If you’ve ever subjected yourself to modern-day hustle culture (let it be college, career, or personal), you’ve probably heard someone say, “We all have the same amount of time in the day! There’s no excuse for not being able to do [insert reasonable difficult and time-consuming task here].” Yes, you can definitely argue that everyone is given the opportunity to use the same 24 hours however they please, but an often-overlooked idea (willingly or not) is that we don’t get to choose every single second of those hours. And I don’t just mean people with chronic illness, I mean every single person. Like it or not, everyone has limits and will eventually succumb to their bodily needs (shocking right?).
Chances are you’re a human, so I won’t waste either of our times going further into that. My goal with this post is to call out the ableism of this phrase. At the time of writing this, I’m 23, working full-time and working toward my Master’s. Oh yeah, and I have a lot of stuff going on inside my body. I have documented Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, Idiopathic Hypersomnia, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, and some less-important others, along with speculated Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome and Mast Cell Activation Syndrome. If any of that was foreign to you, don’t bother Googling it unless you have hours to spend falling down the rabbit hole of invisible illnesses that “no one knows about.” I’ve been learning about them for years and still feel like I know nothing—and I actually live with them! Anyway, let me break down why I, a young-but-not-so-healthy 23-year-old and, say, my fairly able-bodied 22-year-old roommate (or any other generally healthy individual of my age group) do not in fact have the same 24 hours in our days.
Things That Take Up My 24 Hours
- My body requires that I get more sleep. Idiopathic hypersomnia (IH) in itself literally* means “unprecedented requirement of more sleep.” It’s recommended that people with IH aim for 10-12 hours of sleep per night (yes, you read that right–that’s about half of my 24 hours). I usually sleep 5-6 hours at night and then take 4–5-hour naps when I get home from work (when I’m not absolutely required to do other things). *I’m not a dictionary.
- I work. Um, hate to break it to you, Mary, we all work! I mean I’m at work from 7am-3:30 doing my job. That’s 8.5 hours of my day that isn’t mine. And sure, this is something most people deal with, but later on in this post I’m going to do some fun math to show you how much that factors into my day versus, say, my roommate’s.
- I have so many doctors’ appointments (although, not as many as people with other conditions, so props to you out there if that’s you). When I was in college, I fell into the habit of scheduling “appointment weeks” where all my appointments happened within the same 10-ish days every 3-6 months. Even though this isn’t every day, those weeks are excruciating because most of my doctors are not in the same town that I live in; on average, it’s a 30-minute drive. That’s 30 minutes there, 15 minutes in the waiting room, anywhere 10-45 minutes in the actual appointment, and then 30 minutes back home.
- Getting my meds ready is a task. This is one I’ve never really heard about online, but it’s a huge pet peeve for me. Every week, I have to spend at least 5-10 minutes getting my meds ready for the week, because if I don’t do the whole week at once, I won’t take them. And now I’m actually on a new med that I have to take every night that can’t be “prepared” more than 24 hours in advance. Then, of course, if I need anything refilled, my pharmacy is a 40-minute drive. I try to work that into a planned trip, though, just to feel better about it.
- Going to school means doing homework. I mentioned I’m working towards my Master’s. If you’ve ever taken a college class, you’re probably familiar with the credit-hour rule, where a 3-credit class will require 3 hours of class/week and 9 hours of out-of-class work (homework, assignments, readings, research, etc). No one’s standing over you with a stopwatch to make sure you’re hitting those 9 hours, but you generally have to put work in if you want a good grade in the class and actually retain the information once the semester ends.
- I have tummy issues. Cramps and gas are probably the worst of these issues, but it’s hard to tell when a cramp is just a cramp or when it’s a warning sign, so there are times I spend half an hour in the bathroom, ready for the worst, and nothing happens.
- I have friends and they try to get me to have a social life. My friend group is a generally introverted one, so I don’t mean “let’s go to the bar and pick up boys!” I mean “let’s take ice skating lessons!” If you haven’t’ figured it out by now, I don’t live close to anything (except my job, for some miraculous reason) so ice skating lessons doesn’t just mean the hour every Saturday to go for the lesson plus whatever public skate sessions we went to, it included a 45-minute drive one-way.
- My body doesn’t really work well. My joints fall out of place, my muscles go into spasm, my brain forgets things like that’s its job. A simple task for the average person is a real feat for me. I’m not saying brushing my hair every day is “my Everest” but I am saying it’s such a task that I only do it every couple of days. When I know I need to brush my hair and my body is just fighting me on it (dislocated wrists, bicep spasms, dizziness from having my arm up for so long), sometimes I reach out for help. My roommate is amazing and very understanding, so she does help me out when she can, but I try not to be greedy about her help, so I try to make it as convenient for as possible.
- I have a strict* gym regime. Due to #8 being such a pain, I decided to start working out to try to combat most of those issues. Well, they’re in my genetic code so there’s only so much I can do, but working out does help keep my body as physically in-line as I could have hoped. I have fewer dislocations and less generalized pain. But (location, location, location) my gym is a 20-minute drive, so with a 45 minute workout, we’re talking about a rough hour and a half for this part of my day. *I do have terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days where I simply cannot (and should not) go, and I also have days where I need to get other stuff done (crazy, with all this time I have in my day, huh?) so I push this off for later.
Let’s Do Some Math
I probably missed a few things, but I think I hit the biggest factors. Okay, let’s look at my roommate’s TYPICAL 24 hours first:
-4 hours of sleep/night (we both know this isn’t ideal, but she’s young and has the energy to make this choice)
-1.5 hours for gym w/ me 🙂
-45 minute drive to work
-8.5 hours at work
-45 minute drive home
So we have: 24 – 4 – 1.5 – .75 – 8.5 – .75 = 8.5 hours. That’s roughly 8.5 hours to pick and choose what she does with her time. She’s tired? She has time to take a nap. Her room is messy? She has time to clean it, too. Wow, found a new recipe she wants to try? I think she can squeeze it in.
Now let’s look at my day:
-5 hours of sleep/night
-1.5 hours for gym w/ roommie
-8.5 hours at work
-1 hour of listening to my body (massaging sore muscles, toilet time, extra naps)
-4 hours for napping
This looks like: 24 – 5 – 1.5 – 8.5 – 1 – 4 = 4 hours. Sure 4 hours is still enough time to watch Oppenheimer and run a quick errand but let me remind you that the point of this post is to shine a light on the ableism of “everyone has the same amount of time in the day.” I don’t have the choice not to sleep half my day away without suffering major consequences (like the potential to fall asleep at the wheel). I’m lucky I have the ability to even split up that sleep time or I feel like I’d really never get anything done.
Obviously, these are the things that interrupt my day. If you talk to someone who has severe allergies or light sensitivity, their days might look different than mine. Everyone has things that they dedicate their time to; it’s just that some people have to dedicate their time to taking care of their body before they can do whatever they want.
Now, if you’re a spoonie, I hope you found some solace in this article. I guess it kind of really is the definition of the Spoon Theory that I’m getting at here. If you don’t even know what a spoonie is but you’ve stuck around this long, thank you! I hope you can see that some people really just don’t have the time in their day to be doing everything that Next-Door-Nelly is doing, regardless of whether or not they have a chronic illness. If you’re someone who has said this phrase before, maybe just don’t say it the next time you want to. Don’t assume that the person you’re talking to is healthy and that this post doesn’t apply to them, because to see me, you probably wouldn’t think it applies to me either. I don’t look “sick.” According my ex-cardiologist, I don’t even “look” like I have EDS (thanks so much for pulling out your phone to Google what EDS was and reading that very brief and not entirely representative description of the population who has this condition, good job, doc!).
This might have been a bit aggressive for my very first post here, but this is something that’s important for me to say. Not every post on here will be this…passionate 😉 And not every post will be about chronic illness. I still have those 4 hours to be myself and I enjoy things other than dwelling on what my body can’t do compared to others’. Stick around for more posts involving chronic illness, being a young woman figuring out life, financial organization, some ecominimalism tips, and even some posts about the #TeacherLife. In the meantime, let me know what kind of things take up your 24 hours below!