Chick, Chick, Chick

Carolyn See on the glories of having an off-the-rack identity; in this case a “Chick.”

Everyone else in the cast of characters exists only to glorify and valorize the chick.

Half Brain

So, on House this week he figured out that a piano savant had a right hemisphere that was seizing all the time, and while that hemisphere allowed him to play, it also meant that the left half of the brain was spending an enormous amount of processing dealing with the broken right half.  House removed the bad right half, and life moved on.

Of course, this is how stigma works, too.   As long as you are consumed with processing the stigma, you don’t have the capacity to move on.  You are always waiting for the third gotcha, always remembering to keep your head down.

Do I often feel like I have only half a brain, only the inner part, with the social part sezing all the time?   Oh, yeah.  Inhibition doesn’t just affect the parts of the brain that are inhibited, they affect the whole brain that becomes consumed with managing the seizures.

I once told a staffer that I often was confused.  She didn’t believe me, because I was so smart.  That was, until she worked for me for a while, and saw where it all just seized up.

The price of being smothered in stigma is big, across the entire being. 

Trust me on this one.