Making connections

I think my goal going forward is to spend some time writing about those things where we need to listen to our inner voices, and how and why, and certainly spending time relating it to capitalism.

My concern is that I am not going to have the time to do it well as I start my new job. (Which is for a corporation that provides health care, because I too must survive under capitalism, regardless of my familiarity with its flaws.)

So, I don't know how it will go. If I don't have a post ready to go the night before, I don't think I will be able to get one out during the day. I may start being really irregular again, though this time I hope because my life coming back together takes time, rather than before when it was my life falling apart.

It's a good thing I haven't really rebuilt my readership yet. 

For those of you who have been sticking around, perhaps you noticed that hesitance this week. I hope you also felt the sincerity and the love. Whatever I do, I will do it with integrity and heart, and I will overthink everything, I promise you.

Fortunately, as I rework my home space to take in my work PC and its two (!) monitors, I will have a lot to say about tidying. I always have things to say about health and my size. 

However, how those two aspects -- tidying (where keeping only what sparks joy flies in the face of consumerism) and fat (with the billions spent on diets and weight loss products) -- relate to capitalism is fairly obvious. 

Audre Lorde going against the advice of her oncologist -- choosing to visit an anthroposophy clinic and taking supplements rather than undergoing more probes, surgeries, and heroic measures -- may not have as obvious a relationship to capitalism. 

Though this quote is worth thinking about:

"What would it be like to be living in a place where the pursuit of definition within this crucial part of our lives was not circumscribed and fractionalized by the economics of disease in America? Here the first consideration concerning cancer is not what does this mean in my living, but how much is this going to cost?”

Yes, the way capitalism affects our possibilities for health is huge, in more and less obvious ways.

However, there is also something that may relate more to dominator culture (another topic that will recur) where some people will feel the right to exert authority over others. The doctor's training was a factor that deserves at least some attention, but which can't be definitive for the patient; we all know doctors who have been trained and still been wrong.

In Lorde's case, seeing a Black woman may have increased his sense of authority. There are some dangerous medical trends against both women and Black people, for what is researched and how and for how patients are treated.

(For more on that, see Doing Harm by Maya Dusenberry and Harriet A. Washington's Medical Apartheid. That's just for starters.) 

But racism and capitalism have this way of shoring up each other too, so it all connects.

Always.

Wish me luck as I start anew.