🖋 𝒮𝒲𝒜𝒩𝒦 Dispatch | 23 November 2024
“We Only Speak When It’s Sacred”
Filed Under: Respiratory Discrimination · Verbal Coercion · Disability Adjustment Refusal · Pediatric Neglect · SWANK London Ltd
Dear Kirsty,
“I don’t appreciate the way they treat us when we go to the hospital unable to breathe, when we can’t defend ourselves verbally.”
In the theatre of institutional care, breathlessness is viewed with suspicion—especially when paired with advocacy.
In your world, dialogue is default.
In ours, dialogue is dangerous.
“All they want to do is argue.”
You frame it as procedure.
We experience it as persecution.
Theirs is a system that equates silence with guilt, and speech with noncompliance.
“They refused to check Honor.”
A child, visibly unwell, discarded because her mother could not perform distress in their preferred dialect.
What kind of clinic demands oxygenated obedience as a precondition for care?
What kind of safeguarding officer allows it?
“Apparently other people can talk more easily because they waste it on arguing so often.”
Indeed.
But I speak only when it’s sacred.
When words are necessary. When life is at stake.
That is not silence. That is strategy.
📍 Composed in Controlled Breath. Filed in Refusal of Debate.
Polly Chromatic
Guardian of Honor · Silence Strategist · Director, SWANK London Ltd
✉ director@swanklondon.com | 🌐 www.swanklondon.com
© SWANK London Ltd. All Breath Accounted For. All Abuse Indexed.