YDEV 501 - Care

 "Love is an act of will-namely both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love."          
 -M. Scott Peck (Bell Hooks)

I'm gonna be really honest, the wording in the question this week made it really hard to find an answer. Specifically, the words "and received it". See, I'm sure many people can relate to looking back on the hardest times in their life and feeling as though they were not given the care that they so desperately needed. I have lived a very productive and mostly happy life. I have family who loves me, even if they don't always know how. I have and have had privileges' and opportunities that others do not. And yet, I feel so much suffering and loneliness looking back at trying times of my life. It's interesting to me that "care" often means care that others decided you needed and so rarely means care that you actually needed. Many times in my life I needed care like encouragement, love, education, non-judgment, safety, etc. Yet, I was met with systems who told me I needed something else - a diagnosis, punishment, medication, a plan, organization skills, "self-care", etc. This made me think about not only HOW we receive care but WHY and WHAT that care looks like. Leaving high school I had such a negative and lonely perception of how to deal with hard things in your life. It felt like the systems that were supposed to give me care - public education, mental health system, family - had all given me one answer to my problems: you're on your own. When you constantly get support in the wrong ways it makes you feel as though you can never be helped or understood. Underestimating the power of love and healing is an obvious flaw in our society. Priorities lay in productivity, your ability to conform, and how you are contributing to the current systems of power. So instead of slowing down and giving me the space, approval, love, and encouragement I needed I was taught how to "trick" my brain, how to rewire my thoughts, how to be more productive, and how to "apply myself" better. It's taken me a lot of years (and many more to come) to unlearn this mentality and to really ask "what do I need?". I think the readings and podcast this week really reflect the WHY and WHAT of care. Looking at connections to white supremacy and capitalism it is easy to see why many systems that provide "care" really provide training and redirection to become whatever is needed to support those ideals. In the Bell Hooks reading this week it states “A culture of domination is anti-love. It requires violence to sustain itself. To choose love is to go against the prevailing values of the culture". The best care I receive now is surrounded by love and if it's not, I am now able to know it isn't for me.