Insecurities and Other Things

Today, I worked at the Children's Museum as a desk-staff person. I answered the phone and everything! It was extremely quiet, which was a relief because I actually had absolutely no idea how to do my job. All the other work I'd done there generally had to do with entertaining kids or planning and setting up their special events. Not to mention, until this afternoon, I hadn't used a cash register that was younger than 90 years old. Trust me when I say, there's a huge difference between a modern cash register and a 1920's one.

There might have been some panicking on my part, as well as whining about all the possible worst case scenarios. 

Because it was so quiet, I read most of Terry Pratchett's Going Postal. It is, of course, highly recommended. I'm a tremendous Terry Pratchett fan, even if I do go on bizarre tangents about the philosophical implications of some of the things he writes. You should ask me about Nation sometime. =P

The first sentence of Going Postal reads "They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man's mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that, in the morning, it will be in a body that is going to be hanged." Perfectly lovely Pratchett-esque sentence, no?

But what struck me was the implications, as it frames the mind as the user of the body rather than the soul as a user of the mind and body, or the mind and body as one cohesive unit. The former two approaches, I believe, are huge reasons why there's a massive divide between the way that someone who's physically ill or disabled is treated vs someone who is mentally ill. I think a much healthier, practical paradigm would be to see the body and mind as inseparable, or at the least interdependent and each influencing the other. The fact that I can even use "body" to mean "all of the body except the mind" is a disturbing testimony to just how far the gulf between the two is in our culture. And while the reification, separation, and elevation of the mind continues, I think people with mental illnesses will have different experiences with ableism than people who are neurotypical but otherwise subject to our society's stupendous prejudice and callousness, and that these differences should not necessarily exist, and if people were more rational and thoughtful about bodies, life, the universe, and everything, we'd all get to experience the same prejudice! Go us!