Well-Being is not curing

These practices have supported me in thriving with lifelong chronic illness and chronic pain.

The practices invite greater sense of agency and awareness of choices, living well with the bodies we have, and creating more well-being. These practices encourage allyship within one’s self and across communities and identities.

Well-being is not curing. We can have well-being and still have illness, including terminal illness.

It is in the nature of being human that we are born and we die. It is in the nature of being human we can have illnesses. Human beings are enormously variable. We can have well-being and still live with and in oppressive systems.

Well-being is not a binary: one is well or one is not. One can have well-being while experiencing less happifying events.

Experiencing oppression and having illness, pain, or disability does not mean you are morally flawed or somehow deserving of those experiences. The wellness culture ideal that says people having pain, illness, or experiences of oppression are because they are not yet free or enlightened is dangerous and harmful. Well-being is different from the ableist expectations of wellness because I reject anything purporting to be wellness that nurtures shame and oppression.

The Difference Between 2SLGBTQIA+ Pride and the Sin of Pride

Every June, a certain person I know will ask where I am off to as I dance away in rainbow colors with fistfuls of transgender and Phillie Pride flags. I will singsong, “Off to Queer Pride celebration in X place!” And they will solemnly admonish me, “Pride goeth before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18: Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirite before a fall.”) I am tempted to giggle about the introduction of a Biblical translation named after one of the queerest kings in history.

The sin (missing the mark) of superbia (usually translated as pride) is not the same thing as the celebration called Pride.

Superbia, which means something more like boastfulness, arrogance, and conceit that disregards or diminishes others are social failures. They are busy lifting up one person as somehow better than other people.

The “pride” of 2SLGBTQIA+ Pride Month is much more like Psalm 47’s lifting up of the pride of Israel. Rather than expressing superbia, these are collective events of naming and claiming ourselves as free and loving people in the vast diversity of how we are, who we love, how we worship, and yes, because there are people doing fashion commentary, what we wear.

Pride Month is about countering the social sin of superbia that seeks to dismiss, demonize, and authorize harm to Two Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Asexual people.

Superbia indeed authorizes destruction regularly, passing laws that prevent people from using public bathrooms in accordance with who they are, eliminating safe places in schools for all children and teens to learn there are so many ways to be kind, generous and loving people, and intervening between people and their medical practitioners from practicing good medicine.

For many people who grew up with the King James version of the Bible, the Sacred sounds like it hangs out in the English of the early 1600s (CE) even though it is a translation of Hebrew and Greek texts that are much, much older.  Those of us who have regularly faced condemnation using this particular translation combined with superbia, know when the -eths come out, someone’s claiming holy mantles for their own (not God’s) business (because when were they appointed spokesperson rather than regular neighbor like the rest of us).  The insistence on the -eth after “go” becomes a form of superbia, an attempt to claim to be expressing wisdom while condemning someone in order to put forward the condemner’s person as better.

2SLBGTQIA+ Pride events are not about the missing of the mark in how to be a kind, just and generous person by elevating some persons over others through conceitedness and boastfulness. They are, instead, about creating communities of play and healing, communities of resisting oppression and nurturing the kinship we have so often been denied by hateful legislation and people insisting on their more exclusionary understanding of religious life is protected and protectable by law, rather than standards that make room for the vast diversity of ways to worship (or not), to form neighbors and family and friends, to be kind and generous and be part of celebrating this life.

Go, celebrate. Come on down, celebrate. Unite to celebrate 2SLGBTQIA+ Pride month. We’re still having to work on legislative protections and educating people about queerness, about gender, about how love and life manifests in many wonderful ways. Still, we need to party. The joy of being our whole selves, after all, is what is so terrific, and disruptive to oppressive systems, and part of giving thanks for being here. Joy and celebration are spiritual practices, and these events are one way we’re in the spirit.

Accountability Supporting Joy

Yes, that’s correct. I am saying that joy thrives with responsibility.

Consider just for a few moments, how many relationships in your life would be less joyful if when you harmed one another you did not take responsibility for that harm, make amends, and stop doing the harmful thing.

Pretending that no harm happened, or that we really did not have anything to do with that harm, or it could not possibly be as hurtful as the person we have hurt is saying does not increase joy in our relationships. Responsibility and accountability need not result in punishment or meting out equivalent harm for harm caused. But they do require attending to the beings in these relationships with respect, compassion, tenderness, and, yes, that uncomfortable reality of having caused harm. I say beings, because maybe the relationships that need attention are between human beings and maybe they are with others, like our polluted air and waterways or this rapidly changing earth.

The glee some expressed for feeling like they have gotten away with wrong-doing is their glee in escaping punishment, perhaps their pleasure in deliberately causing harm to someone else and not having to do anything.

The self-righteous justifications of causing harm to others or diminishing the harm caused is just that, protecting the self from not having to acknowledge that we have participated in hurt, maybe even in wickedness (which I define as intentional harm).

Often, we might be tempted to deny the harm we cause, because we believe we are good people and good people are defined as never messing up, or having biases, or having temper tantrums, or feeling threatened and lashing out or any other very human responses we have as good people to meeting experiences that challenge our sense of goodness and good-enoughness. When this happens around racialized harm and it is white people denying harm, we’re talking about white fragility, this hunger and need to be affirmed as good enough, literally at all costs to everyone and anyone else. I’ve experienced and witnessed a lot of that kind of need behind harm causing and avoiding responsibility, amends-making or repair, or efforts at changing the behaviors and attitudes and beliefs that are the propellent behind the harm.

All of us can cause harm. That ability does not mean we are not basically good or good enough people.

I have, on more than one occasion, had someone’s hurtful actions defended to me as “but they’re good people.” Over time, I have learned to reply, “they can be good people and they can still have caused harm. Good people hurt others every day.” We all have things to learn and unlearn, and we cannot do that without taking up responsibility for our words and deeds.

There are practices for repenting, the process of acknowledging we have caused harm. Every spiritual tradition has practices for returning to our fundamental values of care and nurturing relationships. Secular practices are innovated and developed every day, particularly as we try to find ways around increasing suffering through punishment and instead teaching people how to harm less, how to repair relationships, how to learn and grow through their accountability in and with communities of care.

Repaired relationships can be the grounds of such pleasure and joy. We do not need to intentionally break relationships to nurture that pleasure and joy, because I assure you, good people, we will make mistakes or be drawn into some attachment or belief that takes us out of relational nurturing and cause harm eventually.

So when this happens, may we take a few deep breaths, and begin the process of acknowledging we have hurt a relationship and how we have done so. May we attend well if the others in that relationship wish to tell us the effects of that harm. May we find and offer and follow through on the growth and change so that we stop causing the harm. May we do the work to repair the relationship and nurture trust and respect there again.

We also inherit social structures and relationships of harm, legacies that require current generations to take responsibility for the repair work past generations shifted down to us. We ourselves are harmed by the past generations having done so, because multigenerational and intergenerational harm becomes more and more challenging to undo. Lifetimes of unlearning and relearning, of trust building and relational care to bring balance to the lifetimes of harm and the further harm by pretending harm did not need reconciling, accountable, repairing relational work. Reparations, for example, are part of acknowledging the continuing inequities in wealth and access to the resources to thrive caused by dispossession from the land or enslavement and being stolen away from one’s home or denied one’s culture. They’re a gesture toward acknowledging the many generations of harm, and the continuing harm by not teaching or noticing or addressing the injustices and inequities that are carried on today.

Repairing relationships takes many forms, but it almost always involves reflecting with those harmed or their representatives, on what is needed.

There can be joy here, joy in nurturing a present and future where the harm causing stops and repair is just part of who we are and how we live. Let us move away from punishment and move more fully into real responsibility that attends to repairing our communities and world, making space and resources for healing, and relationships that can thrive with joy.

Fat and Virtuous Enough

Size and virtue do not correlate. My size is not reflective of my will power, my lovingkindness, my self-care, my care of others, or my care for this planet. I am fat and I am virtuous enough. It is possible to be fat and be a good person. But this might be hard to believe in a society so obsessed with shaming fatness and fat people. 

I was looking at furniture the other day, imagining furniture that was comfortable for my body and the bodies of so many other people. I remain perplexed how anyone could rate as comfortable and well-built for “heavy people” a kitchen counter chair that has a back hugging in to the front of the seat, creating not just an arm, but a wall of chair back that is going to mold many large bodies, pressing in quite harshly. It was a little like picking up a shirt supposedly in my size from a certain company and noticing that it would be hard pressed to cover anyone I know who is thin. I am irritated by companies not building manual wheelchair frames for people my size and larger, on the assumption we’re not strong enough to push a chair around and therefore, once again, setting up enoughness and virtue as the same thing. 

You are enough whether or not you meet society’s expectations or demands for productivity and other virtues. You are enough regardless of your size. And when I say “enough” I don’t mean overly full. I mean the enoughness of comfortableness, of belonging. 

I am a fat person and why that is does not matter, no more than it matters why someone else might be a thin person. There is pressure to prove my virtue as a fat person: how much I exercise, how little I eat, how many hours of therapy I have put in. Each time after I exported electronic diaries and logs of exercise and food consumption and still was condemned, I have grown a bit more tired of all this virtue signaling. Now when someone wants to know these things, I want to know why, and how much they think will be enough if I am still fat today, tomorrow, and next year. Do you or anyone else realize how much energy can be freed to have a more amazing life and work for equity and justice and nurture the earth and laugh generously and live joyfully if we stop this shaming and judging about size.

Size is not a good judging point for someone’s health, sexiness, strength, flexibility, fitness, joy, well-being, or whether they’re a good person. 

August is Fat Liberation Month. What does that mean? It means liberating ourselves and our communities from shame and stigma associated with a person’s size. It means ending the associations of fatness with slovenliness, laziness, or lack of willpower. It means freeing all of us up from the truly inordinate and enormous amount of time, energy, and money demanded and devoted and sacrificed to the error of equating thinness with virtue. Fat Liberation is about freeing us from hatred based on our looks (lookism), assumptions about our health, longevity, and what’s healthy (healthism), and beliefs about how impairment and disability functions (medical and personal instead of socially created).

If we care about justice, equity, compassion, the worthiness of persons, fairness, generosity, graciousness, love or any of the other virtues, we might want to consider who benefits and how when we accept, promote, and reinforce the social connections between virtue and thinness. 

When we decouple virtue and size, our bodies are no longer flags for whether we are good (and enough) people. When we decouple virtue and size, we move a little more toward what is true and real. 

Size is not a virtue. Size is not proof of being good or good enough. I can be fat and virtuous. You can be fat and virtuous. Fatness or thinness has nothing to do with whether we are good or good enough. Size is the wrong assessment tool for inquiring about virtue.

Love the World, Let the World Love You

In the swirling, thick, thuggy atmospheres of hate and disdain, the proposition of loving the world and being loved by it may feel like fairytales and moonbeams on a cloudy night. Indeed, there are aspects of the world set up to actively not love us, depending on our identities, social locations, or how vulnerable where we live is to the worst effects of our changing climate. So then, how and why is it helpful to commit to loving the world and letting the world love us?

For one thing, we don’t want to shut out the people who really do love us and cheer for us and whom we love and cheer. Shuttering my heart to love’s juiciness and being wary all the time, even when that wariness is deserved and earned by a few people, is a way to sap my vibrancy and leave me thirsty.

Deciding to love the world is a choice I make repeatedly, many times a day.

And yes, honestly, sometimes I am too hurt and too tired to make that choice. Sometimes I curl in on myself around my knitting and my cup of tea and some magical writing that cocoons me for a little while, until I can feel my sap flowing again, my vibrancy returning enough to choose to love this world some more. You might say, I retreat and let the world love me. That is also true.

Love is a dance, a recognition of relationship that we want to nurture and to be nourished by, a reciprocity of care and wonderment, thankfulness and just enough spaciousness to be free and to be kindly held when any in that relationship need or want that. There is consent in love, consent that is renewed regularly but not routinely, consent that bows before the holiness of being and honors life and choice and freedom.

We are finite beings in a web of interbeing with other finite beings, although some of them have existences so long, to us, they might feel infinite, like the oceans, the mountains, the forests, the bogs, the deserts, the plains. Yet we are all changing, always, even when we might be resisting change or surprised by change’s fact of being. Love dances in part because of change, because we are not static, the world is not static, none of us who are parts of the world are static, finished, complete, done. We dance to acknowledge, accommodate, adapt with, admire, admit, and practice change. We dance to express ourselves and to receive others’ expressions, to make together expressions none of us can make alone.

Choosing to love this world and choosing to allow ourselves to be loved by this world requires courage, for it requires vulnerability and accepting both our vulnerabilities and those of others.

When we belong together, when we need one another, when we interare, we share in this life, and this means we share our weaknesses and challenges even as we share our strengths. How then shall we nurture the courage we need to choose, day after day, when there is so much evidence of hate and disdain, to love and be loved?

Dear one, I cannot answer that for you. For me, some days that choice is a weary chant, some days, flowing so easily. I do find that practice helps me and making sure there I play and co-create pleasure and generous laughter and sleep when I am tired and eat when I am hungry and drink when I thirst. I find I need to care for my whole bodymind and choose to love myself, which is, like the rest of me and this world, in progress. What helps you choose, repeatedly, to love and be loved by this world? What nurtures your courage and your hope, your juiciness and your joy?