I Am Miss Shuganah: A Heart Centered Woman Living in a Head Centered World

People sometimes approach me on Twitter and tell me my handle is one of their favorites. I thank them.  That indicates to me they get the joke.  Misshuganah or meshugana means "crazy" or "crazy person" in Yiddish.  

I was a very emotional child. Sometimes to the point of hysteria.  My mother will tell me, "You need counseling." An unkind, compassionless thing to say.  I imagine she was frustrated because she didn't know how to help me.

My father, who I was more alike than either of us would have wanted to admit, would routinely push my buttons and then when I would demand an apology from him he would say, mainly to my mother, "Get this mad bulldog away from me."  My brothers, I suspect, shared my mother's assessment of me but kept it to themselves.

From childhood on, I have been called crazy in one form or another by people who have confused my emotionality with mental illness.  Being emotional does not equal mentally ill, although, sadly, on the surface, to most people they appear indistinguishable.  It is for this reason that I am sensitive to people being labeled crazy.   It's too easy a word to use to discredit someone.

When I was in grammar school, these older girls were singing "They've come to take me away.  To the funny farm where life is gay."  At first I thought they were being friendly, because they were pointing at me.  So I smiled back at them. They were singing a silly song and including me on the joke.  After a few minutes I realized that was their not so subtle way of calling me crazy.  My heart sank.

I am keenly aware of being an outsider and not being understood. It has allowed me to be simultaneously strong and vulnerable.I can slide between these two states with ease.  It has also allowed me to be comfortable with other people's dark places.  Because of that, people either gravitate towards me and seek me out as a confidant or they feel ill at ease around me.  I know that I push past many people's emotional comfort zones.  When I was younger that used to make me insecure. Now I do not worry about being disliked.Sometimes, however, I do perceive people having a desire to distance themselves from me, and sometimes that still pains me.

Being an emotional person in a thinking person's world is very difficult.  In clinical terms I come out as INFP on the Myers-Briggs personality tests. That is Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Perceptive.  My husband is an INTP... T for thinking.  One letter off, but it can create a huge chasm. Most T types dismiss my intuition and my  insights and all that I have to offer because from their standpoint I am lacking in logic.  I am not lacking in logic. Nor am I lacking in critical thinking. What I am lacking in is ways to explain my intuitive feelings to others.

I cannot always provide reasons for what I know.  I just know.  I am perceptive enough to know that "just trust me, OK?" neither gives me credibility nor gains me allies. The tragedy for me is that a lot of times I am right, and, months later, when it turns out I am right, it is too late to do anything differently. I do not say "hate to say I told you so," because I derive little pleasure from it.  Asking me to provide reasons behind my feelings is like asking me to change my personality.  It would be like me saying to a math genius,stop solving math problems or to tell my husband, stop thinking of new ways to improve the world.

There are very few people like me.  We maybe make up four to five percent of the world's population. Makes it hard for people like me to find mentors. Makes it harder still to figure out how to fit into a thinking person's world. I have had many years of therapy.  As a result, I have a more balanced personality. I don't conform emotionally, but I have learned to hold my reactions in check. When I  have an over the top emotional reaction, it feels like a huge personal failure.  I realize that I run the risk of alienating others.

Immature emotional types are perceived in our society is as either drama queens or as too intense.  I joke that I am a drama queen in recovery. I never really was a drama queen in the sense that I was never really that self absorbed.  One can be a drama queen yet, paradoxically, have compassion for others. Emotional maturity is hard fought, all the same.

People like me literally take things to heart.  We take criticism personally. It's taken me many years to figure out that criticism doesn't mean someone dislikes me.  I realize that a person dislikes a flaw, not all of me. Hate the sin, love the sinner. It is out of that realization that I strive towards change and personal growth.  I am very introspective.  Imagine a Princess Hamlet.


I find it objectionable that people prefer to categorize emotional types like me as emotionally unstable.  Too many people try to marginalize heart centered people  like me by saying, "adjust your meds." I don't know statistics of how many heart centered people are mistaken for mentally ill.  Feeling things intensely is neither a crime nor an illness.

Because we are heart centered, people like me feel everything.  And I do mean everything.  When I call myself an empath, I don't do so to brag. I am an emotional receiver. What I've discovered is that this can lead me to a kind of arrogance and suffering.  If I think or feel that someone is blocking their feelings, I can choose to feel their feelings for them.  Years ago I decided to let people feel their own feelings, even if they, by my estimation, do it badly. Because I am a receiver, I sometimes cannot tell if I am feeling my own feelings or those of others in the room.  That may seem very strange to many of you, and no, I cannot explain it in logical or scientific terms.  Being an introvert compounds the problem.  I have found that clearing my second chakra helps a lot.  Allows me to return feelings to their rightful owners.


On our first date, my husband and I went to an animation film festival.  There was one cartoon about zoo animals being interviewed.  The large cat being interviewed ( cheetah perhaps) was saying to the interviewer, "I need space!"  By the time our third date rolled around, my husband was saying that back to me.  He found it amusing that I needed so much space, but he loved me despite what I am sure he perceived as prima donna tendencies.

When I was pregnant with Kid O, we went to a Purim service because we wanted to meet this rabbi.  When we approached him afterwards, this warm, wonderful soul kept stepping closer to me.  I kept moving back.  My husband could hardly keep from laughing.  He understood that this man was unintentionally invading my personal space.

I need more personal space than the average person because I am more sensitive to energy than many others. While I have developed coping strategies over the years, I sometimes feel like energy just about knocks me down. As with anyone, I adapt. The shape of a room affects me.  The furniture affects me. If I am in a room with a TV on, I will sit as far from it as possible even if I find the people engaging.  If I leave a room, it is not because I am disinterested. It may be that I am experiencing informational overload.

Why did I choose to call myself  Miss Shuganah?  Afterall I could have called myself Miss Understood or a number of other jokey handles with considerably less stigma attached to it.  After years of being reacted to as if I were crazy, I decided to celebrate it.  Calling myself Miss Shuganah is my very public way of liberating myself from the stigma that  I have struggled with for the vast majority of my life.  I am proof that talk

therapy can work. I am proof that one can choose compassion over being mean.  I am proof that sometimes sanity prevails in an insane world where events sometimes seem a little too random.  

I understand why society chooses to block out heart centered people like me.  Sometimes I mirror a sick society. Sometimes I insist people honestly address their feelings instead of  burying them. Much as a bird needs a right wing as well as a  left wing to fly, a person needs a heart as well as a brain to be a truly integrated human being.  Perhaps I express my feelings in a more authentic way than most.  Society needs to spend less time trying to force people like me to feel less and more time learning from people like me about what I do best:  living a feeling full life.    

Kid O Is CPed, or How Crippling Language and Sentimentality Dehumanizes Disabled Children and Adults

This past Monday I came back to Twitter after a weekend away only to have to face up to the error of my ways in regards to the word "handicapped." This led to much anger, angst and upset on my part. Yesterday morning I logged into Twitter to this post from a twitter friend. (OK, it's Ira.) focusing on whether Tiny Tim was a negative or positive portrayal of a disabled child. I've read Dickens but not A Christmas Carol, so I've only had the Hollywood sentimentalization to go by.

All these years I felt that Dickens was presenting me with a caricature of a disabled child, when, in fact, it was Hollywood all along who was deserving of my contempt. I should have known better, as works like Bleak House, for instance, point out how acutely aware Dickens was of the struggle of the working class. I wish that my Victorian Lit class had been taught incorporating Ira's historical knowledge, as it would have been a much more meaningful experience for me. I was so uninspired by the class that it's the only time I needed a professor to pick a paper topic for me. This was a graduate level class, too.

I always objected to the pure sentimentalization and emotional manipulation of Tiny Tim as depicted by Hollywood. Now that Ira Socol has separated out Hollywood versions from the original, I now understand how Tiny Tim was included within his family while not being included by the rest of society. There is perhaps a subtle irony with which Dickens has Bob Cratchit report Tim's assertion that, "...he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.'"


The bitter truth is that those attending church that day very likely looked the other way because they did not want to be reminded of disabled children and other imperfections of creation. After all if there is a God then there'd be no misery of any kind because God would be merciful and not allow for such blemishes on his peoplescape. Religious people do not want to have their sentimental visions of a god who answers their prayers shaken by harsh realities. Sorry, Tim, they are more likely wishing that you and other disabled children would conveniently disappear. Or, at the very least, get swept under the rug. Out of sight and blessedly out of mind. We cannot have emotional discomfort, especially on Christmas Day, which, since the mid-19th Century, has been subverted from celebration of Christ's birth to the the worship of material wealth and comforts, which in turn leads to shallower expressions of emotion in the form of sentimentality and nostalgia, as opposed to deeper, more authentic expressions of emotion in the form of compassion and genuine empathy for one's fellow man. That in turn leads to objectification of the disabled and other less desirable members of our society. When we objectify disabled people, we turn them into people to be pitied rather than people to be empowered.

Some of the worst offenders for rolling out the disabled child to ensure that the tote board total jumps up is Jerry Lewis and the MDA telethon. Thankfully there are organizations such as Jerry's Orphans that vividly portray what it's like to be a grown up "kid". Adults suffer from forms of muscular dystrophy, too, but they are rarely heard from.

The Kids Are All Right


The kids are all right. So are many disabled adults. I am just starting to learn about person first language. Until recently I saw no problem with the word, "handicapped." Cap in hand. Although the phrase "cap in hand" does not come from "handicapped," the connotations and images remain much the same as language evolved. And in Kid O's case, it connotes someone who could end up on the fringes of society working in a sheltered workshop.

I also realized I had never asked Kid O how she would like to be labeled (other than just a kid, that is). Given her limited ability to effectively express more complex ideas (note: not the same as being able to comprehend more complex ideas), I asked her, using a two hand system. Touch this hand for answer a) and this hand for answer b) She ruled out "handicapped" in favor of "disabled." So I took it one step further. She prefers being known as someone with cerebral palsy. My small problem with that (OK, sometimes huge amounts of angst) is that you can say, "she is handicapped," or "she is disabled." But, try as you might, you cannot say, "she is cerebral palsy." Others have suggested saying that "she is a wheelchair user." But Kid O does not use a wheelchair in the sense that she is able to wheel herself around. She sits in a wheelchair and others push her, ie, "use" it, if you will. So I am thinking I need to coin a new phrase. "She is CPed." I could give into convention and say Kid O is disabled, but that is too encompassing a word. She is CPed. Kid O doesn't have CP as if it were some dread disease. But CP is part of her identity. Kid O is a girl who has CP. It's cumbersome language. If we can say "she is handicapped" or "she is disabled," why not "she is CPed?"

Now that may seem like quibbling to some, but there is a difference between being something "blind, deaf," and having something. You have an illness. Someone may be a cancer patient, but, passively, they have cancer. Does that mean they own the cancer or that the cancer owns them? There is no ownership of cerebral palsy. It just... is. Kid O is CPed.

Kid O is not differently abled. She is not "handi-abled" as the gym teacher on Glee says. Kid O is CPed. I am not circumferentially challenged. I am fat. Kid O is not physically challenged. Kid O is CPed. Kid O is physically disabled. Kid O is a kid, actually a teenager, with many positive traits and many flaws first and the disability, cerebral palsy, that defines her second. Kid O is not an angel flying too close to the ground. Kid O does not have special "other" powers. Kid O is a human being. Sugarcoating the language about disability is to sentimentalize Kid O to the point of creating a caricature and denying Kid O her humanness. Sometimes she is a human board. Sometimes she is a mule kicking machine. Sometimes she is very primal in her communication. But one thing Kid O always is is very human. Kid O is CPed.

If we deny the disabled their right to call themselves what they will, and if we use feel good sentimental language, then we are doing a disservice to the disabled individual. Furthermore, we are doing a disservice to ourselves by denying our own discomforts with truths about the human condition. There are the infirm and disabled and disfigured among us, and we need to stop cheapening their lives by using disabled people as props and considering them objects of pity. When we objectify a human being, we are committing an act of psychic and linguistic violence. We need to look inside and figure out why we are not comfortable around certain people. We, as a society, need to confront our disablism. Disabled children and adults do not have deficits. Disabled children and adults are whole, just the way they are. Disabled children and adults are just human. Kid O is CPed.