Language as Reclamation and Power

Sor Juana wielded language with extraordinary precision and creativity, understanding that who gets to name reality holds power. Medical language about chronic illness often reduces lived experience to symptoms and pathology, stripping away the full reality of what it means to live this life. This concept invites deliberate linguistic reclamation: How do you want to describe your experience? What words honor your reality while refusing diagnostic reduction? Some reject identity language entirely (not 'disabled' but 'living with a condition'); others embrace it with pride. Sor Juana's model shows that the choice itself matters—that naming is a political and spiritual act. Creating new language, reviving old language, combining terms in unexpected ways, writing your own narrative of illness—these are all acts of power. Language becomes a way to assert what is true about you that medicine alone cannot capture: your resilience, your adaptation, your transformed but continuing life.