medicalization

Truly Unruly Body (Medical Trauma)
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Truly Unruly Body (Medical Trauma)

Phenomenology this is the theory is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. In simple terms is each person can experience the same thing but due to their past have a completely different view of this experience. For me this help me better understand my own unruly body, I personally have been sick since birth I had rare disease that caused my main vein to my liver to fail as a baby in turn cause me to need a liver transplant at only 2 years old, due to this I was often sick and in and out of the hospital for many different things. With this being stated I have a lot of medical trauma that yes what they did was for the best but as a child you do not completely understand why they are doing the things to your body that hurt or our uncomfortable. This trauma I never really thought was there until I started to go to therapy and learn more about the body and mind through going back to school.

Sex a very common thing for most couples to engage in I personally have been with someone for many years but have never taken that step even though there is a desire to do so. Why? Well through this concept of Phenomenology and going to therapy it has helped me see that because of my medical trauma my body react to physical touch very negatively. I will tense up from head to toe and shut down internally this occurs suddenly and is completely out my control my body take control. I used to tense up if anyone tried to hug me as a child through teenage years due to this trauma I have been able to work through that but still struggle with physical touch outside of a hug. It is very frustrated has caused friction between me and my partner, but they have stayed by myside through this. I hope that in future we can take the next step in our relationship, and my body can learn to accept and trust physical touch again.

Am I Able To Do This??
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Am I Able To Do This??

Many thoughts and questions go through my head with the world of ignorance we live in today. How do I keep going? Will I be successful? Will I be able to have the dream family, dream lifestyle, dream anything that I want? Sitting back and deeply thinking, you won’t know unless you do something for yourself and those protective around you. Being a young Afro-Latina in today’s society is hard, whether it’s in terms of pregnancy, civilization, or my own self-image. I come from a family line of women who dealt with traumatic pregnancy terms, or even reproductive issues in itself. A line of men who have suffered from cancers varying from lung to low blood cell count leading to other health issues. Thinking about starting my own family scares me. I always track back to the story my mom told me: the doctors didn’t catch my faint, irregular heartbeat at eight, almost nine months. The umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck. What if that were to be me in about 6-7 years with my first born and I’m not conscious of it? Or if I am ignorant and decide to not get check ups and discover something too late? I always tend to think the negative rather the positive, so clearly that’s a sign of something psychically that I need to work on.

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Queer Brokenness: Intersection with Mental Illness

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Image Source: http://trauma.blog.yorku.ca/2015/12/south-asian-queer-community-lacks-visibility/  (Artist – Jinesh Patel)

(Content and Trigger Warning: Self Harm, Suicide, Substance Abuse, Emotional Abuse, Intimate Partner Violence, Bullying)

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I often find that mental illness and queerness aren’t addressed properly or constructively when talked about together. So often the public at large would have us believe that queerness is a result of mental illness or that mental illness is the result of queerness exclusively. With this in mind, the queer community will often push back on society’s behavior by talking about the two exclusively from each other, frequently ignoring all the ways mental illness intersect. That’s does not go to say that queerness is the result of mental illness or vice versa at all, but rather it shouldn’t be ignored that many people in the queer community go through both because of the way society has constructed and reacted towards queerness. For example, queerness has often been perceived as a deviant thing, it has historically been punished and worked against in a variety of ways. Continue reading →

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A Freak of (Un)Nature: On “Unnatural” and “Natural” Bodies

There is nothing I dread more than the confused, shocked, horrified look on people’s faces after I open my mouth and say something incomprehensible to their untrained ears. I feel like I am exposed for the freak of nature that I am. Despite my years and years of preparation in the form of weekly speech therapy sessions and high-tech cochlear implant, I still clumsily navigate the hearing world, where sound reigns supreme, constantly tripping over tasks that seem mundane to most people.

My body, and more specifically, my ears and voice, are seen as something out of the ordinary and freakish that must be covered up as efficiently as possible or put somewhere else where there are “people like me”.

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A pass on passing
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A pass on passing

I am a nonbinary trans woman. Within the first year of being out as transgender I was constantly plagued with people asking “When are you going to go on hormones?”, a question which has & still does annoy me to this day.

The dialogue that every trans person must, or should, inherently want to seek medicalized transition, is a deeply flawed & even toxic viewpoint to hold.

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Anxiety: A Common Body Story

I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, which means my brain doesn’t know when to stress out about something and when not to. Two of my closest friends also have anxiety, and in a weird way I think it’s made us closer. The stress from our anxiety affects our minds and our bodies. Continue reading →

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Something to think about.

At the beginning of the semester, I had no idea what to expect to learn in this class. It took me a little while to get used to thinking about the body in different ways, but I can say that I’m glad I did. From the information I have learned in this class, I’ve been able to look at issues in the world with a different lense, and I think that is so imortant.

Because I’ve learned so much about all of these topics, I’ve actually gotten in some interesting conversations with my mom. Continue reading →

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Now I’m an Amputee G*d D*mn You

Our class discussion from the other day has me thinking. How do we talk about the US’s responsibility in producing disabilities through wars abroad (both in our own veterans and in residents of the countries that serve as the battlegrounds) without implying that disabled people are undesirable or useless?

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Underweight is also a problem

Underweight is mean you have a body mass index that is below 18.5. Many folks think being fat is a health risk, they might think being too skinny is good. But being overly skinny carries its own health risks,too.

About four years ago, I happened to have poor absorptions of nutrients. At that time, my weight was unintentionally dropping, and I was overly losing weight. I lost almost 20 pounds in just one month. In school, classmates and teachers started to give me dirty looks. Even when I go to the grocery stores with my mom, people ooked at me like I was from a differernt planet. I felt so bad. I did not try to lose any weight, and I was eating as much as I used to, since then I even tried to eat as much as I could everytime till I throw up. My family started to worry about me because I eat so much, but still did not gain any weights. They forced me to stop exercise and rest, at that time, they would just put me to bed after dinners. Finnally they took me to the doctor. The doctor said that I might suffered with an eating disorder. But after he arranged the blood test and all of those long examations for me, he told my family that I was diabetic, and I had to go on drugs to control it. Because diabetes affects the way my body uses the blood surgar, I would lose weight if my body do not get enough of suger to generate, even I might be eating as much as usual.

For most people, losing a few pounds without meaning to could be a good thing to them. But it’s important to know when unexpected weight loss is a serious cause for concern. And sometimes, unexpected weight loss can be a sign of a depressive illness, many cancer cause unintentional weight loss as well.