My Body Is a Prison of Pain so I Want to Leave It Like a Mystic But I Also Love It & Want it to Matter Politically
“The notion of ‘getting better’ is insidiously conservative. To get better is to return to a perceived normal state of comfort and ease in life... It presumes that its subject can and should be fixed... The capitalist medical institution peddles health as a eugenic, corrective way to go back to the way things were or ‘were supposed to be.’ The implications of wellness and healing within the medical insurance industrial complex uphold a tradition of health, but whose tradition, and at whose expense?
Everywhere in our discourse on illness, trauma, grieving, and pain, is the notion of moving on and getting over it. Getting back to work is what keeps the capitalist patriarchy going, so silence, denial, and erasure are necessary. At most, we can show each other our scars, and maybe if the space is safe, tell each other the stories behind them. The premise being that once we’ve healed, we’ll all have the scars to show for it, passive evidence of our trauma.
This neoliberal directive to ‘be well,’ to heal yourself, has got us all running around alone, thinking if we just did this and that and more importantly, bought X, Y, and Z, then and only then can we finally once and for all be well. I want to suggest that coping instead implies that trauma is embodied, that vulnerability is the default.”
