Tuesday was the one year anniversary of this very special Medium post I wrote called “I Sh*t My Pants at Work”. I posted it on January 25th, 2021 which was 366 days ago and also maybe 17 years. Writing this post was my shockingly vulnerable public admission that I had not been doing well for a long time and needed to drop everything and take care of myself. I wrote very plainly about the fact that I had pooped my pants at my social services job and just threw away my underwear and worked the rest of my day. Because, apparently, pooping your pants in the middle of the work day, is just an average Tuesday in the club I’ve come to call the Undignified Covid Things Club. That work, my job at a harm reduction residence for old men who use alcohol daily, was demonstrably the number one priority in my life: a higher priority than my basic dignity and hygiene.
When I realized, later than night, after the pants-pooping, how entirely fucked up this whole situation was, I immediately recognized that I needed to ask for a medical leave at work. I could barely tolerate working one more day of my life because I felt so disconnected and upside-down in my relationship to myself that I urgently needed to get out. I lasted about two weeks with modified hours from the pants-pooping to my actual last day before my short-term disability (STD) was supposed to start.
And once my leave started on January 29th, I crashed- hard. It became super clear that I had been relying on living in a nearly-permanent state of activated nervous system to get through my job. There were a lot of reasons for this, the easiest of which to explain being Long Covid. Post-viral fatigue, especially with a super virus like Sars-cov-2, is not a fucking joke and I had been only barely surviving my job for months at this point. All of my energy was spent trying to get through the work day and all of my off time was spent trying to recover from the work day enough to get back to work. When I pooped my pants, I had already been missing 2-3 days of work per month since starting my job in April 2020- I had never had this level of absenteeism before.
But it wasn’t just the Long Covid and the acute ME/CFS. I also had been in a grueling season of grad school and near-poverty from January 2018-March 2020. My last day of class for my Master’s of Social Work was Thursday March 12th, the day before Governor Walz declared “lockdown” for Minnesota. For the week that ended up becoming the first week of lockdown, I had already planned a staycation from my homeless shelter job as a reward for finally finishing the program that stole my mental health, my soul, and almost stole my marriage. My graduation was postponed to June 2021; I never attended.
And it wasn’t just the recovery from grad school either. The job I started in April 2020 was supposed to be this easy, 9-5, housing case manager job that I was pretty overqualified for. It was at a building designed for single adult men who are alcohol users; “a wet house”. I was excited about doing harm reduction work and bringing my skills to a place that sorely needed some fresh ideas. Most of the men were in their 50s and 60s and had been drinking alcohol every day of the last multiple decades. It was 8 minutes from home by car, on a direct bus route, and wouldn’t require me to work swing shift homeless shelter hours anymore. It wasn’t a clinical position (the type of job I should have been trying to get after finishing a Master’s in Social Work in Mental Health and Trauma); it was a regular social service job. It was supposed to be the “recovery period” job I took after limping to the finish line of that damn MSW.
Of course the pandemic arrived in Minnesota at the exact same time as I was starting this job and within only, like, 18 days of being employed there, I tested positive for COVID-19 at the very first mass-testing event on our housing campus. 25 of my residents- and me- had COVID within the first 30 days of my employment there.
This was still the early early wave of the pandemic so I had phone calls with the Minnesota Department of Health (who considered my case asymptomatic): contract tracing was still a thing then. I did 10 days of quarantine at home. Working with 70 men with every single high-risk factor, I was operating from the place that I was going to be working at a charnel house and I was terrified. We got hazard pay for a while; and our job provided us masks and goggles. Every day we had to take every resident’s temperature and do symptom screening. And anyone who had symptoms or a positive COVID test had to isolate themselves in their rooms as much as possible (it’s like herding 250 pound drunk cats). Staff transported meals to these isolated residents three times a day. We had to close our TV lounges and our dining hall. Guys were allowed to drink alcohol in their rooms for the first time in the history of the building to minimize congregating.
It was honestly a goddamn miracle that only one man died (and he was dying before COVID), and only two more needed a hospital stay. Most had asymptomatic COVID like me. The temp screenings and monitoring a to-go meal line and trying to get surly drunk men to isolate in their rooms when they were sick went on for months- over a year actually. In July 2020, we had an incident where three different men had an accidental fentanyl overdose in the same morning. I used my Narcan and my CPR skills for the first time in my life and the first guy still died. The other two guys survived.
Between the fatal overdose in July 2020 and the pants-pooping in January 2021, I also broke up a knife fight in the parking lot, picked up grown men off the floor and wheeled them back to their rooms countless times, responded to innumerable medical emergencies, deescalated countless interpersonal issues, attended a few resident memorials, contained a couple mental health crises, and found two different residents deceased in their rooms. One of those men had been dead for three days in a pile of his own hoarded garbage; I had to leave early to go home and shower to get the smell out of my nose. The job I thought was going to be my recovery-from-grad-school job had turned into this mangled, frazzled, sweaty, trauma-laden thing that I no longer recognized (and that doesn’t even mention the staffing issues, the upper management issues, the NPIC issues that pervade all social service agencies in this town).
The pandemic conditions, the uniquely stressful constellation of things that happened at work, the exploitative work conditions, and the post-viral illness I had been ignoring caught up with me. Pooping my pants at work fundamentally rearranged how I understood what capitalism (and social work in particular) had ground me into. I was just sort of a tachycardic, sweaty (just really so much sweating) husk performing the motions of labor and care.
When, after a few weeks of total collapse, my head finally rose above water during my medical leave, I wanted to write about the fuckery of work. I wanted to eviscerate everything we have internalized about work. I wanted to scrabble out anti-work manifestos. I wanted to shout from metaphorical rooftops about how work is destroying all of us and it’s by design. I thought that’s what this blog was going to be when I first started thinking about it.
Now, though? A year later? Long-term disabled, asked to resign because I couldn’t do my job, unemployed for 4.5 months and counting, not able to work in the foreseeable future? I don’t want to (talk about) work anymore. I don’t have the energy to talk about work anymore. I don’t have the energy to do the verbal-throttling I hoped to do in an effort to wake up the professional class people in my life. I just don’t want to spend a single additional second giving any energy or legitimacy or attention to work, careers, job development, meetings, circling back, lean staffing, non-profit bullshit. None of it. Jenny Odell talks about withholding our *attention* as one of the last remaining personal resources available to us and I find I want to apply that here.
It feels like a pretty… essentialist attitude to the whole thing, honestly, and I’m not sure if that’s a super useful or sustainable approach to take but it is where I am. And that needs interrogating, too. People, even in collapse, have to work to survive in this country and the fact of my disablement functions, as Jasbir Puar explains in The Right to Maim, as something of a privilege in its legibility and access to care*. Many many people in this country- Native, Black, and brown women in particular- work through chronic illness and disability ALL THE TIME and don’t even identify themselves as ill or disabled. The fact that I am not working and the fact that I just refuse to spend any energy thinking about work is a real part of my disability experience and it also is a material product of the way that the logic of disability-as-exceptional is used to obscure state-sanctioned debilitation of the masses for the purpose of controlling them. So I gotta marinate on that more.
Still. I just want to write about possible futures for disabled and debilitated people. I want to plant wildflowers in my backyard and talk about access and world-building. I want to practice at a future that doesn’t include work as we know it under capitalism.
I’m trying to be dynamic and just write what is in my current stream of thoughts and the connections I’m making in almost-real-time. It’s not meant to be prescriptive, it’s meant to be fluid, curious, flexible, influenceable, and reconsidered again. Thanks for taking the time to engage with me.
