Deconstructive Therapy

I'm tired of words. I'm tired of attempts to label, categorize, and quantify human suffering. The joy of being a student of English--a student of words--is that the best gift I have been given is the knowledge and the theory to deconstruct these words, to realize that certain words or diagnoses of pain are arbitrary and broad classifications, created, I hope, with the optimism of trying to help others. Yet, these words, these labels, do not have colours and shape and feeling to them. They don't describe the smooth enveloping of the soul with blackness, or the quiet peace of sunshine flowing into your throat, of the trembling rat-a-tat-tat of anxiety, of all of the emotions humans have the capacity for. They are more infinite and abundant than language, they transcend language. Jacques Lacan says that language removes our capacity to access the Real, the essence of humanity, and our awareness that there is something within us that cannot be accessed is the Trauma of the Real. I think I'm in love with Jacques Lacan. And Derrida, too. Derrida, who taught me the meaninglessness of words, that the meaning is in the gaps between words.

My idea of therapy is deconstruction, la guerre sur les mots. I must use words to break them apart and take away their power over me, and eventually, perhaps, I will become mute.

I have a strange fascination with mutism, selective or otherwise. I think there is great speech in silence, and I strive for it more and more. I need to have more and more days of wordlessness. Even these words, the ones I am writing right now...they bind me to a specific construction of the world, a series of linguistic algorithms of which I tire.

Les mots s'envolent, les écrits restent, dit-on, mais le réel est permanent.