A social worker colleague from my graduate school program reached out to me today to give me an update on how she’s been doing in her own Long Covid saga. There was a lot in her message but a key element was reckoning with the fact that she can no longer keep up with her social work job and the guilt she feels about leaving these clients she cares about for “an easier job” that she can manage with Long Covid. I also just exited my own social work job and I, too, felt a lot of guilt about leaving my guys (the clients at my job).
Guilt, as Audre Lorde explains it in The Uses of Anger, is “the ultimate protection for changelessness” and “only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees”. Guilt keeps us from changing even when we know we need to change. Of course, it’s not actually our fault that we both became too sick, too rundown, too disabled to the job of caring for other people professionally even though it might sometimes feel like it. This is part of the stigma of disability, right? When we become disabled, we feel individually responsible for our new “failure” to keep up with the expectations of our jobs- a sad reality under capitalism.
Perhaps that’s why I felt so much recognition when I first heard about Jasbir Puar’s concept of debility. I first heard about this concept when a friend sent me a picture of a reference to debility in Harsha Walia’s book Border & Rule (a book I haven’t yet read). There, Walia says “debilitation is a state of being causing slow death that is endemic to capitalist and imperialist plunder. In contrast to neoliberal framings of disability as exceptional or symptomatic, debility is the quotidian, racialized biopolitics of ‘working and warring'”. Whew, debility is a 2021 MOOD. I was immediately hooked on this idea and while I haven’t read Jasbir Puar’s The Right to Maim (2009), I did find this quote in this post about debility:
“[The concept of debility] foregrounds the slow wearing down of populations instead of the event of becoming disabled. While the latter concept creates and hinges on a narrative of before and after for individuals who will eventually be identified as disabled, the former comprehends those bodies that are sustained in a perpetual state of debilitation precisely through foreclosing the social, cultural, and political translation to disability.”
Jasir Paur, 2017
This is just my own introduction to the concept of debility but you can be sure I’m going to dig in more a little further down the stack of books-to-read next to my spot on the couch. Stick around here for more thoughts. .