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| Re: ME Awareness Week. And some bad bells. [message #49710 is a reply to message #49690 ] |
Fri, 11 May 2012 06:48   |
Katsheare
Messages: 147
Registered: December 2011
Location: Berks., England |
Senior Member |
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This is one of the things I’d like to see more recognition of—that most people with ME are still capable of doing something—and most of us want to: who wants to be helpless, hopeless, dependent and bored?—but we need SLACK from the healthy, functioning world. We need FLEXIBILITY. The business/working/income-oriented world is still lousy about people who don’t fit their pattern. It’s like the colossal waste of energy and talent of parents who want to, you know, raise their kids themselves. The corporate world still seems to think that kids are something you do in your spare time, and that making widgets and earning money is the real centre of the universe. What is wrong with this picture.
Shortly before going on maternity leave (in California, happily, where I got about 3 1/2 months to get used to an ENTIRELY NEW LIFE, twice what much of the rest of the country gets) I was a shop steward at a prominent non profit dedicated to improving the lives of the community. We were trying to figure out ways of reducing costs so that we wouldn't have to go through a third round of layoffs in just over a year (we failed, which I found out sitting on my hospital room the day after my son was born) and one of our suggestions was flex hours, allowing more people to work more like freelancers: from home, clocking their hours, still coming into the office as need be, but with added flexibility. Flat out no. basically, the higher-ups and HR considered it too much hassle, and managers would have to actually put effort into managing which they were of course way too busy to do, and at the bottom of it was a lack of trust that the work would get done.
Allowing flexibility and differences of lifestyle requires trust, effort and innovation, none of which are rote enough to satisfy the concept of success that has ruled the west since the Industrial Revolution. I think that by doing what you do, writing (damn fine books, not kissing up, just they are) and bells and hurtling, and being successful at it, you are fighting the good fight. One of my hopes as we come out of a global economic smack-down is that families will keep to their non-traditional solutions, that more and more of us will have both parents working from home, showing the next generation that creating your own job is an option. That flexibility isn't weakness but empowerment. That someday those children will be our policy makers and doctors and journalists, that they won't be threatened by those who don't fit into rigid preconceptions. That someday preconceptions will be acknowledged as debilitating. That the things in life that are valuable will be valued.
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| Re: ME Awareness Week. And some bad bells. [message #49740 is a reply to message #49737 ] |
Sat, 12 May 2012 21:28 |
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| Katsheare wrote on Sat, 12 May 2012 10:20 |
| blondviolinist wrote on Sat, 12 May 2012 12:16 |
| CathyR wrote on Sat, 12 May 2012 02:45 |
And here was I, thinking that AJLR was such a pure-minded, upright and respectable person.
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I didn't think such people were allowed in the forums.
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Oh, people like that are allowed in. They just don't stay that way.
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I'm sorry, but I've been waiting for someone to say that *that's* how they got this way...
FairyTales - http://xkcd.com/872/
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What would we do without the latest update on towers, hurtling, bluebells, or the lack thereof? But I'm pretty sure that someone is just tickled pink that we're clamoring so loudly.) 
