A life you can cope with
Toward the end of Wintering, author Katherine May talks to a woman named Dorte who lives with bipolar disorder. Dorte struggled with the condition for many years, endlessly adjusting medications that never seemed to make her feel better. One day she went in for an appointment and happened to see a new doctor. “He told her that they could keep tinkering with her medication, but it would never solve everything. ‘This isn’t about you getting fixed,’ he said. ‘This is about you living the best life you can with the parameters that you have.’” This encounter revolutionized Dorte’s approach to her condition, and her existence. In her words, “Nobody had ever said to me, ‘You need to live a life that you can cope with, not the one that other people want. Start saying no. Just do one thing a day. No more than two social events in a week.’”
When I first read this in December 2020, I laughed. TWO social events in a WEEK??? That’s so much! I haven’t had two social events in a year! Mostly I was laughing at how small and circumscribed my life had become, that the prescription chillaxing intended to ease a severe mental health crisis now seemed overwhelming to me. But the truth is, two social events in a week would have seemed like a lot to me even before the pandemic. And “do one thing a day?” I’ve built an entire life philosophy around it. I felt a wave of recognition reading Dorte’s story, and I also felt a twinge of embarrassment. Apparently I can’t cope with the world any better than a person with severe bipolar disorder? I have a less demanding schedule than someone in the throes of a serious breakdown? What’s wrong with me? Laziness does exist! I’m proof!
That’s ableism talking. Like racism and sexism, ableism has infected our entire society and everyone in it, even those of us who aren’t discriminated against for having a disability or being neurodiverse. It’s profoundly ableist that it took decades for a doctor to approach Dorte’s condition as something to be worked with, even respected, instead of something to be fixed. That no one had said to her before that she had the right to a life that worked for her. That the problem wasn’t her, but how the world refused to make space for her. It’s also profoundly ableist that the rest of us, the ones without bipolar disorder or disabilities or chronic illnesses, never hear this either. Our limits are framed as something to be pushed beyond and overcome, not something to be honored.
Dorte might reach her limits faster than other people do, and she might experience harsher consequences when she passes them. But that doesn’t mean she’s alone in having limits at all. Everyone has limits. Everyone needs a break. Everyone deserves permission to put as much time and energy into taking care of themselves as they need. Everyone deserves, as Dorte says, to live a life they can cope with. The fact that so few of us are given the chance to create what we need—and that you almost always have to be rich, white, and first-world to even try—should be considered a tremendous injustice and unacceptable societal failure. Instead, the Laziness Lie, and the brew of ableism and racism that created and feeds it, keeps us all thinking we’re the problem.
Laziness Doesn’t Exist and Wintering are very different books. The former is essentially self-help, and the latter is a memoir about one person’s specific experiences. But they are both about figuring out how to create the life you need, not the one anyone else thinks you should have. Maybe that always looks slower and more restorative than other people expect. Or maybe those times of deep rest and reflection are as temporary as they are necessary. No one can be their best self, or do the hard work of building a better world, from a place of exhaustion and depletion. Without the transformations of winter, we’d never have spring.
Note: More people are getting on the Wintering train lately. Here’s a piece featuring an interview with Katherine May in the The New York Times.