I’ve been struggling with some guilt over presumed weakness as we get ready to roll into a whole new season of distance learning this fall. Acutely aware of all my privileges (secure household income; everyone healthy aside from their chronic conditions; physical safety; access to food and shelter and health care; racial, class, and educational privileges galore; and especially the fact that 2 out of 3 adults here can stay home, and I am available for childcare/facilitating remote school because I don’t have a paying job), I feel bad… for feeling bad. Why am I so stressed and exhausted? It’s not like I’m juggling a full time job on top of everything else, or dragged down by stress about how to make the mortgage payments. I don’t feel like I deserve to be this tired.

But my boyfriend kindly reminded me that I probably shouldn’t be judging myself by the default standards in this, and it was a useful and necessary reminder. The fact is, I always have to spend extra spoons on rest and self-care thanks to my chronic pain. The fact is, I was already shouldering a lot of the household’s collective executive functioning load—so if finding more capability to hold remote schooling together feels like a huge challenge, that’s because it is. In the spring, I kept saying, how am I supposed to facilitate learning for my kiddo? I was never trained to be a special ed teacher! It’s still true. And I was out of the workforce for some very good reasons. If I’m laboring and sometimes faltering now under the load of increased expectations and lessened time to rest…. well. That seems pretty understandable. My increased responsibilities ate through any ‘extra’ down-time I might have had, and then started taking a big juicy bite out of the down-time I really needed for my mental and physical health.

The comparison game is a fool’s game. Other people having it worse doesn’t mean I can’t legitimately have it bad. It’s true in health and mental health, and it’s true in life more generally. Having a struggle in one area doesn’t mean my privileges aren’t still there supporting me—but support in some areas doesn’t magically mean support in all areas. Any missing piece is hard. My struggle is valid.

A lot of these assumptions and thought processes are rooted in capitalism. Only the productive have value, and your worth therefore depends on your ability to be productive. Our society doesn’t naturally value rest, or prioritize health, or care about mental welfare. It makes all of the household contributions that I was already making (cooking, cleaning, organizing, planning, delegating, educating, parenting) effectively invisible. So then of course I feel bad for being unable to do all of these additional (still unpaid) pandemic-spawned jobs on top of my existing invisible jobs. Looking through a capitalist lens, I was doing next to nothing!

Which jobs will see us through this? Does it mean more that I manage telehealth visits or wash the laundry or figure out how to order hand sanitizer or stock the pantry or worry about our exposure or buy masks? Or does it also matter, deeply, that I bake sourdough bread and make some art and read a book and let my kid watch extra videos on YouTube and connect with friends over social media and arrange video calls with relatives? Life is made out of an awful lot of things, my loves. And some of the brightest, most nourishing ones are invisible in capitalist terms.

I don’t know where you’re at, what privileges you enjoy or what challenges you labor under. But I do know that 2020 is adding to everyone’s burden, and the best we can do is to build each other up. Remember to ask for help when you need it. Don’t feel guilty if you need a break, or can’t do as much as you think you should. Put one foot in front of the other. Don’t forget to take care of yourself while you’re taking care of everyone else. It’s okay to be burned out and less capable than usual. Just concentrate on getting through.