Imagine living in a world we didn’t have to heal from
The conditions of our lives are shaped by systemic violence. Ongoing genocide in Palestine. School shootings. The death of public figure Charlie Kirk, whose public rhetoric normalized hate. These events are evidence of how structures of white supremacy, settler colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism manufacture harm at scale, harm that becomes the baseline of everyday life.
Cultural critic Toi Smith writes, “in a world where people have been disposed, extracted, exploited, enslaved, violated, alienated…of course we are healing.”[1] Healing is not incidental. Healing is not a private virtue. It is a political response to patterned harm.
In the churn of public mourning, clarity matters: “you do not need to hold empathy or mourn the death of people who cause you harm to maintain your humanity.”[2] Refusing compulsory empathy for those who actively propagate violence is not a collapse of compassion. It is compassion disciplined by analysis. bell hooks names this alignment as love tethered to justice[3] and Mariame Kaba reminds us that abolition centres care for the harmed while refusing to sanctify the structures or figureheads that injured them.[4] Orientation matters: our grief and care belong first to those targeted by violence. That orientation is how we begin to imagine a world we do not always have to heal from.
Healing as structural, not merely personal
Dominant discourse frames healing as a private pursuit: self-help, therapy, resilience. But to treat wounds as purely individual is a western misdiagnosis of their origin. Healing, in this time and space, cannot be disconnected from a systems analysis. This is not a new thought. Frantz Fanon identified how colonization produces psychic trauma alongside material dispossession.[5] hooks situates love as an ethic of justice rather than sentiment, making care an explicitly political practice.[6] Angela Davis insists abolition is generative: it dismantles the cages while building social infrastructures of care that make cages obsolete.[7] In short, to speak of healing without speaking of systems is to obscure the wound.
Imagining a world without manufactured harm
What would it mean to live in a world where healing was not perpetually required? Not because pain disappears – loss, grief, and conflict are part of human life – but because harm is not systematically produced by inequality. Smith points toward this vision: “maybe the dream isn’t just to heal from this world, but to create one where healing isn’t constantly necessary. Not because pain disappears, but because it’s held differently. Because it’s not manufactured en masse by the violence of inequality.”[8]
Indigenous scholars Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Eve Tuck offer a language of refusal: refusing assimilation, refusing erasure, refusing systems that demand healing in the first place.[9] This refusal is not passive withdrawal but an active world-building. It cultivates practices and spaces where cultural integrity, relationship with land, and belonging are the norm rather than the exception.
Design as a site of structural intervention
Design is central to this conversation. The built environment is never neutral. Design has the capacity to perpetuate structural violence or dismantle it. Designed within logics of control or liberation, streets, schools, cities reflect and reproduce the values of the systems that shape them. When classrooms become sites of fear rather than learning, when streets prioritize surveillance over play, when cities erase cultural presence in the name of efficiency, design is complicit in the production of trauma. Conversely, when design embodies safety, joy, and plurality, it becomes a site of collective healing, an infrastructure for liberation. Urbanist David Harvey notes the “right to the city” is not simply about accessing urban space but about transforming it.[10]
To imagine a world we do not always have to heal from is to shift from a paradigm of resilience to one of justice. Resilience accepts the wound as given; justice asks why the wound was inflicted at all. This is not utopian longing. It is practical abolitionist imagination. It is what Davis describes as “the presence of something new,” what hooks names as love in practice, what Simpson and Tuck articulate as grounded refusal. It is the work of dismantling oppressive structures while simultaneously designing infrastructures of care. It is the work Lemon Papaya commits to: co-creating spaces that resist erasure, redistribute power, and nurture radical belonging.
Ready to imagine and build a world we don’t have to heal from? Let’s chat.
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[1] Toi Smith, Instagram post, 2025.
[2] Abolitionistdoc, Instagram post, 2025.
[3] bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (New York: William Morrow, 2000).
[4] Mariame Kaba, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizaing and Transforming Justice (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021).
[5] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004).
[6] hooks, All About Love, 2000.
[7] Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003).
[8] Smith, Instagram post, 2025.
[9] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1-40.
[10] David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review 53 (2008): 23-40.