I’ve been really sick this year.
There are so many things I have not been able to do... AND I feel so deeply engaged with my work.
I would have thought a long illness would make my work more difficult but it hasn’t. It’s made it BETTER. I feel so much more deeply aligned with the magic and power of the Creative Dream Incubator.
It turns out, not being able to participate in life the way I usually do has given me so much QUIET SPACE… for reflecting and growth. Like I finally have ENOUGH time/space to THINK!
So I’ve been thinking about artists and writers who create amazing inspiring even world-changing art while being mentally ill, chronically ill or disabled.
There’s a lot to be said about how we treat ill and disabled people in this culture, and how a lot of disabilities aren’t really limiting people, it’s THE WORLD BEING DESIGNED FOR ABLEDS that limits them.
Like how we use steps everywhere when we could have planned our cities to work for people in wheelchairs. An inability to walk doesn’t have to limit your life - living in a world that’s not designed for your abilities limits you.
I’ve also been thinking about my time in new age/healing spaces and how often I was fat shamed, how people would so earnestly share with me that they believed I could lose weight and “be healed”… when I wasn’t sick or bothered by my weight. Like - I never mentioned it! THEY brought it up as a thing I SHOULD be working on healing because their definition of HEALED couldn’t include any FAT at all.
Wellness culture is sick.
Most, not all but MOST, of the healing and wellness spaces, all the way from licensed therapists to the wooest of the woo healers, operate from within dominant culture and it’s values. So they are operating on a definition of HEALED that is really off.
Yesterday I wrote about how you can dream from different parts of you… how it’s actually kind of easy to NOT be connecting with your most authentic dreams… but how working with the dreams you have does help you move towards hearing your deeper dreams.
This is related: Which part of you is defining what HEALING and HEALED means?
I was lucky to be able to find a therapist who is rooted in a decolonial, intersectional, non-oppressive worldview. So when I was caught in un-helpful definitions of my own healing, she could say things to me like “Andrea, are you expecting that one day you’ll be so healed that you’ll be able to (do the thing that other people or the culture in general expect from me that I honestly don’t have the capacity for)?? Could it be that real healing would look like honouring and respecting your actual capacity?”
There are so many places where we JUDGE ourselves for not measuring up to dominant culture’s standards instead of CELEBRATE ourselves for having the strength and courage to BE our unique self.
There are so many places where HEALING is used as a tool to help us cope with the injustices of the world so we can conform to who and how the world tells us to be.
The truth is, your most healed and authentic self might not “measure up” to what the world around you expects.
After all, it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society!
I believe your most HEALED self is your most CREATIVE self and our most creative selves, together, can CREATE a much better world that honours everyone’s unique ways of being.
I believe this is what our creative dreams are leading us towards.
So let’s keep dreaming!
And keep thinking: Where do your definitions of HEALING and HEALED come from and do they truly serve you?
