or said another way, thank God I have health insurance.
What if I didn’t have the awareness or education to seek medical attention? What if I wasn’t able to afford medical assistance when I needed it? Specifically, what if I didn’t have insurance to cover the major costs? Where would I be? How would I be? Would I be?
But there are people who don’t have insurance, people who can’t afford help with or without insurance, or don’t have the awareness to get help. How do they go along? What maladaptive habits do they pick up? How does their life go?
Poor. Homeless. Prison. Addiction. Dead. ?
I present to you post traumatic slave syndrome. The trauma inflicted on Africans and Native Americans, their coping mechanisms and how those behaviors trickle down the generations. A culture and people founded in pain and perseverance by any means necessary. Descendants carrying burdens that they know not the origins of. Pains and wounds that have never been tended to. Normalized discord and so not knowing to get healing.
So, what happens at the intersection of poor, black/brown, and declining mental health? How does one go along? How does it affect them? How does it affect how they interact with the world? How does it affect their children?
Victims of an oppressive system that pretends as if and convinces you that it doesn’t exist. invisible puppet strings influencing even our minute interactions and behaviors. They’ll have you thinking it’s your own fault. They’ll tell you to have some agency. “We all have the same opportunities. No one has ever treated me different because I’m…” They’ll place the exceptional negro on a pedestal and tell you that you can do it too if you work hard and persist.
Hope can be an effective tool of oppression. The Great American Pyramid Scheme is what I like to call it.
Though our bodies move forward, the rest of us decays.
Erosion. Implosion. Explosion.
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