[Visual ID: A photo of Audre Lorde, a Black lesbian woman wearing big glasses and a red v-neck shirt. She smiles widely at the camera as she paddles a canoe, the lake and its forested shoreline behind her.]
This question has been on my mind lately. Specifically, to what extent do healthcare and healing really intersect when capitalism degrades the quality of science and clinical care? The purpose of healthcare, biomedical or holistic, should be to facilitate people’s healing. Our baseline expectation is that healthcare providers 'do not harm' (i.e. the Hippocratic Oath). However, healthcare within the medical industrial complex is so often about compliance, behavioral change, and what’s supposedly 'wrong' with our bodies, instead of what’s glorious and right.
Reading The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde recently gave me some perspective on this chasm between healthcare and healing. Lorde, a Black lesbian feminist writer and educator, was very much ahead of her time and still comes across as revolutionary today. She wrote The Cancer Journals in the 80s after surviving breast cancer, divulging her insecurities around having to choose between her breast and her life, along with other ebbs and flows that accompanied her healing process.
At times, the healthcare system facilitated her healing by presenting her with evidence-based and performing timely treatments that halted her cancer's progression. At others, healthcare providers made her feel angry and isolated; namely, when they pressured her to use a prosthetic that made her feel unlike herself. For her, it was more healing to accept her new shape without conditioning that self-acceptance on appearing two-breasted, ‘normal’, and rendering her survivorship undetectable to the outsider. She longed to just walk down the street and be one among other survivors, visible and not. Realizing that gave her power, a power which contributed to her healing.
Ultimately, Lorde’s tight-knit community elevated her physical healing to the point of holistic transformation. Of her beloved community, she wrote, “It is the sweet smell of their breath and laughter and voices calling my name that gives me volition, helps me remember I want to turn away from looking down. These images flow quickly, the tangible floods of energy rolling off these women toward me that I converted into power to heal myself.”
Healing isn’t always physical, nor is it always permanent. Six years after her breast cancer treatment, Lorde was diagnosed with liver cancer and died at the age of 58. Yet Lorde probably understood what healing meant more than many healthcare providers whose job ultimately is healing others. Because healing necessitates the shedding, and sometimes amputation, of false beliefs, and metamorphosing into a more liberated self. And Lorde was a master at this: having changed her life many times, she birthed a future for the rest of us to mature into.
As she modeled, healing does not necessarily bring about an abled-bodymind that bears semblance to the unicorn of normality, but instead, one that authentically engages with the triad of self, environment and community.
Since Lorde released The Cancer Journals, breast cancer survivorship has increased exponentially in the US, which is a testament to the strength of biomedicine and public health. However, I don't believe the medical community is any more accepting of non-normative bodies than they were in the 80s.
Tragically, this is a missed opportunity for the healthcare system, which invests trillions into making people more alike instead of helping them to be and accept themselves. Like Lorde said at a conference during her recovery period, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Healthcare will always be but another instrument of the oppressor when wielded by practitioners and administrators bent on maintaining the Medical Industrial Complex.
With all this in mind, do you think it's possible to preserve the aspects of healthcare that are caring and consensual, empowering and effective, while discarding the parts that strive to standardize everything and everyone?
Maybe, like me, you’ll find some answers and/or more questions in this book: Whether you have one breast, no breasts, or two; whether you are healing, healed, or in conflict with the notion itself; whether you know the pain of difference or the false comfort of conformity; whether you identify as a feminist or not; whether you journal or not; and whether you like your body or not.
Whatever categories you fit into, find some comfort in knowing that healing can be powerful, pleasurable, and possible.
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Would you like to learn to access the healing capacity of plants and your own bodymind? If so, please book a consultation with me.