My enemies poisoned me... I’m unsure whether my enemies are the owners of a small restaurant in Bukhara or water quality inspectors in Uzbekistan. Still, they are out there, and I am here, begrudgingly typing from a hotel bed in Samarkand. E. coli 1, Diyora 0.
Apologies for missing last week’s newsletter; as you can gather from the introduction to this email, I’ve been seriously ill.
No one wants to spend their holiday being sick for seven days straight, but that’s been my reality. While my friends and partner explore the wonders of the Silk Road, I’ve been tuning into Russia’s finest propaganda channels streaming directly into the hotel TV – that and spewing my guts out.
Oddly, I've found the experience of being this unwell freeing. Besides spending a week in purgatory, I'm officially allowed to desert the responsibilities of the holiday. I don't have to be On. I don't have to go to the Top 10 Destinations. I don't have to politely say no to every market seller. I can just be gross in an air-conditioned bathroom and indulge in the endless scroll of the internet. The cherry on top is that in the short moments I pop my head out of my room, everyone on the trip treats me like a war veteran.
I haven’t always found it easy to allow myself the space to be properly sick. It’s only a recent development. Having spent much of my existence thinking I was a burden to others, I’ve worried that my ailments would somehow inconvenience the people around me.
In my first post-grad job, I was terrified to ask for sick leave — partly because I never saw anyone in a senior position take it. Whether in the throes of a disgusting migraine or the deep burn of a UTI, I would dose up on painkillers and come in regardless. Every piece of work we did felt Extremely Important. Our KPIs were high, so taking time off would only harm our own work performance.
In one instance, I felt extremely unwell after a holiday to Croatia, but having been gone away for a week, I was terrified to ask if I could go home. I came into work and couldn't get up from my seat. Each time I tried, my vision would pixelate. It was bizarre. I had to eventually put myself in a cab to go to A&E because I physically struggled to walk alone. The doctor told me nothing was wrong and that I was likely experiencing anxiety.
Only when I got horrifying intrusive thoughts – which instructed me not to leave the house in fear of accidentally dying – did I properly allow myself a few days off. My boss at the time was very nice about it, and yet, I still felt a hangover of guilt when I returned to work. I was convinced people thought I spent a week skiving.
After this minor mental breakdown, taking space for myself became easier because the intrusive thoughts (which came on and off for a few months) made it feel like staying at home was the difference between life and death. The experience was not one I’d recommend, but it taught me a big life lesson: when your body is showing you in every way possible that you need rest, whether through a violent vomiting episode, a panic attack or intrusive thoughts, you need rest.
Of course, I haven't entirely rid myself of the fear that people might think I'm pretending to be ill or grossly exaggerating my pain. Some might conclude that this results from not having enough "self-love" or prioritising health above all else, but I think it takes a lot of interpersonal and societal trust to feel like you can safely take space to be sick. Even at school, perfect attendance was praised, and if you were ill, you were expected to ‘suck it up’.
Let me evoke the theory of the social model of disability once more, which proposes that people are disabled by societal barriers, not by their internal impairment or difference. Applying the same logic here, it’s only a problem that we’re sick if we live in a society that doesn’t allow us to be, discarding us as soon as we are. Georgina Johnson writes that within a capitalist society “a profit-driven welfare system [repeatedly puts] into question the viability and useability of the ill body.”
When workers' rights are on the floor, and good jobs are few and far between, taking time off or even asking for a lighter workload might feel an impossible task. I've seen many friends get engulfed by job stress, having to modify their schedules for colleagues who don't respect their time. The growing fear of replaceability, whether by someone willing to work for worse conditions or AI, must only be adding to the problem. There is no rest for the wicked.
Wouldn’t it be much nicer if we were fully trusted in relationships and could ask for what we need when unwell? Or if the workplace had the kind of sick policies that encouraged people to take all the time they needed to get better? In my previous job, you could take mental health days and didn't even have to explain what they were for. Better working conditions like this create environments filled with support rather than criticism, which is what most people need to recover from an illness. We’ve seen glimpses of this version of society since Covid-19 came into our lives; when communities gathered to help the sick, and workplaces were more flexible to employees working from home, believing them when they said they were ill.
Until we collectively drop toxic attitudes around illness, I’ll add to the resistance by staying in bed for a little while longer.
What I enjoyed this week
This profile of Caroline Calloway in Vanity Fair
Deborah Levy’s latest novel August Blue
Love On The Spectrum on Netflix has been my binge-watch in bed
What I’ve been up to this week
I’m still doing general research in Uzbekistan and have a piece coming out soon about hay fever. I’ve also started DJ lessons, and it’s been very fun!