Are you angry at yourself regarding productivity?
Many of us define our self-worth in terms of the goods and services and benefits we bring to others. With the massive layoffs caused by the pandemic, that way of thinking is about to take a huge hit.
The first time I really questioned the difference between worth and productivity was when I was laid off from a tech company and feeling like a foolish waste of space. My friend Gina relentlessly texted me about my intrinsic human value, knowing that my time at home would lay siege to my self-worth. Having spent years bedridden due to a chronic illness, Gina had been forced to master the lesson that one’s worth does not depend on one’s accomplishments.
Although I loved and valued Gina regardless of her productivity, I had trouble applying the same standard to myself. When I’m depressed and using all my energy just to move from one moment to another, I have trouble considering myself worthy. Pouring my energy and time into others gives me a feeling of worthiness, a hit of endorphins that can be just as much an addiction as any other positive feeling.
The idea that our value lies in what we create rather than who we are is a violent idea. When my friend Kat posted the following on her disability justice blog The Willow’s Work, I understood this violence in a a new light. (reposted with permission)
WHAT’S IT LIKE TO KNOW THEY WOULDN’T CHOOSE YOU?
If you needed a ventilator and there weren’t enough. What’s it like to know your life isn’t worth saving because a return to health does not mean a return to work for you? Lemme tell you, you don’t care that the odds are low you’ll be in this situation. Because this is not new information. You knew people valued you less when they refused you accommodations that have been made available nationwide in a week. You knew when a local shop renovated and didn’t make their store wheelchair accessible. You knew when the fourth stranger demanded you tell them “what’s wrong with you”, when your family considered your disability ignorable inconvenience, when your friends said “I don’t want an online friendship.” I don’t want You, the way you are. In this relationship, in this shop, in this school, in this world.
🌱And when this is over, if they stop live-streaming and video chatting, if they stop “checking in because isolation is hard”; if they leave us behind in our homes in our beds in our graves, we will remember that they have always valued our lives less.
🌿It’s not new. But I didn’t need the reminder. ⠀
Right now, a lot of abled people are learning what it’s like to have their freedom limited, and experiencing some things disabled people have experienced for a long time. This humbling can bring compassion, wisdom, and lament.
For a long time, my parents have been supporting some friends through their toddler’s multiple heart surgeries. The toddler currently needs a ventilator. When I spoke with my mom on the phone, she said, “Charlotte, what if later in the pandemic, they decide the ventilator she’s using is needed by an adult?”
Medical professionals across the world are having to make decisions about who is worth saving and who isn’t. But we’ve always been making those decisions, haven’t we? The toddler had access to her heart surgeries because she was Canadian; if she’d been born in the United States, who knows if she’d be alive?
Every day, our collective actions make decisions about who we do and don’t consider worthy of the blessing of life. Before the pandemic hit, my activist friend was organizing funerals for homeless people who were dying from lack of access to ordinary medical care. As The Willow’s Work says, it’s not like it’s new to prioritize some over others. However, it’s visible to abled people in a way it’s never been before. It’s visible to abled people, because many are finally receiving the emotional knowledge of what it might mean to have someone pull the plug on us.
I’ve been disabled by depression on two occasions, although I’ve lived most of my life as abled. My experiences of finding it difficult or impossible to work while depressed, opened my heart to compassion more than any other experience in my life. As people showed grace for me during my sadness, I comprehended for the first time that grace is survival. I was able to continue surviving because my coworkers forgave me instead of getting rid of me when my illness slowed me down and I started making more and more mistakes.
Grace is the way of life. All other ways are death. We will all have times when we are not powerful enough to earn what we need to survive. “Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors,” goes the Lord’s Prayer, and those two expressions absolutely are connected. Right now, all over the country, debt is springing up in a way we don’t remember seeing before: more and more people who won’t be able to pay for shelter, food, healthcare, and safety. Increasingly, it is grace that must deliver our daily bread.
Triage: the division of limited resources according to some criterion among a group of people whose needs are too large to be met. In scarcity culture, we have always practiced triage, and we have always defended the practice of triage with the myth of moral unworthiness. In seeking to hide from ourselves the knowledge that we condemn the innocent, we have unnecessarily robbed those who lack resources from our love and our respect as well as the daily bread.
My favorite author, Lois Bujold, has a disabled hero, Miles Vorkosigan, as the centerpiece of her most popular science fiction series. He’s born into a very ableist culture that developed a practice of infanticide towards disabled infants during a time of extreme resource scarcity. As the planet adjusts to a life of technological abundance, the parents of Miles become activists for disabled inclusion within society.
The grandfather of the family tries to pressure the mother into aborting Miles, and he characterizes the healthcare costs involved in preserving Miles as a robbery from society. As a result of the abusive messages from his grandfather, Miles grows up obsessed with achievement, trying to create a career splendid enough to justify his right to exist. He never lets himself rest from overachievement, until he is fired at thirty years old and comes to a crashing halt.
Most of us can identify with Miles, I think. I’ve noticed that age thirty has been a rite of passage for so many of my friends. It’s a breaking point of sorts; in your twenties you have the energy and endurance to give capitalism everything it demands of you. Thirty years seems to be where that stamina comes to an end. You see the demands from without are too large to meet, and you have to draw some sort of boundary around your selfhood. Which begets the existential crisis, “Who am I?” Who am I when I am not doing all these things for all these people?
How did sloth get characterized as a deadly sin, when the Bible says what makes God’s people unique is their willingness to rest on the Sabbath? When God Himself is depicted as a being that needs rest? We don’t need to be protected from our body’s desire to rest.
The obsessive phobia of sloth protects capitalism from our desire to labor in the service of life instead of death. It makes us afraid of meeting the person we are during the period we are not in motion. It makes us believe there will be no one there when the activity stops. But the person who exists inside the stillness is vast. That person is worth preserving.
