SICK WOMAN THEORY

Just read this EXCELLENT piece by Johanna Hedva. A truly heroic woman. She reminds me of a friend of mine in Melbourne who never ceases to humble me with her courage and strength. Love to all people suffering with chronic illness in a world that was not built to care for you.

Here is a little excerpt, but definitely read the whole thing. It has an important message for all people, not just those suffering from chronic illness.

    "I used to think that the most anti-capitalist gestures left had to do with love, particularly love poetry: to write a love poem and give it to the one you desired, seemed to me a radical resistance. But now I see I was wrong.

    "The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care.

    "Because, once we are all ill and confined to the bed, sharing our stories of therapies and comforts, forming support groups, bearing witness to each other’s tales of trauma, prioritizing the care and love of our sick, pained, expensive, sensitive, fantastic bodies, and there is no one left to go to work, perhaps then, finally, capitalism will screech to its much-needed, long-overdue, and motherfucking glorious halt."

    Read the full article.