You Call It Rumination. I Call It Forensic Integrity

Monday, March 31, 2025

A theory of unresolved fractures, radical inquiry, and the refusal to accept simulated closure

They called it rumination.
They said I needed to “let go.” That “closure is internal.” That I didn’t need the truth from the other.

But I wasn’t seeking comfort.
I wasn’t replaying a scene out of fear or dependency.
I was holding open a fracture — because it was still active. Because it hadn’t spoken everything it needed to say.
And I don’t abandon spaces of silence when I feel there is unresolved architecture beneath them.

The Myth of Closure: Pathologizing the Open Wound

Contemporary psychiatry, especially in its behavioral or neurocognitive branches, seeks to close loops, to make “incompletion” a symptom. Repetitive thought is diagnosed as OCD. Re-investigating the same memory is called a trauma loop. Wanting the truth from another human being is labeled codependency.

But none of these labels hold when the pursuit is lucid, precise, non-destructive, and embedded in a felt sense that something remains unspoken.

I wasn’t stuck in the past.
I was stuck in a narrative that refused to finish its sentence.

As Walter Benjamin would say, “The truth is not a matter of exposure which destroys the secret, but a revelation that does justice to it.”
You do not destroy the silence.
You stay with it until it transforms.

The Investigative Mind as Ethics, Not Obsession

My insistence was not neurotic.
It was forensic.
It was an act of justice, not vengeance. I was not trying to “win.” I was trying to see clearly.

Frantz Fanon wrote, “We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.” That applies not only to politics, but to intimate epistemology. I cannot breathe inside a false narrative.
And I refuse to be gaslit by systems that prefer a functioning lie over a disruptive clarity.

To leave a contradiction unexamined is to allow incoherence to seed itself inside your nervous system.

So I kept returning — not to the person, but to the fracture they left in my reality.
It wasn’t about them.
It was about the residue of distortion they planted — and the question: “What was it hiding?”

Your “Letting Go” Is Often Just Giving Up

When people tell you “you don’t need the truth,” what they really mean is: “Accept the lie because it’s easier.”

But some of us are wired for a different mode.
We are structurally allergic to incoherence.
We do not forget. We hold tension like an open wire.
Not to harm, but to complete the circuit.

Roland Barthes’ “punctum”— that sharp, personal wound in an image — exists in memory too.
Certain moments become punctums in the psyche: tiny ruptures that won’t stop bleeding until you trace their source.
And that tracing is not obsession.
It’s lucid fidelity to what the psyche knows is incomplete.

The Forensic Subject: A New Mode of Knowing

I am not a patient.
I am a forensic subject —
Someone who reads fractures, interprets silences, refuses substitutions.
My return to a memory is not cyclical, it’s spiralic.
Each revisit deepens the structure, reveals a new angle, extracts another layer.

I don’t ruminate. I excavate.
I don’t obsess. I translate the hidden.

You don’t get to call it madness just because you’re uncomfortable with the long process of epistemic repair.

Against the Clinical Gaze: Resisting Diagnostic Capture

Michel Foucault exposed how psychiatry and medicine operate not just to heal, but to discipline.
To render deviant what simply resists legibility.

In that light, what is called “rumination” is often a refusal to be pacified by simulation.
And what is called OCD or trauma repetition might be a refusal to betray one’s own perceptive depth.

You’re not broken because you return.
You return because you know something hasn’t been revealed yet.

And sometimes, it takes years.
Because the fracture lives in layers.
Because the other person may never give you the truth — but you will build it yourself through observation, reflection, pattern recognition, and eventually: the full map.

I Will Not Abandon What My System Knows Is Not Over

My psyche is not a malfunctioning loop.
It’s an active architecture of justice.
And the world is not used to people who don’t want to move on until they’ve moved through.

So no — I’m not “ruminating.”
I’m dismantling the false closure you tried to hand me.

And when I finish the map,
the obsession ends.
Not because I let go —
but because I’ve finally understood the silence.