Symptoms are not failures

the wellness world & the false hope of control

I’ve written the sentence I’ve been sick a few times and then deleted it. Not because I’m trying to hold onto some image of perfection, but because the word sick brings an image to mind I don’t relate to at all.

Over the past week or two, I’ve been experiencing symptoms.

Over the past week or two, I’ve needed to rest more than I’m comfortable with.

Over the past week or two, I’ve been doing very little, and learning to love myself in the process.

what I look like (in my fantasies) while laying low and healing this past week

For a long time, my experience with my health and wellness seemed mismatched. I was all at once both a very healthy, happy and active kid, and also, one who picked up anything and everything going around, and usually hit the deck with it pretty hard. Even a cold would have me in bed for a couple of days. But once I was over it, I was back in full force again. Until the next one came.

As a kid I had both had asthma and also loved to run and dance. I played centre in netball (the one that runs around like a lunatic) for years and loved it. My asthma triggers were sudden drops in temperature and cold winds. I didn’t get it often, but when I did, it was scary and intense. I grew out of asthma in my early teens, maybe just because, maybe due to playing a lot of woodwind instruments, both clarinet and saxophone: aka expensive, jazzy breath-work.

In my late teens until my early twenties I had terrible eczema and continued to be knocked out with colds and flus a few times a year, until it was the winter of 2012, I think, when I had tonsillitis twice and spent more than half the season feeling miserable. At that point, I decided to get my shit together, and start going to yoga. My yoga practice pretty instantly seemed to bump up my immunity, and it was probably as much the breathing and the movement and the being in my body, as it was drinking, partying and smoking nowhere near as much, which happened almost instantly after my first class.

But not all my health woes were immediately solved with my new practice. I did still, get sick, and I did still, have very bad eczema every winter. It was the beginning of a relationship with wellness that was both beneficial and also… not.

breakfast perfection :’)

A few years ago, when I was still very vegan and spending the first half of most days consuming only green juice or fruits, I picked up a copy of Healing Wise by Susun Weed. She talked about the three paths of healing: the medical, the heroic, and the wise woman. It blew my mind.