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.