What if We Reframed “Sickness”?

Interrupting the new contagion script.

Jan 09, 2024

I spent a little time with family over the holidays and I noticed something: they’re all quietly running a new script.

They have never run this program in their lives before 2020. They argued about it in 2021. They studiously avoided the topic in 2022.

Now they accept it, wordlessly, and without question.

They do what they are “supposed” to do.

The program is called: SICKNESS = CONTAGION.

The slightest sign of symptoms—any symptoms, of anything, sniffles, sore throat, body aches—means you are SICK, which means CONTAGION.

“There’s something going around,” is the magic incantation which starts the protocol, like pulling the fire alarm lever.

Initiate contagion containment procedures.

All the actions kick in.

First engage in complex billiard-ball “exposure” theories like: “soandso was SICK three weeks ago, and he was EXPOSED to soandso, and I met mutual-acquaintance soandso two days ago for lunch, therefore I was EXPOSED…”

Then, armed with your indisputable proof of “exposure”, isolate from other family members, get tested, and start taking all the approved “medicine”.

And if you MUST interact with other family members, wear a mask, stay on the other side of the room, do not touch any surfaces (or obsessively clean them with chemical cleaners), reprimand yourself for not getting boosted, and schedule the appointment for the following week.

🙄

Interestingly, there seems to be no fear of the deadliness of the supposed contagion anymore, or really any emotion about it at all.

It is simply a set of procedures which kick in. A protocol. A script we’re supposed to run now.

This is called “sickness”.

(There’s a sickness, all right. But it ain’t in the body.)

I expressed my incredulity and skepticism for all this foolish behavior, but of course it fell on deaf ears. Actually, on ears of people that barely even acknowledge that I’m speaking. They simply nod and run the script, like androids incapable of altering their programming.

I too, had a day of “sickness” (their definition, not mine) during this time. I had one evening of headaches and feeling really, really tired.

When I mentioned this in company, the reaction was something like astonishment: “Are you… SICK??”

And right away I sensed something wrong with this. It wasn’t astonishment that I was not feeling well. It wasn’t even care or concern for how I was feeling.

It was astonishment that I wasn’t running the contagion script.

“No, I’m not sick,” I said, “whatever that means. I just have a little headache and I’m gonna go lie down. I’m going to obey the signals my body is giving me.”

My body had some problem to overcome, to be sure. A problem that I had introduced to it. If I had to guess, it was probably the absurd amount of sugar I had foolishly sucked down over the course of a couple of days. (I have a weakness for pie, okay?)

And, sure enough, I drank some water, slept, and the next day I was fine.

Cancel the hazmat suits. Contagion averted!

And so I got to thinking, what does “sickness” even mean anymore?

If Sickness=Contagion, you have to put blinders on to an awful lot of reality.

Think of the myriad ways we punish our bodies. And the body, being a physical thing that exists in the world, must deal with that punishment, and compute the best way of keeping us alive.

Hence… symptoms.

Stress hormones (like chronic excess cortisol and adrenaline) give you symptoms.

Nutrient deficiency gives you symptoms.

Nutrient toxicity (over-consumption of something) gives you symptoms.

Dehydration gives you symptoms. (So does excess water consumption. It’s called hyponatremia, AKA drowning.)

Sunlight deficiency gives you symptoms.

Sleep deficiency gives you symptoms.

Too much screen time and blue light gives you symptoms.

Environmental and chemical toxicity gives you symptoms.

Swallowing or injecting pharma products gives you symptoms.

Radiation and wireless signals give you symptoms.

Your lack of emotional well-being gives you symptoms.

You get the idea.

Of course, none of this even exists in the Sickness = Contagion mindset.

But look at that list, and think about it. Which of these conditions manifest around the holidays?

Maybe, kinda, sort of, like… every single one of them?

Like, it’s a wonder we survive the whole bloody ordeal.

But we do. Your body, in its wisdom, quietly deals with all of that punishment. It wordlessly runs its own script, even while we are flagellating through our own absurd contagion rituals.

It eliminates all the toxicity, the sugar, the caffeine, the alcohol, the stress that we throw at it. (Unless we continue to abuse it to the point where it can’t anymore.)

It gives us all the signals, begging for an ally in the dumb human that’s responsible for all the abuse: it tells us to eliminate, or to lie down, or to drink water or broth, or to turn off the screen, or to get fresh air and sunlight.

And when it is done with all this thankless work, and we no longer feel “sick”, it doesn’t even care that we misattribute the cause of our recovery to miraculous pills or shots or to our contagion containment rituals.

What if we acknowledged our body’s wisdom in all of this?

What if we reframed “sickness” as the body’s beautiful, wonderful detox mechanism in action? What if we thanked the body for the headache, for telling us that we have done wrong by it, and instead of putting it down to “something going around” we instead examined our own actions?

Would we be “sick” nearly as often?

Would we ever?

Probably we would make it our mission to reduce toxicity, to change the way we consume, to try to optimize the chemistry, to give our body what it needs to function best, without over-consuming anything.

We would examine our environment and see what toxicity we could eliminate from it, and eliminate wireless signals and radiation wherever possible. (Increasingly hard unless you move to a remote area).

We would make lifestyle changes like getting out in the sunshine, and moving.

When we experienced a symptom, we might realize that there is a world of proper care and chemistry to consider before we start theorizing in invisible hobgoblins that float from person to person trying to make us “sick”.

What if we saw the body not as “sick”, but as correcting for an operator error? What if we saw a symptom like a warning light in our car, as something neglected which is begging for our attention?

What if, instead of the new mindset that HEALTH = BEING CONTAGION-FREE, we remembered the mindset that HEALTH = WELLNESS, with all the self-care and attention it implies?

What if what someone else calls “sickness” we called HEALING?

What if we reacquired this ancient, intuitive knowledge?

Would we even need a concept of “sickness”?

I wonder.