🖋 SWANK Dispatch | 23 November 2024
“We’re Not Liars. We Just Can’t Breathe.”
Filed Under: Clinical Gaslighting · Asthma Stigma · Verbal Coercion · Medical Torture · Social Rejection · SWANK London Ltd
Dear Kirsty,
Let me enumerate—since institutional minds require bullet points to recognise lived experience:
The defensive posture of hospital staff.
Their refusal to follow respiratory protocol.
The insinuation that needing to breathe must be performed, proven, or denied.
You wanted “safeguarding.”
I gave you oxygen.
You asked for history, then punished it mid-sentence.
“Dr Arjumand said: I don’t believe you.”
Several times. With intent.
And just like that: my lungs collapsed.
My recovery reversed.
You took improvement and turned it into procedural injury.
This is not personal grievance.
It is generational. Institutional. Coded into the architecture of disbelief.
I have lived this disbelief in schools, universities, and workplaces.
Now my children inherit it in hospitals.
When they don’t “perform” asthma, they are shamed.
When I advocate, I am framed.
“We don’t want to be social with regular people.”
“We want to be social with other people who have asthma. Very bad asthma like ours.”
That’s not alienation. That’s respiratory refuge.
The world that demands effortless breathing has no place for us.
You call it isolation.
We call it selective inclusion.
“Deaf people have deaf friends. Blind people have blind friends.”
And asthmatics?
We form alliances built on shared air, not shallow pleasantries.
We socialise through oxygen fluency—not forced integration.
I breastfed all four of them hoping they’d escape this fate.
They didn’t. But they gained something else: sovereignty.
So no, we won’t argue for our right to breathe.
We’ll document your disbelief.
And exhale our resistance into the record.
📍 Not Broken. Not Lying. Just Done Explaining.
Polly Chromatic
Founding Archivist, Oxygen Sovereignty Collective
✉ director@swanklondon.com
🌐 www.swanklondon.com
© SWANK London Ltd. All Disbeliefs Rejected.