What we need from healthcare will look different for all of us on personal, cultural and community levels. Whether we get what we need is based on systemic issues within healthcare organisations and, less commonly, individual practitioners.
Outside of what healthcare we need is what healthcare we dream of. It’s not something we’re taught to ask but it is vitally important to reflect on. Focusing on what we dream of, what we need, and what we love is powerful. It allows us to work towards healthcare that is more accessible, useful, appropriate (and dare I say joyful?) for everyone.
Without an end goal we have nothing to work towards.
Dreaming is radical and takes work. Ijeoma Oluo suggests that it is not enough to know that something has to change, we must understand the root cause, and all the issues it creates, and act in a way that champions what we want, instead of simply rejecting what we don’t want.
What is the care I dream of?
The care I dream of starts with the deconstruction of capitalism. We cannot care for ourselves, families and communities well when we are overworked, underpaid and stressed. Capitalism and colonialism have created great divides in society, as it continues to sell the lie of co-depence as danger. Co-dependence is liberation.
You have skills I do not. I have skills you don’t have. We all have different ideas, skills, resources, passions, interests. The care I dream of makes us all useful, we would all play a part. No job, idea or contribution would be too small. Ideas of normality and abnormality, binary ideas in general, would be obsolete as they otherwise would continue to entrap and control us.
I dream of community-based healing through connection with each other. In my dream we live happily together, no one need feel lonley or like a burden. The care I dream of would include us creating extended families with our neighbours, sharing resources, skills, time, responsibility and love. We would all have homes, community and places to belong.
The care I dream of centres love. Family love, community love, friendship love, queer love. Love with nature, with the soil, growing foods and caring for animals.
The destruction of nature is a destruction of ourselves and our connection to each other. How can we connect through concrete? How could we hold hate, when nature knows no hate, no judgement, no discrimination. When nature is the purest part of ourselves?
This recommunion with nature would include allotments, community gardens, composting, fishing, weaving, crafting, creating, re-wilding.
The care I dream of is letting nature heal.
The care I dream of has existed for hundreds of years before colonialism and empirialism. We need to go back to nature, trust nature, ourselves and each other. The care I dream of is liberation, it is built together, within this new system I would not have dream jobs but dream community roles.
Most of the world is not here yet but until we are I shall keep dreaming.
This blog was inspired by Ijeoma Oluo’s work on radicalisation and Zena Shermans edited book The Care We Dream Of.