‘Jungle’ is an immigrant word

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A diagnosis a few years ago gave me a label to understand why I was like I was.

It’s an acronym of four words, and it had the potential to open the door to a narrow path, some of which I ended up disagreeing with and so refused to accept.

I would rather not put too much focus on ADHD as a primary identity marker for myself.

I did some personal work in tracing back through my life and figuring out how this new explanation led to decisions and behaviour patterns.

There’s a rhetoric in the world right now (that is quite vocal) about not really grasping this thing as a genuine thing.

Which is fine, I actually do understand the perspective.

I don’t quite get this thing that much either, and I will probably continue to make sense of it for years to come.

There is also a risk of falling into the realm of identity where you feel the world needs to adapt to you rather than you remember that you are an individual within a bigger picture that also holds others.

And I would rather keep the balance at the forefront.

A poem has to have the ability to make its mark alone, whilst also being part of a bigger anthology.

Labels do this though - identify you in a certain way, and if you’re not careful, give you one singular route to take to navigate the rest of your life.

Why should you allow it to?

Saying that, with this label specifically the mind does feel rather like a jungle - a vast array of different tangled thoughts and decisions.

A chaos within a structured existence.

One has to try to navigate a sense of routine and normality daily with the rest of the population too.

I associate the word ‘jungle’ with the word ‘tangled’ quite a lot.

It seems the vast space of green and tall trees, noises of nature and animals we’d not keep as pets also has this notion of being chaotic and not that orderly to a human being, despite being completely in order for the jungle.

There is a lesson in that I suppose.

The chaos of the jungle follows its own order.

But ‘jungle’, as a word in English, is actually an immigrant word.

It has a Sanskrit origin of ‘jaṅgala’ meaning ‘rough or arid land’. We see it evolve into the Hindi and Urdu word ‘jangal’ to mean ‘forests or wild uncultivated areas’.

Its early English usage was around 1776, when a ‘jungle’ referred to ‘swampy or wild areas, particularly near the Himalayas’.

The meaning expanded in the 19th Century (by around 1849) to mean dense vegetation, especially tropical forests, and a further metaphorical expansion took place in the 1850s to include terms like ‘concrete jungle’ that we use to identify places like New York, noting its chaotic set up of buildings.

And now, I’m expanding it further to explain my mind.

‘Jungle’ is an immigrant word that sees its origins from the same place my own name comes from.

But it also aptly describes the chaos going on in my mind too.

I will still work to balance my life within the realms of society.

But I will also honour the fact that it’s a web of chaos too.

And it has its own rules.