Has anyone else noticed how, when you have a chronic condition of some kind, that there’s always the basic assumption from people around you that you’re not already doing everything you can?
It’s all about the illusion of control. People who are healthy like to believe they can always keep being healthy if they do the right things. They don’t want to think about how good people get struck with terrible circumstances for no reason.
So they keep assuming that if they got sick, they could do something to make it better.
And if you’re still sick, that must mean you’ve done something wrong or not done enough.Nail. Head. The same attitude can be seen in how a lot of people talk about poverty.
Accurate. And mental illness, and sexual assault, and abuse, and unemployment, and eviction, and and
A lot of people are desperate to believe that they are entirely in control of their own lives and don’t want to face the fact that there are a lot of aspects in their life that they have no control over at all. So they’ll convince themselves that when a terrible thing happens to something else, that is in some part either a result of their own actions or something they can always overcome through their own actions. Nothing else is acceptable because accepting that things just happen and you can not always make them go away is terrifying.
Truth is, we are inherently vulnerable because that’s part of human life and we live in a system that makes us far far more vulnerable because people who can’t produce aren’t given the means to a decent life, so when something bad happens our job and our savings and our house and our connections fall apart all at once. Facing the truth of that vulnerability is essential to being less than total shits to each other and to identifying how this system hurts us all, even those of us with health insurance who are not living paycheck to paycheck.
QueerAnarchism 