The Problem
I reached out to a “queer-friendly” healthcare facility to inquire about an SSRI because four years of working in healthcare during a global pandemic with no institutional-level emotional support, suddenly losing my grandparents to Alzheimer’s Dementia and Stage 4 Cancer, unexpected conflict with friends, and nine months of co-occurring genocides, has erected a mountain of grief in front of me too steep to conquer.
By the time I could muster up the energy to fill out the new patient paperwork—demographic info and screening forms and waivers and insurance information and back-up payment to cover any costs that my insurance denies—the provider that I had hoped to see stopped accepting new clients and I was placed on a waitlist.
That was a month ago.
I am managing, waiting, completely deprived of energy to seek out another provider and start the whole process anew. Meanwhile, I cannot help but wonder, how folks navigate this maze during emergencies? The jagged edges of our medical and mental health systems nick and scrape up against my sensibilities as both a patient, and a provider. It feels like death by a thousand cuts.
The reality is that I am seeking medication to regulate my body-mind-spirit, which have been affected by the pathological labels of “anxiety” and “depression.”
These diagnoses have always felt like manifestations of a much larger issue, “a reflection of something that has happened to me rather than evidence of something that is wrong with me” (paraphrased, Gutiérrez, 2022).
Reading Natalie Y. Gutiérrez’s book “The Pain We Carry” has given me the language to identify and name the harm that has been inflicted upon me. She describes this “bigger issue” as complex posttraumatic stress disorder, or CPTSD, the result of racialized, institutional violence.
During this time that I’ve spent waiting to be evaluated by a mental health provider, I have mulled over many things in my mind:
What benefit is any treatment that I receive absent of systems change, if the environment that created the conditions for me needing treatment in the first place remains untouched?
Is returning to a baseline that facilitates my labor and energy to be extracted the best outcome that I can hope for?
Are the healthcare providers who don’t have a “systems view” of the issues that plague us providing healing? or simply “assimilating us into a burning building,” as described by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.?
I wait.
I wonder.
The Way Forward
This week was bookended by glaring signs of a white supremacist, capitalist global system under slow and steady collapse, feral and fighting to extend its life.
The week began with three water mains breaking in metro Atlanta, leaving thousands without clean water. An outdated, underfunded infrastructure quite literally bursting at the seams, while its Black city leaders allocate the majority of its municipal budget toward policing and the creation of a $90 million "Cop City."
The week ended with a "Trojan Horse" style attack by U.S. and Israeli militaries, disguised as humanitarian aide and indiscriminately killing over 250 Palestinians in the refugee camp of Nuseirat—a "mission" described as a "victory" by imperialist powers.
There is a cost to all of this enduring. Etched in the fine print:
"Bill To: the nervous systems of the Global Majority.
Billing Cycle: daily."
We are asked to make constant withdrawals of rage, and fear, and re-traumization, and grief and worry, and compartmentalization, and sorrow, and activation,
and,
and,
and.
We take a deep breath, reach into the interior of our body-mind-spirits, and hope to graze our fingers across enough resources to cover the cost of all this enduring, all of this witness-bearing.
But this economy of survival is unsustainable.
What must we build to remain embodied and whole to counterbalance all that is being extracted from us?
Right now, I'm reading Octavia Butler's "Parable of the Sower." The main character, Lauren Olamina, the book's narrator and protagonist, reflects in her journal about what may become of herself and her community as they fight to survive the end of the world:
"We'll have to be very careful how we allow our needs to shape us. But we must have arable land, a dependable water supply, and enough freedom from attack to let us establish ourselves and grow."
There is theory in this small passage. Indirectly, Octavia Butler is asking us to consider the following:
"How are we being shaped by these overlapping crises in pursuit of the things that we need (i.e., liberation, self-determination)?"
"How can we collectively meet our material needs so that we can 'establish ourselves and grow'?"
In response to the questions Butler poses in Parable of the Sower, I am reminded of the teachings of Cara Page and Erica Woodland, authors of the book “Healing Justice Lineages”:
"We are not going to get free if we don't have healing traditions at the center of our political work. And we are not going to be healed if we are not transforming the conditions."
With no way to process and release all of our trauma and grief, the shape we end up taking is unregulated, reactive, carceral, exhausted, individualistic. This is not something that we should be ashamed of, but we are absolutely responsible for doing something about it.
The late Fannie Lou Hamer once said, “You can pray until you faint, but unless you get up and try to do something, God is not going to put it in your lap.” So, yes, I’ve been waiting to see “The Lady” to inquire about medications that can be adjunctive to my healing. But I have also been exploring ways that Black and Indigenous healers, both past and present, are engaging in community care and healing practices: tapping into ancestral wisdom and practices, reconnecting with the land, engaging in ritual to process and release grief, moving my body, breath work, etc. We can’t wait on nobody to save us because no one is coming; the upside is that we already have all we need to heal ourselves if we pay attention.
We must be more intentional about building care infrastructures, grief infrastructures, healing infrastructures in order to sustain ourselves because the systems we are living under are ill-equipped. It must not be an afterthought. Our efforts to heal and our efforts to resist must become so intertwined that they become indistinguishable.
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