It’s hard, when you’re in graduate school, to prioritize your physical health. Mental health awareness campaigns, resources, all that good stuff is made available (at least at my institution) in what on good days I think is evidence of the way that society is changing to recognize the holistic nature of our ontological health, and on bad days merely a response to the fact that students keep trying to kill themselves because Anthropocene.
I digress. I was in a car accident last year about this time, and I now have a whole new appreciation for students with mobility issues, chronic pain, and chronic exhaustion. I even kind of know what it’s like to be (briefly) addicted to opioids.
None of which is particularly helpful in analyzing literature for my thesis, but it’s helping me learn to be a more empathetic human being, which imo is kind of the point of life.
I’m thinking about my physical health a lot these days, is I suppose the point of this post. I could take it further in academic inquiry into my subject (what does it mean to be disabled / “infirm” in a post-apocalyptic setting?), but I’m not. Check out Mad Max, though, since that was one of the questions that drove the narrative in the first place, as George Miller used to work as a doctor and saw quite a few car crash victims.