"This fragility of identity and sense of impending linguistic/cognitive collapse was nothing new; nor was the trashing of my language and cognitive capabilities. I can’t speak for others, but I’ve come to understand that my sense of identity is so bound up with my ability to use language that when my ability to make (produce and understand) syntactical sense through language in the ways that I need to is withdrawn, assailed, or otherwise compromised for capricious reasons – when I’m forced to think and express myself in ways that are inimical to me – in order to control and dominate; my sense of self disintegrates along with my language and my thought processes. By the same token, when I’m able, using my own thought processes and words, at least to try to make logically and materially cogent syntactical connections, which, even in my flights of fancy (including my dreams and hallucinations),5 are or can be developed into concepts that are objectively as well as subjectively meaningful, my sense of self coheres. Syntax is the vehicle which orders, binds, constructs, and is the bearer of sense. More than once when, because of this sort of imposition, all language becomes foreign to me, I’ve been compelled to spend/waste much time busting my brain engaging in remedial work, which ultimately proves to be of a ridiculously Sisyphean nature, simply trying to reconstruct my basic sense of syntax (something beyond grammar) and ability to recognize words as something more than pure and opaque lexical artifacts, and associate them in meaningful ways: thereby recursively reconstituting the syntax of my/self and the semantics of my existence through language and ratiocination. And for me, whatever else is contributory, psychological, cultural, environmental, what have you, the neurobiological processes that produce this mentation are fundamental, and thus fundamentally inextricable from my/self. "
