Tags
American dysfunctional families, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, labels, Medicaid failure, Mental Health, physical health, poverty, PTSD, state of the "Union", stigmatizing, trauma
Imagine that you are a book. Each page in your book is assigned to all the doctors you’ve ever seen, and pages for each and every family member and friend and people you encounter, and bugs you squash in irritation . . . everybody has a page of YOUR book. Some have more pages than others.
You open your book about your life from birth to Now, and one by one, you tear out a sheet and give it to the appropriate doctor with a specialty in the issues of physical and/or mental health on that particular page, for each particular doctor.
Among these highly-trained specialists, there is little yet mostly no communication. Each specialist, when asked for a diagnosis, gives his take INTENDED to represent your entire book (after 5 minutes of your life), divulges a plethora of wide-ranging labels for your book’s title, meaning the entirety of YOU that they hold as truth with minds of ideological steel.
Their ignorance is causing you harm, via cost, stress of appointment after appointment while experiencing Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, traveling while sick, being subjected to test after test after test with many instances of radiation exposure (body-wide), financial incurrence beyond your means, the failure of Medicaid’s infrastructure which has paid zero medical bills for 2 years and put you in a state of bankruptcy as you live on the poverty line, sick, alone, the desperation of having no doctor (but for one precious sapling, flexible and full of light–your primary care doctor) LISTEN to you with your knowledge of the whole of your own experience.
Your family avoids you. You remind them of their own mortality . . . that they too will each be invalidated and slowly die alone, as you are experiencing now. Family has disappeared but for your savior son 500 miles away . . . that set of conditions, among all issues has remained and manifested into the gut-punch of PTSD.
Each family member has a page or pages out of your life story. Light bulb moment!
You have lived each page and contain the entire narrative in a samsara*-wracked body and mind, and with each doctor or family member (of 7 immediate family), or friend, you sense rigid ignorance of the whole of your life, and the lack of interest each individual has in reading other pages of your book, even when paid! The blind men touching a huge elephant comes to mind. Each blind man has a wildly different “diagnosis” about what this thing is that they are touching.
Some family members have more of your pages than others, and rise up in power and arrogance, bestowing upon themselves some twisted honor to have known X before anyone else in your immediate family. In this scenario, it is your mother who has a rambling jumble of your pages, has a PhD diploma hanging on her wall, hence whose opinion is ceded to by others of the 7, far-flung as they are. (Do they run from her? Or do they run from you?). Four of the 5 adolescent siblings ran away or tried to get away from her sad ignorance and bitter spirit. The 5th one opted out of living with your mother, by choosing to go with your father upon the violent divorce.
Books Books Books. Too much to read and bothersome to have around. A house full of traumatized children and your two equally traumatized parents–a microcosm of the macrocosmic state of the “Union”–all covered in the pages of your book. And all the blind doctors and all the blind men couldn’t put you back together again, and had a cumulative effect in creating great confusion and stress as EVERYONE struggled to take power over your life. What an honor to have such power–especially if the PhD diplomas hanging on many walls were free tickets to RIDE over you and squish you like a bug with impunity. Get over it. In the U.S., you are worthless.
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