Fitting in normative time when working in crip time can cause jet lag

 Crip time, as defined here, is a

"flexible approach to normative time frames" 

https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/5824/4684

For me, it has meant having to negotiate and educate people and organisations that I am not being "lazy" or "slow", but that time just works differently for me. I often feel like I am in a different time zone, where notions of meeting deadlines, or doing certain amounts of work in a certain time frame is impossible. Unlike others my concept of time has to take into account my condition, and how it fluctuates in and out of needing time spending on caring for and maintaining my wellbeing. 

I read somewhere once that you can either have days where 

you can just go into the kitchen and make a cup of tea, (a 2 step day)

or days where

 you have to spend time and energy to movtivate yourself into the kitchen, then you have to find the cup, the spoon, walk to the fridge, get the milk out of the fridge, put the milk on the counter, pick the kettle up, fill the kettle up,  carry it back, put it on, wait for it to boil, pour it out, put the milk in and the tea bag (i dont drink tea so Im not sure o nthe right order :), stir it together with the spoon, wait for the tea bag to work and then carry it over, sit and drink it (a 20 step day)

the emphasis here is on how each of those steps are a usually unconscious part of "make a cup of tea", but for disabled people, sometimes, it is not that simple, and each step takes a great deal of energy and should be recognised on its own as an individual task. On a 20 step day, I am going to take longer to recover from every activity I do, because every activity takes more energy to complete and accomplish. Using the making a cup of tea analogy, sometimes those of us working on crip time have become adept at creating ways of working that cut some steps out and make us more efficient at tasks, not that we can acomplish more, just to make the task possible to complete within our own capacity. Drinking the tea without milk (or using a long life milk capsule) can cut a few steps out, putting the cup or the kettle next to the sink and filling it as we go past another few steps, you get the idea. 

This is all very well when working alone, without having to bump alongside normal time, but when you have to work within normal time, especially when normal time is fixed and unmoveable (like a university deadline), you have to get creative or risk getting jet lagged.

What I have found is that although it takes additional labour it can be a useful exercise to spend time trying to blend a normal time organisational strategy within crip time. As I have spent so long studying in higher education I can usually work out a good conversion.

Converting crip time to normal time takes practice and creativity. It also involves a lot of honesty and awareness of one's own capacity and working styles and speed.

The first job, as I did above is to break the task down into it's tiny parts. 

Next it's time to look at the tasks themselves to categorise them into different types. There are fixed time tasks that have to be done in a certain order, tasks that can be completed at any time, tasks that can be crip-adapted, and tasks that can and should be done differently. 

I then assign each task a rating of red, yellow or green, depending on how easy it will be to complete on different days. The red, yellow green rating is based on my mental energy, but it could be anything that is the biggest barrier to completing the work. 

Now as crip time is different, I try and assign each task it's appropriate crip time frame, which includes recovery, breaks, and my own working speed. This is more realistic. Instead of saying

"I'll spend an hour researching papers." 

"I'll spend 5 minutes reading my current progress notes"

"I'll write 5 search terms from those notes" (3 minutes)

I'll take a short 2 minute break to make sure I'm on task and check in to make sure I'm still ok.

"I'll do between 5-10 minutes of searching on the main uni library database, downloading anything that looks interesting in the first few sentences of the introduction". 

Break time so I don't get frustrated and overwhelmed with searching. completely doing something different and easy. Although my mind likes to wander during this time, I'm giving it time to wander and reflect on the process and how it can be improved. (15 minutes approx)

I'll spend 5 minutes reviewing the search terms and the articles to see if I can refine them any more than I have already for future searches. 

So my hour of work is broken up into crip time consideration and normal time consideration. It can get frustrating to be slower than my peers but this is not a competition, it's my own progress that matters. Some days I can do more than an hour, sometimes I can only do an hour.

So converting and working in both normal time and crip time together means that I am able to continue to work, even slowly on my bad days. It usually means I can keep some pace with my peers because I'm able to find something to do on most days. When it gets closer to deadlines though, especially when the task variety reduces and becomes harder is when it becomes challenging. Of course, there are times when crip time doesn't just "take priority" over normal time and it's demands, it takes over completely. It's why I try and make sure everything I do is not left at a point that I can't pick up days or weeks later. Every task has to have an end point, or at least a note of what to do next.

starting a research project- searching for a needle in a haystack

 I have tried to start searching for some research papers, or anything similar to what I want to base my work on. This is always a difficult task. It involves finding the exact keywords that someone else has also used on their work to describe what it is that they were researching. Even though I am trying to find out information on what happens when student assignments are considered narrative, and also creating a student journal based on student assignments (as a demosntration of student narrative) I can't just type that into a search engine and find it (although that is obviously the first attempt). 

The problem is that student assignments about narrative come up, as do lots and lots of other things about strudent assignment curriculm structure, creating a student journal as in a blog, and lots of other irrelveant things like that.

The trick is to keep searching, keep narrowing down what it is (and it is'nt) your searching for. You may think you are searching for lots of different articles or papers, the more the better, but actually, really, to start with, I only ever am searching for one. 

As soon as I have one, that I can anchor the rest of my searches from then it makes it so much easier to go forwards. The artcile itself will have lots of references in it that I can use to get more papers, and by reading it, will give me lots of linguistic clues to use to find more work of a similar nature. 

That is the needle in the haystack, the one thing I need to find to help me start. It helps me to reframe this part of the task as this, because it makes it less overwhelming to start with, and a bit more fun, because I am just bashing out lots of different words into google and the library search to see what I find, and then Ill just download the ones that I like the look of the abstract. 

Thats my other thing, I tend to work by separating the tasks I need to do down very carefully. Im not particularly well at the moment, so I know that I can't do much reading (or to be more accurate listening). What I can do is searching, and also preparing those articles to be read by a text reader when im well enough. 

Everything is separated as muich as possible so I can complete things in small chunks in small pieces of time, dpeneding on my ability at that time. 

What does healing mean?

I hope this helps some people rethink what healing means 🙂

If we only consider healing in a very medical sense, being completely cured, we can miss out on other ways to be healed that doesn't mean complete cure. Let me explain.

The social model of disability was made as a response to this medicalised view of our lives and that all the problems we have when we are ill or disabled come from something wrong with our bodies. It suggests that actually, we are more disabled by things outside of our bodies including other people's attitudes, Physical things and environmental things. So what the social model does is split the two things up and call them different things. Impairments are what is different about our bodies that may need medical help or treatment, but a disability is a man made thing that affects how our different bodies interact with the world. 

This was a great idea, because it meant disabled people could have something to fight for that unites them, and can make life better for all different bodies. It shifts the blame (and the solution) back onto society to change and include all bodies however different they are.

So for me personally this idea was very healing, because it meant that a lot of the bad stuff I had faced was no longer because of me, but because society wasn't set up for me, and it was them that needed to change. If a disabled person who needs a mobility aid finds a building only has steps, it's not their fault that they can't walk up them, it's the fault of the building for assuming that everyone can walk up stairs. If a disabled person can only work 2 hours a day before becoming tired and needing to stop, it's not the fault of the disabled person that the world of work expects a 7 hour day, or a 37 hour week. I also have come to realize that this goes both ways, and that I can also make changes to the way I live to make it easier for me that doesn't involve following "the rules". If it's easier to use an electronic can opener, it doesn't matter, the can still gets opened, or in my case, actually gets opened! ( That's because I'm left handed and can't open cans with a tin opener!)

So that was the first thing I learnt about looking at healing differently when I was doing my degree. The next thing is something I'm looking at now on my postgraduate degree. 

Whilst this idea is about mental illness and wellbeing it can be useful for everyone to think about it in relation to healing even if we can't be "cured". 

The idea of personal recovery in Mental health means living well within and despite limitations that are imposed on us, or because of our different bodies (this includes brains!). It's about finding meaning and a purpose in life that might be new or different to before illness, but is still just as valid. Recovery is about a whole person, and a whole life journey. It's about finding hope in the darkness, and remembering that even the tiniest flame can burn bright in dark times. Linked very close to this is social inclusion, which is very important in the recovery idea.

We can't do this journey alone, we need others to support us, and we can also support others, in a 2 way exchange of interconnection. We also need others to socialize, work with and to serve and be served by. 

I hope you can find new meaning in what healing means with these ideas and perhaps see that God is healing your life, perhaps not in the way you expect.

Teach a man to fish...

The saying goes if you teach someone to fish they will have food for life. No-one really thinks about the person who taught that person to fish, and what that can teach us about interdependence and the benefit of compassionate works. 

Learning to fish is not an instant thing, so it could take days or weeks of patience and getting the technique just right. Whilst this happens, the two people become friends and share whatever fish they might catch on that particular day. At first then, both benefit, as both don't go hungry. This is great, as it means that even if the person teaching has a bad day of fishing, they will still benefit from having an extra person around to share the reward with. 

As the student gets better at fishing and understanding how to fish, something else happens. Imagine for a moment that this person is not skill less, just not skilled at fishing. So this person who is fishing all day realises that with their engineering skills, they could improve the design of the fishing rod, and the other equipment. 

They do so, and share this with the teacher, who then benefits from a better rod and gathers more fish, so both benefit.

then imagine if the second person starts telling everyone they know about how great a teacher this person is, and all of a sudden, you have a whole network of people sharing their skills together and the results of those skills. 

So you could have a chef, who learns how to fish, but also teaches everyone how to cook the best fish, or an entrepreneur who shares with everyone how they could sell any fish left over and create a business. Or someone who understands chemistry and shows everyone how to keep their fish fresh.

All from one person teaching another how to fish. You dont just feed that person if you share your skills with each other, you can benefit everyone.