A Personal Journey of Self-Naming
When I embarked on my Ph.D. journey, I never anticipated how profoundly the act of naming myself would impact my research and self-perception. As I delved into my dissertation, my supervisor encouraged me to do something that seemed simple yet proved transformative: to name my social location. After much reflection, I chose the term "survivor-researcher." This self-chosen identity became a bridge of compassion in my research, connecting my lived experience with my academic pursuits. You see, I've lived with mental distress since childhood, a reality that has shaped my perspective in countless ways. By naming myself a survivor-researcher, I acknowledged both my struggles and my strength, my experiences and my expertise. This act of self-naming wasn't just about finding the right words. It was about seeing myself in a new light, recognizing the value of my lived experience in the context of academic research. It allowed me to bring my whole self to my work, to approach my research with authenticity and depth that might not have been possible otherwise.
As an editor for the Mad and Crip Theology Press, I've had the privilege of witnessing similar transformations in the submissions for our upcoming anthology, Our Disability Theologies: Body-Minds and God-Talk. The wisdom and power that emerges when writers embrace their unique identities and voices is truly remarkable. It's reinforced for me the crucial importance of naming yourself and embracing your unique voice as a Mad and Crip writer, researcher, or activist.
The Importance of Self-Naming
In a world that often seeks to label and categorize us, the act of naming yourself is a radical form of self-affirmation. It's about reclaiming the narrative around your experiences, your identity, and your perspective. When you name yourself, you declare your right to exist on your own terms, to define your reality, and to challenge societal norms that may not accommodate your lived experience.
For Mad and Crip individuals, self-naming goes beyond mere semantics. It's a political act, a way of pushing back against medical models that pathologize difference and instead embracing a social model that recognizes disability as a natural part of human diversity. By choosing how we identify and describe ourselves, we assert our agency and our right to be heard on our own terms.
Believing in Your Voice
Your voice matters. Your experiences, your insights, your struggles, and your wisdom all contribute to a rich tapestry of human experience that deserves to be shared. As a Mad and/or Crip writer, you bring a unique perspective to discussions about theology, spirituality, and the human condition. Your lived experience provides you with insights that others may not have access to. Believing in your voice means trusting in the value of your perspective, even when – especially when – it challenges conventional wisdom or established norms. It means recognizing that your "divergence" is not a flaw but a strength, offering new ways of understanding and experiencing the world.
Living Into Your Voice
Finding and embracing your voice is an ongoing process. It requires courage, vulnerability, and persistence. I have been reflecting on this a lot lately, and I want to offer some ways to nurture and develop your unique voice:
1. Write regularly: The more you write, the more you'll discover and refine your voice. Don't worry about perfection; focus on authenticity.
2. Engage with community: Connect with other Mad and Crip writers. Share your work, offer support, and learn from each other.
3. Read widely: Expose yourself to diverse perspectives within and beyond Mad and Crip literature. This will help you contextualize your own voice and ideas.
4. Embrace your unique experiences: Your lived experiences are a valuable source of insight. Don't shy away from them in your writing (even the really tough stuff!).
5. Challenge assumptions: Question established narratives about disability, mental health, and theology. Your perspective might offer new and important insights.
6. Be patient with yourself: Developing your voice takes time (decades). Be kind to yourself through the process.
7. Engage in spiritual practices: Incorporate spiritual practices that resonate with you into your writing process. This could include prayer, meditation, journaling, or other rituals that connect you to your inner self and to the divine. These practices can help ground your writing in your lived spiritual experience and provide a unique lens through which to explore theological concepts.
Spiritual Practices and Mad and Crip Theology
For Mad and Crip writers engaging with theology and spirituality, spiritual practices can be particularly powerful in shaping and informing your work. Here's how:
- Embodied Spirituality: Many spiritual practices involve bodily experiences - from the postures of prayer to the rhythms of breath in meditation. For Mad and Crip individuals, these practices can be a way of reclaiming and celebrating our diverse body-minds, challenging traditional notions of what constitutes a "proper" or "able" body in spiritual contexts.
- Alternative Ways of Knowing: Mad and Crip experiences often involve ways of perceiving and understanding the world that diverge from societal norms. Spiritual practices can validate and deepen these alternative epistemologies, providing a framework for understanding them as valuable forms of spiritual insight rather than as deficits or aberrations.
- Redefining Wholeness: Traditional theology often equates spiritual wholeness with normative ideas of mental and physical health. Through spiritual practices, you can explore and articulate alternative understandings of wholeness that embrace diversity, interdependence, and the inherent value of all body-minds.
- Connecting with Transcendence: Experiences of altered states, intense emotions, or physical sensations that are often pathologized can be reframed as encounters with the transcendent. Spiritual practices can provide a language and context for exploring these experiences as potentially meaningful and sacred.
- Cultivating Compassion: Practices like loving-kindness meditation or contemplative prayer can nurture self-compassion and extend it to others. This can be particularly powerful for writers who may have internalized societal stigma, helping to heal internalized ableism and foster a sense of inherent worth.
- Prophetic Imagination: Many spiritual traditions have practices designed to cultivate visionary or prophetic insights. These practices can fuel a prophetic imagination that envisions and articulates more just and inclusive spiritual communities and theologies.
Remember, your voice is not just important for you – it's important for all of us! By sharing your unique perspective, you contribute to a more just, diverse, and nuanced understanding of theology, disability, and the human experience. You help create space for others to share their voices too. As you continue on your journey as a writer, researcher, or activist, know that your voice is valued and needed. The world is waiting to hear what you have to say. Name yourself, believe in yourself, and live into your voice. Your words have the power to challenge, inspire, and transform. Just as naming myself a "survivor-researcher" opened new avenues of understanding in my own work, your self-naming can be a powerful tool for self-discovery and authentic expression.
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