Community Voices for Health

By: Tanvi Maharaja, PT, DPT, at Signature Healthcare

Here’s a question for you:
If you were given the opportunity to re-write the entire social and judicial system, not knowing where and when you would be born, what would you do? Remember, everything about your identity would be random, every single thing that one identifies with currently could be entirely different: religion, ethnicity, nationality, body type, sexual orientation and gender identity, physical and mental health conditions, political affiliation, every single thing. So then, the question is: “What would you change about the system?”

Remember, once you set the laws and policies and rules, you cannot change them. Once you set the rules, THEN you find out who you are: think of all the different combinations of genetic and social and parental and cultural and religious and national and environmental possibilities!
Now, that’s an interesting thought experiment.

Let me tell you why this crossed my mind recently. 

• My husband, for always being here to support and encourage me.
• My son, for being responsible and giving me all the reasons to be proud of him, and for giving me the title of “mom”.
• My parents, for raising me the way they did, with love and kindness, understanding and empathy.
• My brother, for being the absolute brat of a brother one could ever have, my sounding board.
• My sister in law, for being the sister I never had, and providing me with an unlimited supply of laughter and love.
• My school, my teachers, my friends, my co-workers, my social connections, my life circumstances growing up: all of these helped  shape me to be the person I am.

But wait… I would not really think about how wonderful the people in my life are, if I did not have them: what if my life was without parents, or family, or school. If by a sheer stroke of luck, I was orphaned, or did not have parental love and protection. I could have been someone who never had proper schooling, or who was bullied at school, or abused by their teachers.

But for a random chance, I might have been born in a war-torn region, where survival itself was questionable, and really the only thing that mattered was staying alive. I could have been marginalized, been a victim of abuse or violence, looked down upon, passed over, talked down to, yelled at, shooed away… based on nothing else but straight-out luck.

Imagine if I was a non-English speaking, impoverished, disabled, of a marginalized ethnicity, with a body weight and with gender identity that was non-conforming, of a religion that was in the minority where I lived, on top of being a woman. Imagine being even one of these people, let alone having all these identities in one person. Nobody chooses where they are born, what ethnicity they are, how their chromosomes define them physically, sexually, psychologically, what religion they are born into, what color their skin is.

And still, the world is filled with so much judgement and hate for people, based on nothing more than a wild gamble, based on what cards they were dealt by Lady Luck.

This is why it is not enough to be grateful. Gratitude needs to be a door opening to perspective, not a set of walls holding us in!

This is why once that gratitude is expressed, we must pursue that line of thought and identify the privileges we are born into, acknowledge that we lucked out on several items, and maybe not so much on others.

And wherever we have a seat at the table, it is our duty, our absolute, unquestionable responsibility to make space for those who haven’t.

I am lucky I was taught English growing up. So now, if I have to work with somebody who did not get that privilege, I have to do the right thing by not only arranging for an interpreter, but having the patience and giving them time to fully and completely express themselves.

I am blessed to not have a physical disability. So now, if I have to work with somebody who does, I have to acknowledge that ableism and figure out how the norms that I take for granted may be challenging to them. I have to see the world from their eyes, their perspective.

I have been fortunate to be born into the majority religious and linguistic group in my country. So now, I have make space for those in the minority, to ensure their rights are safeguarded.

It all comes down to the system. Although we all like to pat ourselves on the back and think that we made it in life because of our brilliance and efforts, that is not the entire truth. Our circumstances, defined by the framework of the system, play the bigger role in shaping our lives, a lot bigger than we recognize, or would like to recognize.

I have to acknowledge and accept that I am the beneficiary of many aspects of this man-made system, and the system is not perfect. I am therefore bound to create room in the system, maybe even redesign the system, to make it more inclusive and more welcome to others who have been pushed into the shadows by the flaws in the system. Perhaps the system no longer serves the purpose it was designed for, or perhaps the world in which these systems once thrived no longer exists.

It is the people who have positions of power in this system, of any kind and to any capacity, that have to partner with those who don’t, to figure out what needs to change and how to go about doing that. We all have to work together conscientiously and deliberately to make the entire system more diverse and more inclusive, if we mean anything at all by our words of gratitude.

If I cannot act on my gratitude, if I cannot offer a seat at the table to those who did not have my kind of luck, my words of gratitude are futile. I am grateful, and hence I will strive to identify the gaps in the chain of gratitude, and prove that they are not just empty words.

As the holiday season approaches, this thought is weighing on my mind. I have and will continue to converse with family and friends on what they are thankful for, to what factors they owe that gratitude, and engage them in the thought experiment we discussed above. 

Happy Holidays!!