Illness Meaning

It has always been my body. It has always known my name, carrying my pains and joys.

Dies Microcosmicus: Nox Microcosmica. Alchemical chart showing the human body as the world soul.

From my earliest childhood, I spent a lot of time in examinations, hospitals, diagnoses and different protocols and cycles of medication. Ever since I was little, I was always told that no one knew what was wrong with my body, but that I had to take pills, about fifteen a day, until the end of my life. At some point, I rebelled and stopped taking everything because I wanted to live and not just survive. I ventured off the medical merry-go-round at my own risk.

I speak today from this body, which I deeply honour for all its "flaws" and for everything it doesn't allow me to do. But it has always been my body. It has always known my name, and it has always carried my pains and joys. The trauma was imprinted on me because of the violence of the multiple diagnoses, the cruelty of the countless medical appointments, the invasive manipulations never consented to, and the inhumanity of the various examinations. I was never seen, listened to, sought, let alone found —I carried a body on which brutal solutions of normality were successively imposed.

After several years and cycles of violence, both bodily and emotional, through the practices of modern western medicine, I also looked for other meanings, perspectives and references. At first, they smelled like freedom, but soon, a new hole opened up through which the dignity of being in a "non-normal" body easily slipped. The profound ableism and ignorant cultural solutionism in which we find ourselves twist everything in its favour.

I started looking for the emotional and spiritual meanings of each ailment. And, of course, they were making sense. However, the problem with the "meaning" of illness is the individualistic hyper-responsibility for collective processes over which we have no control. It speaks of an absurd nihilism in which we are the only ones to blame for having caught a certain illness, for how we have somehow failed morally or emotionally. Ignoring the complexity of each being and superficialising biological processes to exclusively human meanings and modern "well-being" —which violently ignores and silences so much...

Worst of all, these "meanings" that claim to be universal are always produced by cultural and contextual layers (social, political, historical). Still, as they touch on common human experiences, they tend to self-justify and perpetuate the violent idea that "it's only/mainly your fault." The individual guilt, or perhaps even karmic guilt (such is the perniciousness), of having a body with limited possibilities and unresponsive to modern demands and expectations of what it means to be healthy. The euro-centred deeply absolutist psyche, can't see the violence of these perspectives that silence diversity, opting for the quick fix of the status quo. "You didn't do enough", "You should have done x, y or z". When perhaps I could honour the body as it is, in all its perfect imperfection, in all its pains and impossibilities, dignifying the moments it needs to stop, venerating its wisdom.

I don't need the abstract meanings you want to label and diagnose my body and process.

I don't need quick and effective solutions to "be normal".

Only my body knows my name.