sense it under his skin; it feels like a metal spider in his chest, guarding my foster's heart.
Bob is also a futurist. He loves the shiny and new, loves cyberspace, would absolutely upload his personality to the Internet were it possible. He would be, in Weise's parlance, a classic tryborg. But he also has metal in his chest and a bottle of pills he needs to survive. He can't eat any fun food in his own body. (When he discovered our young, healthy body could, he looked like a child at Christmas and now takes bites of every greasy fried dessert we get.) He is old, and he is frail, and he too is a cyborg.
One night, as we were sitting with each other, I asked, "Can we be cyborg friends?"
He looked surprised for a moment, then laughed with delight and said, "Sure, kiddo. We can be cyborg friends."
REFERENCES:
Clynes, Manfred and Kline, Nathan. (1960, September). Cyborgs and space. Astronautics, September 1960. Retrieved from https://web.mit.edu/digitalapollo/Documents/Chapter1/cyborgs.pdf
Arium, Calvin [deadleggycyborg]. (2021). https://nitter.net/deadleggycyborg/status/1400900474535034882?cursor=ewaaapaehbkwoc9zdm9gpemjqisfqqaaa#r Reposted at https://www.tumblr.com/calvin-arium/700129829061885952/written-the-04062021-you-are-already-a-cyborg
Nishime, LeiLani. (Winter 2005). "The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Future." Cinema Journal 44, 2, pg. 34-49
Packbat. (2024 January 3). no more turing tests [blog post]. Retrieved from https://packbat.dreamwidth.org/338639.html
Packbat. (2024 January 9). humanity, personhood, personal baggage (Indiepocalypse.Social repost) [blog post]. Retrieved from https://packbat.dreamwidth.org/338938.html
Weise, Jillian. (2016, November 30). "The Dawn of the 'Tryborg'." The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/opinion/the-dawn-of-the-tryborg.html
Weise, Jillian. (2018). "Common Cyborg." Retrieved from https://granta.com/common-cyborg
Wong, Shew, and Weise. (2019). Disability Visibility Podcast Episode 66: Cyborgs. Trans. Cheryl Green. Retrieved from https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/podcast
no subject
Good cat. And hey, with his help, you could make it stop!
no subject
no subject
(That time turned out to be an old smoke detector left exiled in a closet. It was the fucking WORST.)
no subject
(That time turned out to be an old smoke detector left exiled in a closet. It was the fucking WORST.)
no subject
But at the same time, I'm glad those parts of me aren't visible because they're blatantly branded. It makes me a walking billboard, and I resent that parts of my body are corporatized. I'd sticker over it if I could find nice stickers that can last 10-ish days with regular water exposure and that I could bear to toss afterwards (one day! I'm looking!). There's an awkward middle space of owning my body, but also being owned by the tools I use to own it. Being branded by the choice to modify. I don't like how common that's becoming, the branding part. Living shouldn't make you into an advertisement.
Going to have to save that Calvin Arium quote. This is my first time hearing about him- is he anywhere other than Twitter?
And I have to ask: what's a masochist pillow?
no subject
And yeah, cyborgs recognizing each other in the wild! I like wearing my trans cyborg button for that reason, since my borginess isn’t easily visible.
This is our masochist pillow! https://benjamininstitute.com/product/bens-block It’s one of those “very good at one thing” tools, and that one thing is getting the knots at the base of our skull. Forever grateful to a massage therapist for telling me about it and letting me use hers, and a friend for buying one for me.
no subject
I'm a little surprised that TENS is that much more known than EMS. That's good to know.
Now I see why you call it a masochist pillow! Does look like it would be really good at getting neck knots. I might have to get one for myself given that a lot of tension winds up hanging out there. I've got a similar foam arch thing that's meant to stretch out my back that works pretty well for that area- looks sort of like this.
no subject
Maybe I just know a lot of EDS people who use TENS units?
Oh god that foam arch thing looks so uncomfortable, hahaha. I used to get lower back pain but figured out sorta postural and activity exercises that worked like magic, courtesy of a book called "8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back" by Esther Gokhale (another rec from that massage therapist who showed me the masochist pillow). Forever fucking grateful that that worked. (And having a mattress that my body liked helped too!)
no subject
The foam arch is way more comfortable than it looks. I first looked at it and thought the pointy wedge bits would hurt, but they actually feel good when you're on them. There's a nice stretch through the back, too. The uncomfortable part is getting up after lying on it. It's a bit harder than it has any right to be- not because it hurts, but because you're lying on a thing on the floor. I usually roll off sideways. I'll have to look into that book- no major back issues right now if you don't count shoulders, but it runs in my family and either it'll catch up to me eventually or someone I know could use it.
no subject
The book is nice just because it helps you develop postural habits to prevent pain from starting. It's a little tricky to get the hang of, but then you find yourself just doing it automatically for nice stretchy times! It has also helped me get better in touch with that part of my body and its needs, learning what different kinds of pain mean and what to do with them. It's a pricey book, but definitely worth it, in my opinion! (It's pricey because it has many photos to try and illustrate the postures and such. Gokhale does a really good job, in my opinion, of communicating postural and bodily things verbally, which is REALLY hard to do.)
no subject
no subject
no subject
See also: you can find a surprising number of nursing textbooks and references for under $10 at thrift shops if you look hard enough! They run a bit older, but that makes them more interesting to me since it's a look at how things have changed over time.
no subject
He is also on itch.io and Mastodon, though posts more in French there, understandably!
no subject
Arium sounds like a most excellent person. Whilst the cyborg aspect doesn't chime with me personally, the concept of trying things, trying adjustments very much does. (I have no patience for people who describe mobility aids and similar in terms of "giving in" or "getting worse" and thus shame people into only using them when there finally becomes literally no other choice. I'm quietly joyous about the fact that over the years I see more and more people (and especially younger people) with canes, with wheelchairs, etc.)
On that note, a request: as evidenced by your recent (and most excellent) family photograph, you evidently have at least a reasonable handle on presenting your selves into the outside world in a way that reflects (at least to some extent) you in your head. You also have a lot of experience with scarcity and living light and don't seem to likely go the way of the majority of advice about experimenting with presentation, etc. (i.e. "buy, buy, buy! spend all this money! acquire all the things, whether or not you will actually need them!"). So, a request/suggestion: any chance of a post about how to reflect your self onto the outside world when you don't have lots of money (or have far more needful things that you need to spend it on).
no subject
You got it! https://lb-lee.dreamwidth.org/1409234.html
Yeah, I can't lie, I would love to reach a point of not needing the anti-despair pills anymore... but that day may never happen, and I am grateful to have them. Weirdly, despite being generally fine with memory work and other parts of my life others find inconvenient, I still sometimes resent that I've been smacked around so much that I need these stupid pills to function. I keep wanting to be like, "what if life HADN'T been so smacky?" Funny that I only feel that way about my meds that help me, though! I'm able to see other, harder parts of my life as things other than crummy reminders! Maybe it's because sometimes psych meds are used to avoid dealing with deeper societal problems? (I.e., back when I was homeless and getting prescribed antidepressants, because pills were cheaper than housing, leading me to feel that the problem was my brain chemistry, rather than my situation.)
no subject
And yeah, I think this:
"Maybe it's because sometimes psych meds are used to avoid dealing with deeper societal problems?"
is a lot of it. I was on anti-depressants for over a decade before finally protesting enough to get diagnosed with stuff that wasn't generic "anxiety and/or depression, take these pills, go away". They're used as a lazy patch far, far too frequently both for societal problems and for more complicated mental/physical health combinations that would require specialist referral and, y'know, believing your patient and actually doing some diagnostic work rather than needing them to come to you with it all on a plate in nicely standardised, normative, appropriately-medical-but-not-too-medical language that hits all the keywords whilst avoiding the hyperchondriac ones...
no subject
Rogan: YES THAT. THAT EXACTLY. It's so maddening, because it's so hard to express this without it coming off as dismissive. It's just not this binary of "depression is real and only treatable with medication" or "depression is purely situational and best treated with REBOLUTIONZ!" It's so frustrating!
no subject
no subject
But I gotta ask. What is a masochist pillow?
Also, I like the Tin Man too.
Indigo
no subject
So, the masochist pillow is really called a Ben's Block. It's a triangular prism made of wood, and you rest your noggin on one of the apexes and rock your head back and forth to loosen up the muscles in your skull. Using it always made previous roommates stare at us in horror.