Suddenly it’s the middle of December

I don’t want to start another post by saying I didn’t mean to disappear for so long, and yet here I am. I probably don’t have to explain what about the past few weeks has made writing (and reading, for that matter) so difficult — I suspect most of you know exactly what I mean. And yet it’s December, and we’ve had a series of beautiful frosty mornings this winter, and I’m mostly looking forward to the holidays, and my everyday existence is by no means devoid of joy. Which is to say that I’m okay, or as okay as one can be at this particular moment in history, even if life still feels very raw.

This week I had a bit of a health scare — a very minor one in the grand scheme of things, but painful and distressing in the way these things tend to be. It made it necessary for me to seek emergency medical care — it was the first time anything of the sort happened since I moved here four years ago, and I suppose it was illuminating to note what went through my head when I was frightened and in pain in the small hours of the morning. A year or two ago I would have found it unthinkable to write about this kind of experience, but I’ve become increasingly interested in documenting what brutal capitalism feels like. I’m interested in using words to prevent the wounds it inflicts on us from festering — in trying, I guess, to banish shame from the corners where it still lurks.

What I realised was this: no matter how passionately committed I may be to the left, I’m not immune to the rhetoric that tells us there’s something deeply shameful and untoward about needing public health care if you’re an immigrant. Needless to say, I would never in a million years apply this logic to another human being, or allow it to go unchallenged on my watch. I roll my eyes at headlines that suggest the strain on public services we’re currently seeing is due to immigration rather than to years of Tory austerity. I work in the public sector alongside other immigrants, and we all give our best day after day. I know better, in my head and in my heart and deep in my bones, and I live by this knowledge every day of my life. And yet, at two in the morning, when pain was the only thing that existed in my world, it became obvious that I still can’t stop the bastards from getting inside my head. In between sobs I told my partner that I didn’t want to go anywhere — that they, whoever they are in this case, don’t want people with accents in emergency rooms; that they want hospitals and doctors to check your passport now and would probably send us away when we couldn’t prove we’ve been here long enough (this, to my friends who aren’t in the UK, is an actual proposal that made headlines here recently). He was able to persuade me to seek help, but it was only in the morning that I paused and wondered at myself.

I owe my panic partially to the right-wing media, partially to the process of sorting through all the documents I’m going to need to apply for permanent residency, which is something we have to do post-Brexit to try to safeguard the life we’ve built for ourselves here. There are some very unfortunate phrases in the application forms and guidelines. A little known fact: if you live here as a student or a self-employed person, you are allowed to access public health care. But if you do that, if you lack private health insurance, you officially become a “burden to the state” and can no longer count that time towards the necessary years of exercising EU treaty rights when applying for residency or citizenship.

“Burden”. “Health tourism”. Such mean, uncharitable phrases. I resent them getting inside my head, these people who came up with them. I realise that this is how they win, by making you afraid when you’re at your most vulnerable, and I’m using my words, the small, fragile tools at my disposal, to try and counter that.

My faith that my humanity will be widely acknowledged and that basic care will be available to me has been deeply shaken in the past few years. I grew up middle-class in a country where the majority of people looked and spoke like me; gender complicated this picture to an extent, much like whiteness still complicates it now, but there was a certain degree of unexamined faith in the system I had then and which is now gone, largely because of my experiences as an immigrant. I don’t regret its loss. This is not a simple story about learning valuable lessons from pain — to be honest, I resist any attempt to frame human suffering as a price worth paying; as worthwhile for the sake of wisdom or what have you. And yet there’s something here, something I wouldn’t give up. I don’t know how to tell this story yet, but I want to keep trying.

On a brighter note, it was also interesting to see how well Upheavals of Thoughts served me in my painful and unexpected encounter with human frailty. “Read this 800 pages philosophy tome: it will help you cope with shame if you have a medical emergency” is probably not the catchiest of blurbs, but I was, once again, profoundly grateful that I read this book.

Speaking of reading, it has been going very slowly for me this month — it was only a few days ago that I finished my first December book. Still, I want to make the time, between Christmas and New Year’s, to write about my reading in 2016. It will be different from my usual Year in Review posts, if nothing else because I stopped reviewing books at the end of last year and thus have nothing to link to, but I hope I can find a way to make a more conversational, descriptive post work. The same goes for my TV and film watching — if everything goes according to plan, I might get that post written next week.

I’ll leave you with the best thing I read all week — Zadie Smith’s “On Optimism and Despair”. Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s recent “Now Is the Time to Talk About What We Are Actually Talking About” was stunning, too (I love them both so much). Lastly but not least, my friend Aarti and I discussed Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl this week. It had been ages since I’d taken part in an in-depth book discussing with a blogging buddy; I’d really missed it.