salutary
salutary
promoting or conducive to some beneficial purpose; wholesome
I’ve ridden several downward spirals in my day, and each one featured a failed attempt at getting support. Bureaucratic hurdles stall any momentum that builds, shifting your “healing journey” from difficult quest to torturous slog.
The few accessible-to-all options lead you down a conveyor belt of mixed messages, and that’s only if you’re lucky enough to last through the gauntlet of waitlists. When employers offer solutions they sound nice on paper, but you're often left in a state of perpetual uncertainty. They hope you'll abandon the idea of getting help entirely.
These barriers all have a purpose, and it's not the stated one about the appropriate allocation of finances. They’re there to enforce the illusion of scarcity and demonstrate that some are worthy while others are not. This dichotomy is never as clear-cut as our institutions would have you believe.
At my lowest moments, I was considered healthy. No matter how much I suffered it was never a problem for anyone until I started to burn-out, and couldn't show up in the same ways. Only then was I unwell. Only once I started to set boundaries and advocate for myself, deemed broken.
Some still consider me ill, because I never returned to a job that was destroying me. No matter how much I've grown, how much I've healed, it gets called depression by those who care solely about extraction.
Healing requires the space to be honest about our struggles, limits, and needs. Don’t fall for the oversimplified fantasy that “healthy” is the same as “fits perfectly into this box”. Things get sliced, shaved, and sanded to fix in there.
There's more to getting through these things than filing yourself down to the right shape.
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