nursingforsocialjustice

The world ebbs and flows, like water flows. I think it is integral that we collectively reflect on our positions of privilege or not having privilege. I think it is important to reflect on the privilege of having the time and space to reflect.

The ability to have choice, and say no, and wait until the next round of whatever is something special that not everyone has access to. Our cognitive frame is only as big and we have constructed it to be. We can only know as much as we have opportunity to know. There are a million competing interests. We aren’t all collectively growing into better selves. Should we be? How? Why?

Today I was thinking about the choice of life and death as an act of defiance, as an act of empowerment instead of a battle that we lost.

I’m thinking about how sometimes someone will be admitted to an inpatient mental health and substance use program and one of the identified goals of recovery (care team identified goal) is to make new friends and a new social circle because substance users are in their current circle. How is someone supposed to do that? Especially when people who are judged as problematic to them are their social circle? This is the place where I wonder why a three or six or twelve week hospital stay is more advantageous than putting resources in communities that people live in.

We put labels on people. We have this duality of good and bad, healthy and unhealthy. We can’t be both…or can we? I’m not sure it’s helpful to have these value judgments that are measured against a standard of averages and ideals. And I’m not sure it matches with the underlying philosophy of nursing. I wonder how to engage in direct care nurses in activities of critical analysis of the system, the processes the policies that we take for granted as good and static and immovable.

Love,

Michelle D.