Words/Labels

I've learned a lot of new words as I've walked through this period of my life.  My favorite being the euphemism "in transition".  In plain language:  unemployed.  But hey! it sounds positive, so let's go for it!

No purpose for this picture - except to brighten your reading pleasure

And while we're at it:  I was not fired, I was terminated - or dismissed.  Two euphemisms for the price of one.

Words to make something unpalatable look, sound or feel better.

While we're at it, there are other terms, not euphemisms, which I've recently learned which describe my situation:  stress breakdown, psychiatric injury, hypervigilence, reactive depression, complex PTSD - to name a few.

Then there's the terms the original specialist (another euphemism - this one for psychiatrist) used to diagnose my condition during the crisis phase from the stressful situation:  bi-polar disorder and mixed personality disorder.

Words.  Labels.  In our world, in our minds, we need to put things into neat, little boxes and label them.  We want the world to make sense.  We want everything to fall into order.

In short we want to make things that we cannot understand, understandable.

We want to make sense out of the senseless.  Put order into the disordered.

As I walk through this journey of recovery, I keep trying to make sense of the non-sensical.  I want the why questions to be answered.  But there are no answers.  None that can take away the pain anyway.

If I'm to be labelled by those involved in the former stressful situation, by the medical community, by those who faithfully walk with and beside me and, ultimately, by myself, I would pick the terms stress breakdown, psychiatric injury and reactive depression to describe what happened to me as a result of the severely stressful situation, where I'm at now and what I'm recovering from.  What I'm dealing with on a daily basis.  These terms are for conditions which are not mental illnesses.  Rather, they are cause and effect situations.  Cause (severely stressful situation) = Effect (stress breakdown, psychiatric injury, et al).  Simple.  And they don't have the negative connotations of bi-polar, etc.  Ironically, I never had the symptoms of bi-polar.

Yet these conditions are not always that easy to recognize.  Especially when one is in an overtaxed, overused and understaffed medical system.  Where it takes months to see a specialist and then the specialist is so overburdened and overworked that he spends as little time with the patient as it takes to "diagnose" the problem and prescribe medication.

So it all boils down to words.  Semantics.  Sometimes euphemisms.  Assumptions.  Perceptions.  Based on who we are, how we think.

This is an interesting blog for me because as I write it, my mind wanders all over the map.  Never staying at one place or one topic for long.  In short, it mirrors the path I've been walking through since early 2011.  All over the map.   Never in one place, at once thought, for long.  Always changing.  As research uncovers something else.  As therapy progresses.  As life events unfold and intrude - sometimes like a bomb exploding and causing re-injury to the fragile soul.  Always changing.

An "all-over-the-map-journey".  Kind of like a round the world trip - except you don't get to board a plane or boat and go to exotic locales.