Fuck Consistency

Rejecting Consistency & Embracing The Fluidity of Chronic Illness In a Capitalist World.

Written by Lennox Orion

For many, the body they exist in is consistent. You can plan your week or month and feel certain of your capabilities & limits but what happens when you add in the unpredictability of chronic illness? Of capacities that ebb and flow, of pain that some days you push through and some days takes you under? What is it like to plan when you can’t see the future?

This is my reality. And the reality of millions living with chronic illness that shape how we move through our days, each slightly different than the one before and the one next.

Every morning I wake up and have to take stock of my capabilities, limits, and needs each day facing a new challenge, a new victory — and yet I must navigate the same unchanging demands. We talk about consistency as the hallmark of being an adult, or a good worker, good student, good friend but we don’t talk about how hard maintaining a façade of regularity is when my body is at war with itself. My entire life this one word consistent has stuck out like a harbinger of bad luck and not meeting my potential. From professors to employers they all have the same message “ incredible worker/student extremely motivated but is not reliable.”

And it always burns. Always begins as hot tears in my throat when I am fired or end a relationship on bad terms because I couldn’t show…