What the Chronic Illness and Disability Community can Teach People About Distress Tolerance
“Staying home for this long is so boring, I just can’t spend this much time at home.”
I could feel my eyes weaken and blur as I read that status update. My mind wandered back to when I first started getting sick with an autoimmune disease. At the time, I didn’t know what was wrong, beyond some vague abnormal lab results, but I was barely able to eat or get out of bed. I’d given up on school and my job as a pharmacy technician because my symptoms (and poor accessibility on the part of my school and place of employment) made them impossible to manage. There were periods where I stayed at home for weeks, unable to do anything besides sleep, watch tv, and read. I wasn’t angry that my friend was bored of being cooped up at home during the pandemic, I understood the frustration. But the people complaining about being bored at home or crying that they missed eating out at restaurants were the same people who had told me when I first got sick that I was lucky to be able to spend so much time at home. That it must be nice to “have a vacation.” Once these people were forced to stay home by factors entirely out of their control, they didn’t see an extended stint at home as a “vacation” anymore.
The COVID-19 pandemic is disproportionally hurting disabled people, including those…
