Awesome Disabled

Things have been changing fairly quickly for me over the past few years. Five years ago, I had one marriage, one home, two children, a dog, and a cat. Now I have no marriage, an apartment, the same two children, and a bird. And an autism diagnosis thrown in, to boot. Plus that whole 2020 event that changed the way we lived our lives.

I have had an ongoing relationship with work, as I have been reckoning with my diagnosis and what it means for me as a worker. This continues to be an exploration of mine, and the past few months have not provided me as much job security as I’d hoped. I’m on a journey on both my personal and professional lives, and weighing a lot of heavy things in the balance.

I’ve been told to wait a lot in the past few months. I’m waiting on a job, I’m waiting on a health result. Just waiting. Like Dr Suess’s the waiting place. I feel like I should write a horror movie about it– truly, one of the most disturbing concepts ever is to be suspended in time and space, like Han Solo in carbonite, or a genie trapped in a bottle. In my mind, there’s an element of cosmic dread to being told to wait.

All this waiting has been exhausting. I have never been a patient person, and this is wearing me the heck out. Plus, I don’t generally trust the forces in my life to be able to come through in the ways that they’ve promised. Gradually, I am unpacking all of the trauma and shame from decades of living this way, but it’s hard work and I hate it.

Luckily, I have planned well for this season of waiting. Like the ant in the parable of the Ant and the Grasshopper, I’ve stored up resources to be able to provide for myself and my children in this idle season. (Although a quick Google rabbit hole showed me that this parable has been interpreted to be critical of the ant for its greed and for hoarding resources. So who knew? Maybe a socialist parable? I definitely feel some guilt about stored resources in general, so I can see there being some ambiguity in the interpretation of this fable.)

I’ve had a couple of nights of awful sleep, due to the heat. It’s taken me forever to get to sleep, and I’m sure what sleep there is is restless and sparse. Today, I actually managed to do some good work in the morning– I did some classwork, some writing and editing, and I poked around doing some tidying. After a couple hours, the exhaustion hit. I tried to fight it for a bit and force myself to be productive, but I just kept hitting the wall. So I decided the most productive thing I can do today is rest. Like after surgery, how the best thing you can do is rest and heal. I’ve had the equivalent of an emotional hip replacement– I need to let that shit heal.

I was also reflecting on some of the less-toxic parts of my Christian upbringing. How Jesus sat and listened to stories. How he played with the children. He left a lot of time for rest and community. (Yes, he didn’t have to do domestic labor and that makes a difference. But still.) In most religious traditions, rest is holy. As a disabled woman, rest is no less holy for me, and in fact, it’s more necessary, because I’m the only one who can give it to myself. Resting my body and mind means that I am taking control of my energy expenditure. It’s a refusal to give my emotional, mental, and physical energy to unworthy causes. To protect it.

My energy is sacred, and its protection is sacred. So I decided to lay in bed and watch a terrible horror movie. After a while, my bird Timothy came to join me. This is us:

I put out a water container for him, so that he stays hydrated (and I’m making sure to drink lots of water myself). Plus, for extra comfort, I brought myself a can of diet A&W root beer. It’s a yummy treat, and it’s worth enjoying. Eating in the heat is hard work for me, so I piled up a load of veggies into a bowl and bowl of mayo dip. (Mayonnaise is one of the most delicious substances on earth, and I am willing to fight anyone who disagrees about it.)

So I ate veggies, watched horror movies, and rested. There’s been enough heavy stuff– it’s time for some lightness. There will be time for hustling later, when it’s not hot as an armpit.

I hope you find time for some intentional rest, too. There is a time to fight, and a time to rest. We rest today, and tomorrow we continue the worthwhile fight.