When is a door not a door?
Aug. 15th, 2015 00:31![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
torquillI have a trigger around the perception that people in authority don't believe me.
I've discussed it before: particularly in bureaucracy and medicine, I have a desperate need to prove that my experiences are valid, that I'm sincere, that I'm taking what they say seriously. All of this is in service of them believing me when I lay out problems which I need their help to solve. If I feel like I'm being dismissed, or met with skepticism, I get extremely distressed. It feels like I'm a little kid again, crying out to a teacher or parent, "...but you don't underSTAND!"
It goes way back, to the point where it's as much an Amy thing as an Alison thing. Sam can cope with lots of things neither of them could, but in this scenario Sam looks at it -- someone with power not helping me, with no recourse -- and says "Damn. We're kind of screwed."
What do you do when your best (sometimes only) plan of action involves a system or authority which is unsympathetic and simply says no? I ran into it over and over at the University of California, and I've run into it a few times at County Medical. Case closed, can't reason or justify, end of line.
It crops up a lot for me, since my situation is never typical. I was a re-entry student with disabilities who repeatedly fell through the cracks at school. That lack of support (and sometimes outright hostility) finally led to me wrecking my health, mental and physical, and took most of a year to recover from. In medicine, I almost never present in a typical fashion, which means that doctors either think I'm exaggerating, imagining things, or ignoring their advice. It's made me paranoid about being seen as a hypochondriac or drama queen, labels which often get applied to women (and I'm still misidentified as one more often than not).
Logically, with the scenario as presented, there's nothing I can do. The helplessness of it makes Amy panic. Sam can't help with that, except to find alternative paths or coping mechanisms after the fact.
I was talking it over today, though, and I started to wonder whether it was a perspective problem. Like when someone describes a horrible situation and another person says, "look at it as an opportunity." It sounds insane, but sometimes, if you stop dwelling on what you think the situation is, and find a way to look at it from the side, the whole thing changes. Maybe it's not two people banging heads in direct opposition. Maybe it's actually a vase.
I haven't found the side-view yet, but I'm willing to entertain the possibility that this unpleasant experience is an opportunity in some form. I need to be conscious of the fact that part of the problem is impostor syndrome, where I start to doubt my own reasoning ability in the face of opposition -- I mean, who am I to challenge a doctor on medical issues? If I separate that out, it's possible I can rotate the rest like a 3D model. I'll have to take a little time to mull that over.
I've discussed it before: particularly in bureaucracy and medicine, I have a desperate need to prove that my experiences are valid, that I'm sincere, that I'm taking what they say seriously. All of this is in service of them believing me when I lay out problems which I need their help to solve. If I feel like I'm being dismissed, or met with skepticism, I get extremely distressed. It feels like I'm a little kid again, crying out to a teacher or parent, "...but you don't underSTAND!"
It goes way back, to the point where it's as much an Amy thing as an Alison thing. Sam can cope with lots of things neither of them could, but in this scenario Sam looks at it -- someone with power not helping me, with no recourse -- and says "Damn. We're kind of screwed."
What do you do when your best (sometimes only) plan of action involves a system or authority which is unsympathetic and simply says no? I ran into it over and over at the University of California, and I've run into it a few times at County Medical. Case closed, can't reason or justify, end of line.
It crops up a lot for me, since my situation is never typical. I was a re-entry student with disabilities who repeatedly fell through the cracks at school. That lack of support (and sometimes outright hostility) finally led to me wrecking my health, mental and physical, and took most of a year to recover from. In medicine, I almost never present in a typical fashion, which means that doctors either think I'm exaggerating, imagining things, or ignoring their advice. It's made me paranoid about being seen as a hypochondriac or drama queen, labels which often get applied to women (and I'm still misidentified as one more often than not).
Logically, with the scenario as presented, there's nothing I can do. The helplessness of it makes Amy panic. Sam can't help with that, except to find alternative paths or coping mechanisms after the fact.
I was talking it over today, though, and I started to wonder whether it was a perspective problem. Like when someone describes a horrible situation and another person says, "look at it as an opportunity." It sounds insane, but sometimes, if you stop dwelling on what you think the situation is, and find a way to look at it from the side, the whole thing changes. Maybe it's not two people banging heads in direct opposition. Maybe it's actually a vase.
I haven't found the side-view yet, but I'm willing to entertain the possibility that this unpleasant experience is an opportunity in some form. I need to be conscious of the fact that part of the problem is impostor syndrome, where I start to doubt my own reasoning ability in the face of opposition -- I mean, who am I to challenge a doctor on medical issues? If I separate that out, it's possible I can rotate the rest like a 3D model. I'll have to take a little time to mull that over.
