And I breathe

I want to resist. To fight.

The world around me seems to be erupting in flames. Burning. Burning with hatred and fear. Burning with passion and resilience. Burning.

Every day I watch the fire touch every aspect of my life, of humanity. And deep within me I feel the fire catch. A passion for humanity; a visceral need for humanity. And I don’t know how to channel it.

By appearances I am not the one being targeted. But I am. If only because at the very least, if one of us is is targeted, we all are.

And I feel so helpless. So small. So insignificant. In facing the wall of flames, what am I?

It breaks my heart that it has taken such a raging, burning fire before we started one of our own to control the burn. That I don’t know how to fight back. That I am not stronger, smarter, more powerful in this world. But I take the words of advice I was given: “write” and I run with them. Because what else am I to do? I might not know what to say, but I must say it. And I must remind myself: from fire comes growth. And with growth there is hope. Hope for a better tomorrow. Hope for unity. Hope for humanity.

And I breathe.

One breath at a time as I move forward.

Originally posted on my academic blog, Life is Learning.

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ePatient Health Literacies

Its been a long time since I’ve written here, and I have no excuse other than depression. Depression makes you miss a lot of things, disengaging with the world with a brain full of fog.

I’m breaking my extended silence because of an exciting opportunity. An opportunity that deserves more attention and support than I have been giving it; something which I hope writing this is a small step in the positive direction of rectifying.

There is a group of volunteers that host conversations related to ePatients–engaged, empowered (and a few more “e”s I can’t recall right now) patients. I’ve mentioned them briefly before. These conversations are driven by the chronically and critically ill, about topics that are important to them.

Our next conversation is about health literacy: the knowledge base, practices, and understandings about health. But this is not a conversation being dictated to us by healthcare professionals or healthy people; no, this is a conversation about the knowledge and practices we as patients need, from our experiences and points of view.

And this is a conversation you can join.