SICK & TIRED
Sick Faces - Episode One - Hypothyroidism Extended
Time continued, as the world around us seemed to stop. The entire world seemingly coming to the realisation that our bodies are not worth the sacrifice, to be traded for productivity and profit. COVID-19 has in no doubt changed many aspects of how we live but none more so than the world of work. The obsoleteness of a physical office has been a background discussion for a while now with the growing trend of flexible work however, no one anticipated a pandemic that would thrust the world of work into a frenzy of creating a means of work that doesn’t put our bodies on the line especially when they do not need to be.
Listening to disability activists and those living with chronic conditions would have saved employers a world of trouble and money. If only sick individuals were not viewed as inconvenient workers, the infrastructure and processes that are truly considerate of health would already have been in place and then there may have not been such a scramble. Unfortunately, under capitalism the understanding of sickness and wellness take on specific meanings with the “well” being a person well enough to work and the “sick” being a person who cannot work (Hedva, 2015). Ultimately, then the narrative of health becomes predominantly an agenda to churn on capitalism’s wheels as is.
I recently sat down with Sancia Juel, a collaborator and participant in the Sick Faces project and she shared a sentiment that speaks to the enforcement of capitalism’s status quo that is inconsiderate to the sick. Sancia lives with hypothyroidism – a condition in which her thyroid gland does not produce enough of the thyroid hormone, this results primarily for her a symptom of fatigue. When I asked her if she could remember the worst day of living with the illness, her response was, “I wouldn’t say one specific day but one reoccurring experience and that would be in the workspace. I wake up sometimes and I just feel tired, like I have just done the most and I have just woken up…and in the workplace where they want you to constantly be doing stuff, on the ball and for me it feels like I am doing a lot but to another person it looks like she’s not doing anything. They don’t understand that I am legit feeling tired.” Characteristic of those with a discreditable attribute in the form of her chronic condition, Sancia works hard to work through the condition and seldom discloses her illness in order to pass as healthy (by capitalism’s construct) because realistically, who is going to believe someone saying they have a condition that makes them constantly tired, let alone hire her.
I am not advocating that the sick shouldn’t work and my anticapitalistic beliefs do not mean I am against work. There will always be work and work must be done but not exploitatively and to the detriment of our bodies. The constructs of wellness and sickness that deem wellness as the default, as the standard mode of existence, positions illness as temporary, sickness as abhorrent to the norm (Hedva, 2015). This further means that care in this configuration is only required sometimes and in regards to the workplace is reserved only for your sick days. How many sick days do you suppose someone with a chronic condition needs? The fact of the matter is people with chronic conditions can work but only if society is creative and empathetic to make space for it.
When COVID-19 rocked our world (perhaps the understatement of the decade), the assumption was anybody could have it and therefore people needed to stay home so that everybody wouldn’t get it. In short, it was assumed that everybody was sick – everybody was vulnerable so suddenly; it was possible to work from home despite the years your boss told you doing so would compromise efficiency. Suddenly universities complied online curriculums despite gaslighting students with disabilities that the infrastructure was not possible in the near future and yet here it is now. In many respects the situation is not ideal, nothing in a pandemic is ideal. It would be remiss of me to not mention that many have lost their jobs in this pandemic for obvious reasons but the reason that is not spoken of as much is how unprepared the working world was to consider the sick. Of course, not all occupations can be practised online, but it is now time to consider how can the workplace be restructured for someone living with a disability, for someone living with anxiety, for someone living with hypothyroidism, for anyone unable to meet the standard of health that requires we labour ourselves to literal death – which essentially is everyone.
COVID-19 for all its horribleness has presented an opportunity to reassess our narratives around sickness and wellness and hopefully has built within us an understanding that we are all susceptible to being sick and therefore empathy must be extended to those already defined as sick. It should also be a moment that makes us realise that our health should be dictated beyond our ability to work and, more importantly, it is time for society to restructure how work is done.
Surely, we must all be sick and tired of capitalism and all the ways it sucks out the joy in making a living - just think of how expansive that term “making a living” is and yet we have narrowed it down to just the daily act of clocking in and out of work. Revolution is the first solution cited to fight the predicament of our exploitative economic system (Karl Marx really stuck with us huh?) but there is also care and that is part of the solution that takes us through the deconstruction of oppressive systems and paves the way into new systems. Self-care has been our prescription for the pandemic and now more than ever it is necessary to extend care for the collective, care towards the sick and into the workplace and realise the truth, as Lorde (Audre) put it, that care is an act of political warfare.
REFERENCE
Hedva, J. (2015) “Sick Woman Theory” Mask Magazine – The Not Again Issue http://www.maskmagazine.com/not-again/struggle/sick-woman-theory
Sick Faces is a project that conceptualises chronic illness into make up looks.
Please check out the first episode – hypothyroidism. We go through the basics of the chronic condition, then delve deeper into Sancia's perceptions and relationship with her illness before getting into the very exciting part of conceptualizing the illness into a make-up look.