A Sick Society + An Individual Burden
“Our individual healing is connected to healing our society, and our healing of the ecosystems upon which our lives depend. To engage in this holistic vision is to practice deep medicine.”
I could tell I was about to sob.
"We're practically strangers, and she's going to think I've lost it if I burst into tears as soon as we start."
My laptop sat in the middle of the living room, balancing atop a makeshift "standing desk" I’d constructed out of a rickety cabinet, a small Rubbermaid container, and one of those cardboard packs that grocery stores use to ship frozen burritos in mass quantities.
Scheduled to meet once more with a new coach I’d hired for a three-month endeavor to tackle ongoing autoimmune issues—symptoms that refused to cave to any prior remedies I’d already thrown their way—I knew I was about to break.
Twenty-one days in, having eaten soup with boiled meat and veggies for every meal, and still processing all of the isolation and financial insecurity and growing civic unrest after the murder of George Floyd—helicopters flying overhead outside and the Colorado mountains on fire—the ability to keep my shit together had finally faltered.
So, as soon as her video flickered on, I let the tears come, and the frustrations fly.
It wasn't just that I couldn't take eating the same thing all day, every day. Or even our most pressing global crises—climate collapse, a virus run amok, crumbling democracy, and institutional racial injustice—come to bear all at once in our daily, lived realities.
Instead, what came spilling out of me had more to do with our intolerably sick society and the way we must bear the burden of its disease so individually.
We are sick, and we often endure the cost of it alone: preventative measures to ward off illness, and the price of care when disease finally comes.
"Thanks" to the pandemic, I'd temporarily stopped working, aided by the help of a business-related PPP loan. Taking care of my health felt like a full-time job, and I decided to admit that's what it was. I started to acknowledge, too, that much of the reason any of us think otherwise is that we have outright ignored our screaming bodies for so long that we consider our symptoms "normal" or excuse them away as "aging." If you haven't made the metaphor yet, "sickness" and "disease" don't just describe our physical ailments, either.
In any case, living alone and having no opportunity to go anywhere or see anyone made it both more accessible and more challenging. Easier, in that I wouldn't be forced to tell friends "no" when they invited me to socialize at a restaurant that couldn't accommodate my dietary needs, which was all of them. Harder, in that I was, well, truly alone.
Every chore.
Every meal.
Every grocery bill.
Every ounce of chicken stock.
Everything I had to ferment.
Every detox bath I needed to draw.
All of it.
It was all on me.
On me to accomplish.
On me to cover financially.
On me to process, mentally and emotionally.
No surprise, but surviving in a society that makes you sick is costly and time-consuming without the benefit of community. There’s all the metal-laced water and soil, the smoky air, the moldy homes, the radiated phone signals, the surface-level relationships, the hyper-sterilized offices, and the chemical-laden sheets.
When a white woman who isn’t even working can’t pull off the rigors needed to heal, you see with razor-sharp clarity how profoundly broken it all is. That was evident to me before, but it became even more apparent: Our problems are systemic, chronic, and epidemic in scale, and we cannot heal in isolation.
In fact, separation isn't just why I couldn't heal.
It's what was making me sick in the first place.
My whiteness is part of it, too. Whiteness and our economic systems embody a story of separation and individualism—a truly colonial project. So many other cultures over millennia and still today, most of which are people of color or preindustrial, operate more collectively. I can't be the only White person who has seen a local QTBIPoC gathering advertised and knew I was missing a kind of connection and joy they share.
So, when I got on that call, I was furious.
For me, but for all of us, too. Especially those who didn't have as much access as I did. Not everyone has the time or money to learn which filters clean our water, which foods genuinely nourish us, how to cook food so that its nutrients are more bioavailable, or what healing herbs lie right outside our door.
As if my individual decision to recycle, walk to work, or change this word to that word alone is enough to counteract all of the ways that society-level separation makes us sick every day anyway.
As Rupa Marya and Rajeev Charles Patel say in Inflamed, "This damage [of colonialism, of separation] is a consequence not of individual choices but of the mandates of a certain social, economic, political, and environmental ecology. To see these connections, and then repair them, is not to pine for a preindustrial lifestyle. It is instead to reject the logic of personal responsibility when so much of what shapes our health is beyond individual control."
Yes, individual growth requires taking personal accountability and, you know, standing at our desks more often (this plus that, after all). But rugged individualism ignores that I shouldn't have to buy an Apple Watch to understand that the nature of my work shouldn't be killing my body.
There is not enough walking I can do to counteract a work culture that mandates constant sitting or standing in place.
There are not enough bubble baths in the world to eradicate the stress caused by overwork, poverty, and unaffordable housing. There is not enough therapy to talk through our everyday traumas and concerns when our friends are equally too busy or too far away and too under-resourced to show up for each of us consistently. There's no amount of language policing that will account for my disconnection from the people my language harms. There is not enough massage to deal with our lack of touch. There are not enough sex workers on the planet to cope with a world so depleted of real, lasting intimacy.
This disconnection is, at its core, a spiritual problem.
"Sin," in fact, is a word that initially signified a "separation." Whatever you believe, the ancient root of any spiritual tradition teaches that separation, or "sin," is not about all of the actions we avoid to assure our place in some supposed future "heaven." Separation is the way we create hell here, now.
It follows, then, that connection and building community are how we usher heaven into our lives today and seven generations into the future.
Community—reconnection—at every level, is our salvation.
What might that look like, practically?
Radical impracticality, in a world that teaches us that that separation is "normal":
Reintegrate the pieces of yourself you've exiled to "belong,” vulnerably displaying all of the "weird" parts of you that feel like they've never fit into a "clean" narrative. Learn how to hold conflict so that we stop exiling each other—even the straight, white men. Befriend your local farmer. Refuse to do what your body says "no" to any longer because you know self-abandonment is self-disconnection and that you must connect to yourself authentically before you can create lasting community with others. Give away what makes you come alive—the work you feel most compelled to do—without expectation for an exact payment or payment at all, and see how community starts knocking down your door. When someone asks for your coat, give them the shirt off your back, also. When immigrants ask for entry, throw open your doors and feed them, too. Pay for a friend’s meal when they’re having a tough week. Meditate for six hours a day because you can't afford to keep ignoring your inner knowing. Start a real relationship with the microbes in your gut, your mouth, and all over your body. Get to know the soil teeming with life outside your door. Care for your elders. Learn the names of trees. Stop planning and start napping. Trash your lamps and go to sleep with the sun. Cancel your streaming services and journal instead. Trade tomatoes with your neighbor. Study the foodways of your ancestors because building relationships backward in time mystically heals your present moment. Teach dance to inmates who might never see the light of day again. Build transformative justice networks so that prisons become a thing of the past. Talk to the rivers.
The nature of the universe is paradox, friends, and it's time to start doing what doesn't make "logical" sense.
As for me, I believe I’m selling my house to afford to save my body. It’s devastating, but I see no other way forward. Money or Health? We choose money nearly every day, and my body can no longer suffer it.
Even if your dis-ease has yet to turn medical, it has probably already infiltrated every cell of your body. If a chronic illness or disability hasn't radicalized you yet, there's a good chance it will do so one day. And if you find all of this far too dramatic, consider that you maybe aren't sick enough yet to acknowledge the truth. Your symptoms aren't loud enough, and perhaps you haven't realized your connection to the health of all things. I urge you to turn before you get there.
I want you, and I want us, to choose a new way. I want us to turn toward life.
Re-animate all of life and watch how it re-animates you.
And if you fear the abandonment of family and friends or the terror of poverty in making these choices, hear me loudly when I say I know this loneliness deeply. Hear me when I say I understand financial distress.
There is a death in it. Real, visceral grief. A cross, even.
But how poor can you be if you finally start to live a truly rich life, thoroughly connected to all of the magic around you and what makes you genuinely come alive?
That is eroticism.
Those of us who have only just begun to tiptoe into this abyss are here to grab your hand when you finally do. This is only the beginning. We are just now learning. Not ahead or behind, but alongside you. Ready to brave the desert in search of a new world.
