#34: Ross Simonini

"Staying uncertain is the best form of freedom I’ve found."

#34: Ross Simonini

Welcome to Health Gossip. Our guest is Ross Simonini (@rosssimonini), an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and musician. Today, a meditation on his healing journey — from developing bodily awareness and divesting from dogma to, as he put in an earlier draft, “discover[ing] health without the help of words.”¹

Health Gossip with Ross Simonini
Altadena, California
Cancer/Aquarius/Sagittarius

What does health, or being healthy, mean to you?

I think the word “health” is just too overloaded for me. I’m exhausted by the whole paradigm of judging foods, sensations, thoughts, and activities as “healthy” or unhealthy. The same is true for “healing,” which has become overused by so many opposing forces that the term has lost its potency.

At this point, the word “vitality” feels like a better choice. Vitality is a feeling, not a standard. It’s right there, inside of pain and pleasure. It’s what gives us the energy to continue finding our balance. It’s the force of uncertainty.

I’ve been reading Jane Bennett and other vitalist philosophers and I enjoy how the concept of the vital force becomes a way of looking at everything in world, not just humans or living things. It’s just the nature of reality.

So where the word health has started to make life feel smaller, vitality becomes a way of opening up the world. It’s also a pretty good description of what I want to experience while I am alive.

Vitality is a feeling, not a standard. It’s what gives us the energy to continue finding our balance. It’s the force of uncertainty.

Was there a specific moment in life that made you change your approach to health, or become more conscious generally?

I am coming out of a decade of dealing with a mysterious swarm of symptoms, which I will not elaborate on here, but which I have written about before. It’s been a long, uneven process of recovering. There was never a clear diagnosis or cure, so I had to lean into exploration, which was ultimately very helpful.

No doctor or practitioner will care about your health like you do, so developing awareness of your body is essential. I also think this kind of awareness can transform you and help you work with your physical self in the longterm. It’s like that proverb in Chinese medicine: ‘One disease, long life; no disease, short life.’

There was one point when nearly every aspect of my existence was dictated by my body. I moved across country to a small town in the redwoods, radically altered the way I lived, changed my profession, all of which were very inconvenient but necessary. However, since then, I’ve had to go in the opposite direction — deprogramming myself from health think.

My Whole Entiled World, 2019

So, by design, I am not as rigorous as I once was about my health, but I have also developed enough habits that I don’t stray too far from helpful patterns. I’ve done plenty of restrictive practices and supplements and exercises that I now understand my tools for some situations.

This whole process has led me to regard my health as a place for experimentation, which is also what I like art to be. It’s actually what I like all of life to be, but I’m not always able to experience it with that kind of clarity.

This approach seeps into other parts of my life as well, like what art materials I use, what elements I bring into my home, where I travel. Wrist problems led me to paint with my feet, etc. The trick is to not let this kind of deep bodily awareness become a compulsion, or it just becomes another liability.