Metaphors We Change Culture By

resistance through spiral time

Autistics are famously literal-minded and bad at understanding metaphor.

For years, this supposed autistic trait kept me from self-identifying as autistic, even when I felt drawn to the #actuallyaustistic community online and immediately adopted their critical approach to neurodiversity. They challenged the view that autism is a disorder that requires medical diagnosis and treatment aimed at bringing autistic bodyminds into conformity with mainstream social norms and expectations. They argued that this medical/pathology model reflected the ways that allistic (non-autistic) researchers view autistics from the outside, with little understanding of the lived experience of autism from the inside. Using the hashtag #nothingaboutuswithoutus, they rejected research and therapeutic interventions that didn’t include the voices, needs, and desires of fully-consenting autistic people. Expanding on the work of critical disability scholars, they theorized a neurodiversity paradigm in which neurotypes that diverge from what society deems typical are viewed not as disordered, or in need of cure, but rather as part of the naturally-occuring diversity, or neurodiversity, of human bodyminds. They argued that what neurodivergent people need is accommodation, not cure, and they recognized that a lack of accommodation is disabling. 

After years of wondering, I was finally diagnosed as ADHD the year after I left my marriage, when I was 51. But when I started making content about ADHD on Instagram in 2019, I was frustrated by how uncritical the online ADHD community was. I was basically yearning for critical ADHD studies, which had yet to be theorized by my friend Jesse Meadows¹ (and others). It seemed to me that the autistics were where it was at—political, critical, and curious. And it wasn’t just their rejection of the pathology paradigm—so much of what they described about how it felt to be autistic resonated deeply. I kept tip-toeing up to the line of embracing this identity for myself, and then backing off because ….  I couldn’t be autistic—look at this artistic life I was forging for myself. I was an artist! Metaphor was my love language! Yet everytime I googled “autism diagnosis,” among the central traits describing autism were a lack of creativity, imagination, and an inability to understand figurative language. 

The irony is not lost on me that I was knee-deep in the pathology paradigm when I uncritically accepted these very often wildly inaccurate characterizations of autistic people. (When I shared this story in DDS, a friend noted that I was being overly-literal about what it means to be literal!) But it wasn’t long before I came to understand that one of the key insights of those critical autistics is that the way we are viewed and described from the outside by allistic researchers and medical/psychiatric professionals is often at odds with our own internal, lived experience. Often there is a kernel of truth in the allistic gaze, but when it gets filtered through a lens of disease, disorder, and dysfunction, it often becomes quite unrecognizable. For example, I would agree that in many ways I can be quite literal. I often don’t understand that someone is joking, or what the joke means. I can be very blunt and direct in a way that is sometimes interpreted as rude. And I too often assume that people mean what they say, and then I’m surprised and confused to learn they are speaking euphemistically or cryptically. It’s not that I don’t understand the expression “beating around the bush,” I just don’t understand when people are doing it. 

Yet I have been met with overwhelmingly enthusiastic response for the highly metaphorical content I was creating on Instagram, YouTube, and through ebooks I was making and giving away. I was offering autistic and other neurodivergent people new metaphors that helped them understand themselves through a kinder, less shaming, more affirming lens of neurodiversity, and they not only seemed perfectly capable of understanding these metaphors, but often found them mind-blowing and life-changing.

Despite the stereotypes, this response makes so much sense to me, given what I know about metaphor from cognitive linguistics. Language is full of metaphors that we barely notice and use unconsciously all the time. In fact, it would be difficult to understand language at all if one couldn’t understand metaphor. For example, consider a metaphor I used in the first sentence of this paragraph, where I described language as being “full” of metaphors. In this metaphor, an abstract concept, language is understood in terms of something more concrete, such as a container. Container metaphors are so pervasive in language that we don’t even notice them (e.g. “in language”—another example of a container metaphor).  We speak of being “in love,” of someone having a mind “full of good ideas,” of feeling “out of it today.” These are all metaphorical expressions that are so ubiquitous they have become almost literal. But in truth (another container metaphor), it is very difficult to say much that is entirely literal. Metaphors not only shape our language (“shape our language” being a metaphor), but they actually shape our very thoughts, our understanding of reality, and our everyday behavior.²

Contrary to our common understanding, metaphor is far more than “just” pretty poetic language, more than “just” rhetorical flourish to drive home an argument or conjur an emotion. Our very conceptual systems—the ways we understand abstract ideas such as time, for example—are profoundly shaped and structured by metaphor. Metaphors don’t just help us understand concepts, they actually create meaning, framing the boundaries of what it is possible for us to think and understand. In their groundbreaking book Metaphors We Live By³, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that “[o]ur ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive … and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities” (Lakoff 5). The concepts that structure our thoughts, communication, and daily activities are metaphorical in nature in ways that are almost invisibly embedded in our language through what cognitive linguists call conceptual metaphors. These are metaphors through which “one concept is metaphorically structured in terms of another” (Lakoff 27). 

In other words, we understand one concept, usually a more abstract one, such as argument, in terms of another, more concrete concept or experience, such as war. Cognitive linguists denote this conceptual metaphor as ARGUMENT IS WAR. We can see this metaphor in many of the expressions we use to talk about our actual experiences of an argument: 

Your claims are indefensible.

He attacked every weak point in my argument.

His criticisms were right on target.

I demolished his argument.

I’ve never won an argument with him.

If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out.

He shot down all of my arguments. (Lakoff, 16)

It’s important to note that this metaphor doesn’t just describe arguments, but rather it shapes the very way we understand what an argument is, and the way in practice that we conduct an argument: as a verbal battle with positions, offenses and defenses, strategies and weapons, winners and losers. In our culture, this metaphor defines the limits of what we understand is possible in an argument, but there could be other ways to conceive of an argument. As Lakoff and Johnson suggest, imagine another culture where the structuring metaphor for argument is ARGUMENT IS DANCE. In this culture, the participants in an argument might be viewed as artists with a goal of performing in a way that is beautifully choreographed and aesthetically pleasing. This metaphor for argument is so different from our own ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor, that if we were to visit this culture, we might conclude that they simply lack the concept and experience of argument at all. (Lakoff 17). 

While there seem to be a few nearly universal conceptual metaphors, many of the metaphors we use to structure concepts are culturally specific. Because they are also so ubiquitous that they become almost literal and largely invisible within any given cutlure, it can be easy for members of one culture to entirely misread another one. When this misreading happens in the context of dramatic power imbalances, the more powerful culture’s conceptual metaphors can become a powerful weapon of subjugation and marginalization.

An example of the way conceptual metaphors structure not just language but also thought and action in oppressive ways is the “war on drugs” metaphor, which has framed the way policy makers approach the problems (or perceived problems) associated with drug use. By thinking of drugs—and by extension, the people who sell and use them—as foreign invaders and enemy combatants, this metaphor has led policy-makers to rely primarily on military and carceral responses to problems that could, with a different structuring metaphor, be viewed instead as problems of public health and poverty.

Yet another example, from the book Botany of Empire, regards the ways we understand plant reproduction. Banu Subramaniam points to the ways metaphors for plant reproduction are rooted in European colonial norms of heterosexual reproductive sex and romance. Subramaniam argues that the ways we think “scientifically” about plant reproduction rely obsessively on metaphors related to Western binary categories of sex and gender and the normativity of heterosexual sex, which are themselves more ideological than they are scientific. She notes that in order to make this framework make sense, biologists have had to shoehorn the vast majority of plants into ill-fitting categories such as “bisexual” or “hermaphrodite,” because the flowers have both “male” and “female” parts, as well as “asexual,” for plants that propagage through roots, stems, leaves, and buds. “There are more exceptions than rules,” says Subramaniam. “Plants do such interesting things… if we had better ways to describe them that aren’t based around human reproduction, it might open up other ways to study them.”⁴

The consequences of this apparently “scientific” metaphorical structuring of plant reproduction not only affects the way we think about plants, but it in turn reinforces the notion that these constructs regarding human sexuality are also scientific, neutral, and essentially rooted in biology. It’s a neat trick. The metaphors become mutually reinforcing in a way that gives a scientific gloss to concepts that are largely constructed and ideological. “When transferred to distantly related lineages like plants, these constructs of a sex/gender binary and gender essentialism can have harmful consequences. If plants, animals, and humans are all alike, surely, the argument goes, the categories must be natural, indeed universal? One of the powerful consequences of transferring human biology to plants and non-human animals is the normalization and naturalization of western colonial ideology as biology.”⁵

Conceptual metaphors are not a minor or occasional tool by which we make meaning and understand the world. Rather, they are ubiquitous and deeply embedded in almost every aspect of our conceptual systems, as can be seen by how highly metaphorical even our must mundane and daily language is. The list of conceptual metaphors that we use everyday is enormous, but largely invisible to us. Once you begin to see them, though, you realize they are everywhere. Here are a few examples:

IDEAS ARE FOOD

That’s too much information for me to digest all at once.

She devoured that book.

That’s food for thought.

That claim is hard to swallow.

His theories are half-baked.

THE MIND IS A MACHINE

We’re still trying to grind out the solution to this equation. 

We’ve been working on this problem so long we’re running out of steam.

Boy, the wheels are turning now!

I’m afraid I’m a little rusty.

My mind just isn’t operating well today.

LOVE IS A JOURNEY

Look how far we’ve come.

We’re at a crossroads.

We’ll just have to go our separate ways.

I don’t think this relationship is going anywhere.

It’s been a long, bumpy road.

We use these and many more conceptual metaphors so seamlessly and unconsciously, they come to be almost literal. But even so, they profoundly shape the ways we conceive of ourselves, our world, and what is possible. Lakoff and Johnson suggest that it is possible to adopt different metaphors in order to conceive of the world differently. To demonstrate this, they offer a new metaphor for the abstract concept of love. Often in English, we conceive of love as a journey (see above), or as fire (“his heart burned for her,” “he was consumed by love,” “I don’t want to get burned again,” “That kindled love in her heart.”) or even as a war or contest (“she won him over,” “he wore down her defenses”). What if, they ask, we instead conceived of love as a collaborative work of art? Structuring the abstract concept of love in this way could give rise to a set of expressions that would both describe and shape the ways we think about and engage in love relationships, such as:

Love is work. 

Love is active. 

Love requires cooperation. 

Love requires dedication. 

Love requires compromise. 

Love requires patience. 

Love requires shared values and goals. 

Love demands sacrifice. 

Love regularly brings frustration. 

Love is an aesthetic experience. 

Love is primarily valued for its own sake. 

Love involves creativity. 

Love cannot be achieved by formula. 

Love is unique in each instance. 

Love is an expression of who you are. 

Love creates a reality. 

Love reflects how you see the world.

LOVE IS A COLLABORATIVE WORK OF ART is a way of structuring our concept of love that is quite different from LOVE IS A JOURNEY, LOVE IS FIRE, and LOVE IS WAR. As a consequence, if we were to adopt this new metaphor for the abstract concept of love, it could radically change the way we not only think about love, but even the very way we experience love.

Lakoff and Johnson acknowledge that it is “by no means an easy matter to change the metaphors we live by. It is one thing to be aware of the possibilities inherent in [a new] metaphor, but it is a very different and far more difficult things to live by it” (184). It is not as simple as making a conscious decision to adopt a new metaphor—indeed, conceptual metaphors shape our experience precisely because they are so deeply ingrained in our language and thinking so as to be unconscious and invisible. It has certainly been my experience that adopting new metaphors is an ongoing practice, not an endgame, but it is nonetheless a practice that has had the power to reshape the ways I think about myself and my place in the world. For me, the practice of embracing new metaphors and sharing them with others takes on an almost spiritual dimension. Once I understood that there is no such thing as “just” a metaphor—once I understood that metaphors are not only real but are actually the very building blocks of reality—then I also understood that it was possible to make magic with metaphors, it was possible to heal broken hearts, to sooth anxious nervous systems, to shore up creative lives and coax out confidence and agency in those who have felt marginalized by so many of the metaphors that have become ubiquitous under capitalism and colonization. 

I agree with Lakoff and Johnson that it is difficult to fully adopt and internalize new metaphors, but it is made considerably easier when new metaphors resonate deeply with our lived reality. As Lakoff and Johnson argue, the meaning metaphors have in our lives is partly cultural, and partly tied to our past experiences (181). Metaphors that make sense in the context of our culture can grate against our personal experience of the world, and it is easy for us to feel ashamed of that misfit, especially when our culture is deeply invested in and demands conformity to the misfitting metaphor. This misfit can often be the source of deep shame, but it can also offer an opportunity for cultural change. Metaphors that accurately describe our different, albeit misfitting, realities as we experience them in our own mindbodies will be less difficult for us to adopt and internalize. Indeed once we become aware of better-fitting metaphors, we often experience them simultaneously as revelation and liberation. As something that is already inside of us but that we didn’t have access to because we were swimming in, or maybe drowning in, the many shaming, debilitating, marginalizing metaphors that structure the demands of our society.  Just as a fish doesn’t know it’s wet, we often don’t realize we are awash in these powerful metaphors until we are offered, or create for ourselves, new ones that more accurately reflect the ways we actually experience the world. That shift to dry land for creatures who were never meant to swim in a sea of “normality” can be a turning point. We will still be disabled by the demands of our society, and by the lack of accommodation for our differences, but especially when we build communities on the basis of new shared metaphors, we have the power to create real cultural change. As Lakoff and Johnson note, “Much of cultural change arises from the introduction of new metaphorical concepts and the loss of old ones. For example, the Westernization of cultures throughout the world is partly a matter of introducing the TIME IS MONEY metaphor into those cultures” (184). 

TIME IS A SPIRAL and TIME IS AN ELLIPTICAL ORBIT are among the most resonant metaphors I have shared with neurodivergent people. While these metaphors initially arose out of my own internal and synesthetic sense of time, it has been affirming—but also unsurprising—to learn that these same metaphors are common in ancient and indigenous cultures. It is no mistake that Western notions of time were on the vanguard of imperialism, and I believe that reclaiming and internalizing ancient and indigenous metaphors, especially for time, can be at the heart of changing culture.

1. Meadows, Jesse. We Need Critical ADHD Studies Now. https://jessemeadows.medium.com/we-need-critical-adhd-studies-now-52d4267edd54).

2. Lakoff, G. (1992). The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor (p. 204) in A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and Thought, 2^nd ed (pp 203-204). Cambridge: Cambridge University.

3. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press, 1980.

4. Corbin, Zoë. ‘We need other logics for our approach to nature’: the woman uprooting colonialism in botany. The Guardian. 2 June 2024 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jun/02/european-colonialism-botany-of-empire-banu-subramaniam).  

5. Subramaniam, Banu and Madelaine Bartlett. Re-imagining Reproduction: The Queer Possibilities of Plants. Integrative and Comparative Biology, Volume 63, Issue 4, pp 946-959. https://academic.oup.com/icb/article/63/4/946/7110401