theunitofcaring:

Sure. 

So imagine you’re at work one day when a fire alarm starts going off. Everyone clears the building, and the fire trucks come, and determine that it is a false alarm, and tell everyone to get back to work.

Except you can still hear the alarm. And it’s going off everywhere, too, in the coffee shop where you sometimes go when you get to work before the building is unlocked and in the student library across the street. And no one else minds it – they can hear it, if you ask them, but they don’t seem affected by it. 

So you try to get back to work, but you’re not really going to be very productive, because your concentration gets interrupted every ten seconds and after two hours you have a pounding headache and you wear earplugs and headphones but they only sort of help and also everyone thinks you’re being antisocial, wearing earplugs and headphones. 

At the end of the day you debate whether to drive home, because you’re not really safe on the road, what with the fire alarm drowning out traffic sounds and the headache. Maybe instead you take the bus, and get home an hour late, and your partner wants to watch TV with you but you have to bow out because you had an awful day, which you explain and apologize for and then go straight to bed.

And can’t sleep because the fire alarm is still going off right next to you.

Maybe you take a week off work to research hearing solutions, or ask your friends to research hearing solutions, or go to the doctor, or investigate how something like this happened. And a week turns into two, because you still can’t concentrate and you still don’t have a fix, and after two you really have to go back or you’ll lose your job. So you go to work and buckle down, but you’re sleep-deprived and can’t concentrate, and your commute is an hour longer each way because now you have to take the bus, and you know that even though you’re trying way harder than you ever had to at work – because usually you just had to do your job, you didn’t have to brush tons of pain and distraction and exhaustion out of the way just to do your job – your work quality is worse. You stay late to try to make up for it. It’s still worse. 

You can’t do your share of the housework, because you have three fewer hours in your day and feel terrible when you get home. Your partner asks you to run minor errands and you have to say “no, I can’t” – or maybe you say “yes, I can” and then a fire-alarm blast drives it out of your head and they have to remind you, or maybe you try and get halfway to the store and have to turn around because you have less energy than you thought. 

The thing I’m gesturing at here is – even if you do absolutely everything right, have a great work ethic and are really committed to your responsibilities and advocate well for yourself and take all the adaptive mechanisms available to you, if there is a fire alarm going off all of the time you are going to seem like a bad worker and a bad partner and a bad housemate. There just isn’t an amount of Protestant Work Ethic and Moral Virtue that can compensate for being sleep-deprived, miserable, unable to concentrate and in constant low-key pain. 

Now imagine you lose your job, because you can’t do it anymore, and Partner can’t support you. If you try to tell new employers “look, I can only do about a quarter of the work, but I’ll accept a quarter of the salary” they don’t call you back. If they ask why you left your last job and you answer truthfully, they don’t call you back. You can either pretend you’re healthy, and fake it like hell when you get a job, or you can fail to pay the bills. What’s the ethical thing to do now? What would a person in this situation do if they were maximally virtuous? Ask their social circle for help? What if this has been going on for ten years, and their social circle doesn’t understand what’s wrong with them and suspects them of faking it and is no longer interested in helping?

The difference between my sick self and my healthy self felt a lot like the difference between how I normally am and how I am with a fire alarm going off. I am pretty sure that the natural variance, in humans, in ability to do things, is as significant as the difference between you-with-a-fire-alarm and you-normally. Someone wrote on that post:

i ‘choose’ not to work because sensory processing disorder means the overload builds up day to day until – anywhere from a week to a few months in, depending on how noisy and busy the job is and how much i let the rest of my life be reduced to lying in a dark room trying to recover – i bluescreen and can’t function at all. like, never mind doing my job, i can’t put my pants on or drive a car, i can’t even function enough to get to my job.

i didn’t deserve to starve when i was on my own and repeatedly going through this cycle of struggling to work and getting fired. but i did starve. i wasn’t lazy; i was working harder than anyone. but mostly i was working to function through an ever-thickening chaos of misfiring neurons, so it didn’t ‘count’, and republicans still thought my food stamp money should have gone into their pockets because they work soooo hard.

This isn’t a hypothetical. This is how the world works for lots of people, some of whom are sometimes normal and have a reference point for what they’re capable of and some of whom don’t and think they just suck. And if you don’t think that a fire alarm going off would make you suddenly deserve to starve – if you think that worthiness of happiness is probably about things other than whether a fire alarm is going off – then I think you just have to conclude that lots of people are starving who aren’t all that different from you and me.