Leonie Bedet, R.Ac.

“Many will counsel you that there is a reason for your disease and that if you could only heal your underlying emotional wounds, pain would leave you alone. But the body is not an abstraction, and pain laughs at the over-simplicity of this way of thinking. As Harvard Professor and author Elaine Scarry describes, unlike interior pain, physical pain “has no referential content. It is not of or for anything.”

This isn’t to say that pain won’t put you on a path of psychological growth, but as Job discovered, the ripping, destructive agony of an illness doesn’t have inherent value.

In Sick Woman Theory, Johanna Hedva tells their own story of living with chronic pain and illness, and how challenging it is for a sick person to find relevance in a world that aggrandizes wellness. Hedva articulates how wellness and sickness are treated as a binary of opposites in our culture. And those who fall on the wrong side of those tracks are considered unproductive and therefore excluded from the collective conversation. We are so fixated on curing illness and eradicating pain that we’re unable to consider people living in pain as leading intact lives. But perhaps more insidious is how this estranges us from our own pain and wretched illness. We are so driven to ‘get well’ that we rarely show any welcoming kindness to this unexpected guest in our lives.”

Excerpt from “Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home” by Toko-pa Turner (belongingbook.com)

Photo of Toko-pa resting on a low wooden fence surrounded by golden autumn grasses. She has her hair piled up in a messy bun, wearing brown boots, white jeans, and a striped grey top.

It’s your life. Don’t forget that. 💫