I Sh*t My Pants at Work
Literally. I literally shit my pants at 11:56am on Wednesday January 13th 2021. I got myself cleaned up and then I went back to work and finished the work day like that was a totally fucking normal thing to have happen. My partner offered to bring me clothes which I declined, I debated about heading home early, but ultimately, I just went back to my office and sat through meetings holding my head up waiting for the day to end.
I came home to my partner who looked at me with pity. What a hard day you must have had, his eyes said. And perhaps the more upsetting thing is that it really wasn’t that hard of a day. I had fully absorbed that shitting my pants was just one of the many mild to moderately shitty days one could have in a pandemic while dealing with Long Covid under capitalism.
Later that night I was overwhelmed by this internal voice shouting, “HELLO?! IS THIS THING ON?! YOU JUST SHIT YOUR PANTS AT WORK AND THEN KEPT WORKING. This isn’t normal! You shouldn’t work when you’re ill enough to be SHITTING YOUR PANTS.” My therapist has been teaching me to listen to my body’s whispers so I don’t have to hear its scream. Well. I’m not fucking sure I’ve mastered that yet.
I had fully reached collapse. I had sort of unknowingly known (and not yet ready to admit) this was happening to me but shitting my pants was a clarion call. I had been working while sick with Long Covid for so long, I had so deeply internalized that work was more important than my own health despite years of work trying to excavate that belief, and I was stretched so thin trying to earn enough money in this pandemic to keep our bills paid that it took me shitting. my pants. at work. to see how far away I had drifted from myself and how distorted my survival had become in this wild world.
That night, after I shit my pants at work, with the full clarity such a humble moment offers, I finally gave myself permission to file a short term disability claim as a direct path to take some time off work.
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I have managed (with varying degrees of success) various types of chronic illness for most of my adult life. I have been managing Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and depression for over a decade. I worked through acute mono in 2011 and then ended up with reactivated Epstein-Barr that went undiagnosed and untreated for something like a year and a half from 2016–2018. I had malaria in 2007 and did a full course of treatment for tuberculosis in 2016. Chronic fatigue has persisted through all seasons of my life: both during parts when I’ve lived most of my life from the couch and during other parts when I would ride my bike for 25, 30, 50, 70 miles at a time for fun. I have known the ways of chronic illness and been disabled-adjacent for big parts of my life. Long Covid in 2020, then, didn’t feel totally unfamiliar in the ways that even quite mild chronic illness or chronic fatigue can grind your functioning nearly to a halt.
Still. COVID is different. The exercise intolerance, the shortness of breath, the appetite changes. The headaches, body aches, stomach aches. The fatigue that wears you down to bone dust. The insomnia, the pants shitting, the brain fog and memory loss. Where you come home from work and spend every evening and every weekend recovering from the work week. Even through all of that and all the illness that proceeded it, I didn’t quite feel like I could claim that I had become disabled by the productivity demands of this capitalistic hellscape world. Until now.
So. Starting January 29th, I’m going to take advantage of a supportive supervisor, short-term disability insurance, and community care and I am going to take a couple months off work. I am going to sleep long. I’m going to read and stretch my aching muscles and go slow. I am going to try to learn what it means to center one’s own needs and ask for help and care for myself.
And. I’d like to tell you about the experience because I think I’m going to learn a lot and frankly my memory is absolute horseshit so I wont remember this transformational period if I don’t write it down. So find me here for dispatches from this place where me and my body get- as I saw on an aesthetic word -art IG post earlier today- what’s good of me, not what’s left of me. //
I can be found ranting on Twitter @colocha_rachel. You can see my dogs and my houseplants on Instagram @colocha_rachel.
