The washing never gets done

feeling useless | lists upon lists

Morning folks

Another weekend of grand plans (well, kids parties) cancelled because November is the season of all the bugs. This time it’s my youngest daughter, who was looking forward to a full weekend of parties with her best friends. She has an uncanny knack of falling ill at the exact moment of the thing she has been looking forward to the most; her last bout was a horrible case of Covid which happened in August whilst we were in Croatia on holiday.

I don’t know about anyone else, but we certainly still feel that slight trepidation of looking forward to anything lest it be cancelled or one of us get ill. I doubt there was anyone who came through the lockdowns/Government mandated isolations without having to cancel a lot of things. It definitely leaves a mark. I suppose the flip side is that we are all a bit more used to it, and know that it’s just one event/one holiday/one birthday and that there will be more.

The difference then was that you knew that everyones calendars were being wiped at the same time. There was an element of universal experience about it. I remember that first week of lockdown #1, literally just deleting all the stuff from my google calendar and feeling a weird mix of crazy relief and complete horror at the situation. All of our time management systems, rotas, ways of juggling family commitments; completely wiped in one fell swoop. Then a weird expanse of days where our daily bike ride or walk around the local park became the only focus point.

Then, as most of you know, I got pretty sick. And my eldest daughter did too. And time became even more blurry as I spent months and months within the house, often in my room, because my body couldn’t handle being outside much. My husband took care of most of the homeschool routine, cooking, and anything that could have given the day some shape whilst I hovered between low, pulsing music, complete rest and, when I could manage it, gentle nature programmes. I genuinely have never felt more useless or out of control in my life.

From that place, I feel like my view on nearly everything shifted a little. I’m not saying that difficult life experiences should have a lesson, just that from that place there was no choice but to realise certain things. I feel like I had my eyes opened to the completely ableist way our society is structured. I’m totally complicit in that, but I think it’s fairly common that until you have to think about something from a different angle, most of us struggle to. It wasn’t until I struggled to walk my kids from the car to the school playground that I realised how few accommodations were made for disabled parents, and it wasn’t until I couldn’t physically be at work in my shop that I realised just how much people with chronic illness or disability are prohibited from many areas of work. I knew it, but I didn’t really know it.

my “sick bed” for the year- best purchase ever from b and q this chair

I found myself on forums and instagram accounts of ME sufferers, people with chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, lime disease- all sorts of illnesses that prevent people from being Fully Productive Humans in the way society orders us to be. The thing most chronic illnesses have in common is fatigue, which means an extremely limited amount of energy to divvy up throughout the day. The fact that thousands of people developed Long COVID at once really shone a light on something that all these people had been shouting for years- “we are not well enough to take part in all of this.”

I’m better now, and insanely grateful for that. But lots of my close friends have been struggling with health in a more chronic way, both covid and non-covid related. All women, which is interesting. I know that every one of us has struggled with the non-productive thing. Enforced rest is a completely new way of being for most people; you meet all of your edges and zones of discomfort. People have to look after you and you have to let them. Your lists are meaningless because your body doesn’t care. You are completely vulnerable and at the mercy of your support networks, which is both a wonderful act of love and trust, and a terrifying free-fall.

Uselessness is a horrible feeling. But I imagine all of us at some point in our lives will feel it. But perhaps we don’t have to constantly be bright and shiny to be of some worth, perhaps it’s enough to be a human who lives in a house and gets through the day.

I’ve done it again, and written about things I had absolutely no intention of writing about. All I had when I started writing was this poem, which I thought would be nice for us to look at:

Chronically ill or not, most of us feel that we wake up as if we are in some sort of deficit and have to complete many tasks to get us up to “useful human level”. I have to remind myself over and over again that this is just not true. I also listened to this podcast over at “Pulling the Thread”- The Fallacy of Time Management by Oliver Burkeman (Author of “Four Thousand Weeks- Time Management for Mortals”) which I highly recommend. Or if you are shorter on time, he has a TedX talk here.

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Invitation to write/play…

As always, take this prompt however you like. Perhaps you could:

• Write yourself a ‘done list’ over the day as explained by Oliver Burkeman here. I will most definitely be doing this this week. Keep it as a list, or turn it into a longer piece of writing/poem. Instead of starting from a deficit, start the day from zero and add the things you accomplish as you go.

• Take Jaan Kaplinski’s poem as a starting point for your own exploration of all the things that never get done. You could even borrow “the wonder is” from the end of his poem to change the tone of your poem at the end.

• Write a “f**k it list” instead of a bucket list. Here’s something I wrote to get you going…

• Perhaps you also have a time when you felt useless? Explore it. Write down the memory, what it felt like, what it meant for those around you. Or perhaps someone you know feels useless. Write to them instead, tell them all the ways they are not.

This ended up being slightly longer than intended. As ever, feel free to reply in the comments or privately by hitting “reply” to this message.

Hope you have a wonderful Sunday.

Em x