Balancing your mental health with your physical health while being chronically ill sometimes feels impossible. But we are here to tell you that you are not alone in struggling with this.
What you need are some simple tools that will help you when things get tough and remind you that you are worthy of love no matter how productive you are and you’ve come to the right place.
WHAT ARE USABLE HOURS AND WHAT HAVE THEY GOT TO DO WITH CHRONIC ILLNESS?
Usable hours is a way of explaining how fatigue affects your ability to do things. We all have the same number of hours in a day but for someone with fatigue, they only have a limited number in which they can complete tasks.
Why disabled people have a rocky history with academia
Unfortunately, when it comes to education, academic institutions often fail even the most basic tests in accessibility. Learning how to make education accessible for students (and educators) with a whole range of disabilities should be an ongoing priority for schools, colleges and universities, but it seems many still have serious lessons to be learnt.
When we look at disability, there are two very different models used, called the medical and social models of disability.
The medical model looks at disability as something that needs to be fixed or changed. Disability is seen as a bad thing, even if it doesn’t cause someone pain or harm.
The social model of disability says that a person is only disabled because of society’s inaccessibility and the way it treats disability, rather than their difference.
Let’s explore the differences between the two models in more detail!
Inspiration p⭐rn is a term that was coined in 2012 by disability rights activist Stella Young.
This term portrays people with disabilities as inspirational, solely or in part because of their disability and describes how disabled people are often used as motivation for non-disabled people.
Stella’s reason for using the term p⭐rn was to highlight the objectification of one group of people for the benefit of another group of people.
So what exactly is inspiration p⭐rn and why can this term be a bad thing? Let’s take a further look!
When we find ourselves in conversations about minor illnesses, even a cold, there is a tendency for people to use the language of war, such as fighting or battling.
People with medical conditions are often called “warriors” and under this description are encouraged to battle their illness and push themselves.
Using the term warrior can be helpful for some people as a means of describing the challenges of being sick to others who are not living with an illness. But for others, the narrative can make them uncomfortable.
This isn’t to say that it’s not a struggle for them, but people with chronic illness are who they are first and foremost, and not a warrior.
Let’s look into why the warrior narrative doesn’t feel helpful and comfortable for some of the chronic illness community.
With the wellness industry valued at $3.7 trillion in 2015 and continuing to be on the rise, it can be easy to get sucked into the latest wellness trends and crazes.
Many are jumping on the wellness bandwagon and while this may seem like a positive thing, it is not so positive when it comes to chronic illness.
There are juice bars on every corner, mindfulness apps advertised relentlessly on social media, and wellness influencers praising celery juice or the latest cleanse as a miracle cure. These serve as constant reminders of the unrealistic promise that you can recover from any illness with enough work.
But this is not the only reason why wellness culture is so bad for the chronic illness community.
Wellness culture has been influencing the beliefs of doctors more and more, to the extent that they believe it’s a one size fits all cure for everything, even if it ends up harming you in the long run.
At some point along your journey I hope that someone has told you that your illness is not your fault but how much do you actually feel that?
Our brains are designed to analyse information and make meaning out of the chaos that is life. When something as big as chronic illness happens it’s very hard for the brain to compute that there isn’t something that we can do to control the situation so we turn it inwards.
We see this in trauma work time and time again. When an event is too big for the brain to process that’s when the narrative of self blame crops up. It is easier for us to blame ourselves than it is to accept that there is nothing that we can do to change the situation.
