Facing Reality on Reality's Terms

When living with dysfunctional disorders, life-long syndromes, degenerative diseases, incurable conditions, addiction recovery, and chronic ailments, your reality changes. People may look at you and say, "But, you seem so well!" or "You don't look like you're sick". It's like others around you point to the sky and observe it as blue, when you're seeing orange. Our shared reality no longer feels valid, and commonly understood anchors in our culture no longer ground us in our communities.

Society doesn't prioritize the unwell unless you're critically ill enough to be categorized into any global health system. They were designed to address the most critical illnesses as a way to stave off death and maintain basic functions for the patient. Preventative health practices to improve our quality of life sit on the shoulders of those who value it and have the capacity to do the work. An economic incentive, such as saving money by prolonging life or creating more efficient systems to facilitate the end of life, can often justify a conversation. However, it will inevitably return to an economic argument against it. Because we cannot focus on what we're getting away from. We must hone in on what we are working toward, and defining what we want is not an easy task.

We've written before about what health is and why it matters within a few clinical environments. But it's okay to not know exactly what is ideal within a preventative health system or our quality of life matrices. Selecting arbitrary numbers and oversimplified categorization to create a perception of management has been a poor approach in the past. Holding space for the conversation and persisting in creating spaces where we can experiment in low-risk, safe modalities is critical to treating our health system as malleable, able to learn and grow. These are recognized factors in a healthy mindset or system. Supporting professionals and those healing with relevant lived experience are well-suited to working outside of what works for the majority of the population, to improve conditions and programs.

Our values around suffering can often interrupt our ability to adjust our behaviors. Deeply entrenched patterns of relating and connection have skewed our ideals of love, success, and well-being. It means that we must take time first to decouple our beliefs, to challenge our stories, and to heal old wounds. It makes this process a life's work, and many lifetimes are needed to see the change we imagine. Like any change, it's not going to happen overnight. It took us centuries to get there; it'll require that and more to shift direction. And we have many more "cooks in the kitchen" than when we first implemented a universal health system.

Perhaps that is just it. Rather than establishing a global system, what if we recognized the breadth and depth of decentralized health systems and created a visa program between them? Community-based health interventions, woven between culture and science, can take the stories that make up our societies and weave them in partnership with experts of various medical sciences, facilitating preventative health matrices. We believe that our health destiny cannot be fully perceived, because no one knows enough about how and where we're falling short to know what a well world looks like. We look back and think perhaps we can recognize it in past civilizations and cultures. But that doesn't quite meet the need, because we live in a world unrecognizable to our ancestors.

We must meet reality on reality's terms to respond in a meaningful way. The reality of what living a good life means, or being well, and even showing up to work or life with your whole self.

It's one thing to neatly arrange your thinking and reasoning, built upon the foundation of the stories that bolster your beliefs about how the world works. We go through much of life this way, our arrogance worn as a badge of pride until reality gets in the way. It's how we were raised, through our families and society. The system works as it was designed and intended. No judgement here. It's quite another to start whittling away at the tidily packed "truths" as cracks appear in our bodies and in our thinking.

Some of us who have addressed life's challenges over time have softened and are more willing to face reality. Rather than imagining a world of known facts and systems, we often dance with the unknown and evolve to perceive a rainbow of experiences that exist beyond the limits of our known Universe. It's allowed us to envision healing as a cyclic journey, rather than a linear progression with a static result. It shifts us away from the idea that a prescription can flip a switch to feel better or that one approach to healing will meet the unique and changing needs of those who make up a population. Our understanding of the human body, mind, and heart continues to expand as we retain a curiosity about the lived experience. This is a beautiful mindset for approaching the problem in a way that supports ongoing maintenance, rather than a state of complete perfection for our global health systems.