Do you trust yourself? Can you?
What would it mean to trust yourself? Is it possible? What's the implication of not trusting yourself?
Do I trust my own body to take care of itself, or do I suspect it of being in conflict, of waging a battle against itself, against "me"?
Self-trust is one of the fundamental metaphysical questions underpinning my theories on autoimmunity. (3 weeks ago I wrote about trust and faith — related, but different. Read it here.)
“Autoimmune” is defined in biomedical science by the presence of 'auto antibodies': white blood cells that misrecognize some part of one's own body. The modern sense of the word autoimmune means that there is a dysregulated immune response to specific bodily cells and tissues.
It's theorized to be a fundamental failure of the adaptive immune system's ability to distinguish "self" from "non-self." Lymphocyte cells are meant to recognize the body's own tissues, a process known as "self-tolerance". However, it's believed that this tolerance can be broken, often triggered by an environmental factor like an infection.
I feel passion rising, and I want to angrily denounce the stories of autoimmune disease that depict it as some kind of heroic enterprise or victim-centered narrative. How often do people with autoimmune signs and symptoms, maybe with a diagnosis, maybe without, turn their trust over to outside authorities that know nothing more than what their scans and charts have to say?
Patients are taught that their bodies are not trustworthy. Over and over again, allopathic medical discourse drills the point home. I want to stress this point: “autoimmune” is a medical theory, an idea attempting to diagnose some group of phenomena using logic in order to pursue medical treatment. Sometimes it works, but often it is completely off track.
If you're chronically ill—particularly with autoimmune signs and a diagnosis—there is a high chance you have been told that your body is dysfunctional and is attacking itself. The metaphorical language of the immune system is a language riddled with warfare. The textbooks talk about "misdirected attacks", "attacking one's own body", "fighting infection".
What would it look like for the language of medicine to be a language of peace-making?
Can you trust that your body is wise, and is behaving according to an internal logic designed to keep you alive? Can you trust that each of the symptoms carries a message?
What if there is a process that unfolds outside of your control? What if something true is trying to happen and your experience is its medium? What if there is an innate intelligence in relapse and remission?
Yes, there is such an experience as illness. Yes, there are systemic, structural, cultural, and epi/genetic factors contributing to the development of disease. Yes, it is real. It is hard. It is misunderstood by 99% of all people you will ever meet. Yes, talking about it will most often bring about sympathetic "Oh, I'm so sorry" responses rather than anything resembling empathy.
Despite all that, can you learn to trust that this is important? What if illness were wise and necessary? Would it lead closer to the truth if you got out of the way? What if the narrative was different, and you could trust that illness is not your enemy?
The thing is, I have no way to know for sure that writing about this journey will help us get any closer to solutions, to change, to cultural evolution, or to an experience of health, but I can use these words like the proverbial finger pointing at the moon to help us get an idea of what the body may have always known.
I’m not here to be a hero, or to sell you a magic bullet. I’m not here to shill a story about how I was sick, and now I’m doing great, and you can be too. I’m writing in an attempt to share my own version of trust in this unfolding process.
What if there is a creative process at play in the midst of all the struggle? And what would it be like to be honest about what's happening? What if healing is a side effect of honesty and trust? What if, for just a minute, we weren't trying to fix, improve, and make it all "better"?
All I’m doing – the writing, the monthly peer group, the hours of qigong a day, the professional bodywork, the ayurveda study, the nutrition, the contact improv dance, the voyages to Amritapuri in south India, to name a few – are just experiments. I’m researching entirely, 100%, on my intuition. I have no plan, no masterful scheme, no framework, no guarantees. Only my own experience, and the couple of things I’ve learned so far, whatever that’s worth.
The questions are frustrating, because they’re important, and there are too many of them to really give each of them the time it deserves. But they keep coming. The questions outnumber the answers 1000000:1. We’d best get used to that.