I do not know if I have ever experienced “wellness,” but it does sound like a very good concept or status. I suspect that it was relatively short-term if I did.
Forget Recovery; I Could Not Breathe
What Is Recovery When You Can't Breathe?
I remember fighting for breath and clean air to breathe in a haze of cigarette smoke in cars, homes, businesses, and public spaces indoors and out. Smoking was ubiquitous throughout my entire childhood, adolescence, and only relatively recently have I been able to stay clear of those 125 chemicals and drugs for any extended length of time.
I still have to seek clean air or retreat to a better place. I had “asthma” until I got away from cigarettes and diesel particulate matter, the heavy fallout from those noisy and noxious machines.
Pollution and Recovery Were Always Mixed Up
Plus I grew up in a lead and zinc mining district directly adjacent to an old smelter and what had been, in its heyday, the largest open pit mine on the planet. I lived across the street from it among the remains of the infrastructure and tailing piles.
I played in the abandoned buildings, and in the trash “dump,” where burning refuse smoldered for years at a time. There is a movie, Fire in the Mountain; I was living at Fire in the Hole.
Radio Frequency Pollution and Recovery Are All Mixed Up
There was an Air Force radar base closer to my house than my four-room schoolhouse, and the general credit grocery merchant down the street. I was being microwaved, and still am by the cellphone and the wireless computer gear everyone is running indoors and out. We’re constantly in some radio frequency field or another, unless you can get “off-grid” into the wilderness somewhere for a while.
It takes a few days to appreciate the subtle difference of not being immersed in this intense radio frequency background, but it lets one become more in tune with what the natural — or at least partially unadulterated — background feels like.
Re-TooIing and Re-Integrating, Not Recovering
As to recovery: Since I never had a clean slate in the first place, or didn’t by the time I started figuring out where I stop and the rest of everything starts, I’m not trying to recover anything. I want whaterver was supposed to be there in the first place, but never really was. I want less pollution and intentionally-fed “by-products” or “collateral damage” of whatever the war du jour is serving up.
I’m re-tooling. It might be that I’ve realized that recovery would be over whenever I found whatever was stolen from me or covered up.
There is history, culture, and family tradition to overcome. I’ve been getting bombarded with crap my whole life. I need tools and procedures that can address this. and perhaps some lesson plans and mentoring on using them. I may have to manufacture some of this on my own.
I’m re-integrating after a lot of deconstruction and disintegration resulting from trauma and insult, from outright lies and fabrications, cover-ups, despite what is apparent to me is a slow-motion campaign of eugenics and population reduction. I’m inoculated with bits of all this toxicity and developed some vaccine-like resistance.
They might cause autism spectrum disorders and other injuries. People and events have stunned, shattered, and fragmented me, splitting of parts of my consciousness and awareness like an oil refinery cooks off layers of distillates.
A bunch of alchemists have been hurting us for their own gain, for their own purposes. We are somewhere among the “walking wounded,” “reparable”, and “beyond repair.”
All of us.
So whatever “recovery” restores, I haven’t seen or had much if any of it.
(Note: Mickey Mantle grew up in the same polluted mining region, in Commerce, OK. His father and uncles were lead and zinc miners who died in their 40’s. Mickey believed he would also die young, and stayed drunk all his life. By the time he realized the environment killed his family, not their genes, alcohol had already damaged his body beyond repair.)
Do you ever confuse pollution and recovery?
Wordworks Blog Author: Edward Duff
Edward Duff worked as a policy analyst for NAMI Missouri for 20 years until he met Robert Whitaker and read Anatomy of an Epidemic. He is now on break from online media but is working to connect trauma survivors in Joplin with spiritual communities. He is also working to create an epistimology or worldview that explains why and how certain beings chose to benefit from other people's suffering.
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