On Learning to Heal: or, What Medicine Doesn’t Know

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It took a lot of learning and a lot of healing to write this book on learning to heal—which is just another way of saying it required a lot of encouragement and support. If I’ve learned anything from this project, it’s that although learning and healing constitute tendencies to which we can aspire, they aren’t certainties by any stretch of the imagination. That’s why we need other people to keep us tending in the right direction. Fortunately for me, I had a lot of help staying on track.

This book would not exist without what I have learned from my beloved teachers: Rachel Remen, Emilie Conrad, Susan Harper, Carol Joyce, Mary Swanson, and Mayla Riley. From each of you I learned how to stay rooted and grow strong—if not wise—at the same time. You each helped me cultivate vital energies that I didn’t even know existed, and I bow in gratitude to your wisdom and your love.

My extended pod created a nourishing context in which I could ruminate on healing as well as heal, never an easy task, especially in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic. Their ongoing enthusiasm for this project made it possible to finally finish even when it looked like we might all be going to hell in a handcart. Big props to Emma Bianchi, Ellen Bruno, Maria Damon, David Eng, David Kazanjian, Michael Lighty, Ardele Lister, Rebecca Mark, Jennie Portnof, Teemu Ruskola, Josie Saldana, and Caroline Streeter for all the love and laughs.

Special thanks to Julie Livingston, who has always been my ideal reader for this book, the perfect ibd companion, and my baking buddy; Cathy Davidson, who saved me from a really shitty title and helped me see why the book deserved better; and Joan Scott, whose enthusiasm and sage advice helped me find my way into nerd-vana.

I am exceedingly grateful to the many people who read and commented on drafts of this project along the way: Emma Bianchi, Maria Damon, David Eng, Simon Goldin, Eben Kirksey, David Kazanjian, Ardele Lister, Julie Livingston, Rebecca Mark, Fareen Parvez, Jennie Portnof, Sarah Quinn, Teemu Ruskola, Josie Saldana, Gayle Solomon, Latif Tas, and the anonymous readers for Duke University Press. I also benefited enormously from the sage editorial direction provided by David Lobenstine and the aptly named Laura Helper. Your thoughtful insights and reflections have improved this text enormously— and made it considerably more readable.

Because spending hours and hours hunched over a computer has never been very healing for any body, I have been very fortunate to have genius somatics practitioners who have helped bend me back into shape. Major thanks to Marcelo Coutinho, Ariel Kiley, Joe Spilone, and Farrel Duncan for helping me recover from writing this book on a regular basis.

My 2019–20 fellows at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton were wonderful thinking companions, and I am deeply grateful to Didier Fassin and Alondra Nelson for inviting me for the year—alas, sadly abbreviated by covid-19. Also, big thanks to Elspeth Brown and Eva-Lynn Jagoe for organizing the workshop in nonacademic writing for academics at the University of Toronto, and all the participants—especially Ann Cvetkovitch—for teaching me to think critically about my narrative voice, which turned out to be what I most needed to learn about writing in order to write this book.

Thanks to Ken Wissoker for including me in Duke’s impeccably curated list. It’s an honor to appear in such great company again. Thank you to all the people at Duke who make such beautiful books (and make making them so easy on their authors): Ryan Kendall for facilitating the curation process; Lisa Lawley for masterfully overseeing the production; Courtney Leigh Richardson for such a beautiful cover and wonderful layout, and for graciously accepting the rod of Asclepius as a design constraint; and the aptly named Laura Sell for helping disseminate this book as widely as possible.
And in memoriam: to Chunky and Monkey, whose feline love kept my lap warm throughout this project.

Table of contents :

Cover
Contents
Prologue: Invoking Healing
Acknowledgments
A Note on Shit
Overture: Healing as Desire and Value
One: Healing Tendencies
Two: We Are More Complicated Than We Know
Three: We Are More Imaginative Than We Think
Four: When We Learn to Heal, It Matters
Coda: Healing with COVID, or Why Medicine is Not Enough
Notes
Bibliography
Index