#subversivelife

It is strange how quickly a person becomes suspicious when they do nothing.

When they lie still.

When they wait.

When they do not produce, explain, optimise, or move on.

When they look out the window.

Sleep.

Watch films.

Game at night.

Think thoughts without turning them into something that can be measured, shared, or used.

There is something deeply subversive in simply being.

For a society built on activity, progress, and function, it is almost unbearable to encounter a person who does not want to—or cannot—fall into the rhythm.

A person who does not get up on time, does not fit into the choreography of the day, does not respond to the demands of development, health, efficiency, and normality. A person who waits until hunger comes. Until tiredness comes. Until a real impulse comes.

It is not just laziness we fear.

It is the loss of control.

Because if a person has value even when lying on a sofa for several days just existing, then an entire moral framework begins to falter. Then a person is not only something by virtue of their usefulness. Then life is not only legitimate when it is productive, slim, alert, fast, clever, healthy, and socially legible.

That is why disability, illness, and suffering are so often turned into something that must immediately be overcome, alleviated, corrected, or hidden.

Not only because suffering hurts.

But because it also disrupts the narrative of the good and proper life.

The sick body disrupts the ideal of control.

The disabled body disrupts the ideal of independence.

The tired body disrupts the ideal of willpower.

The grieving, slow, or dysregulated body disrupts the ideal of flexibility and adaptation.

And the one who simply is, without becoming “better”, disrupts almost everything.

There is therefore a quiet rebellion in not being ashamed of being too much, too little, too slow, too heavy, too tired, too different, too ill, too strange, too dependent, too unfinished.

Something rebellious in not making one’s life palatable to the norm.

Perhaps that is precisely why we struggle to love people unconditionally in their difference.

The elderly.

The sick.

The disabled.

Children who do not fit in.

Young people who live at night.

People who do not want to conform to so-called normal rhythms.

People in suffering.

People in pause.

People who are not “driving things forward”.

To love them requires that we give up the idea that human dignity must be earned.

That is a radical thought.

That a person does not have to justify their existence.

That a life does not become more sacred by being efficient.

That there is also dignity in waiting.

In stillness.

In darkness.

In recovery.

In dependence.

In the unfinished.

In what hurts.

In what cannot be fixed.

There is something deeply human in the body that can no longer do more.

In the soul that withdraws.

In the one who survives by doing less.

In the one who lives at night among other bats and finds community there, where daylight does not demand explanation.

Perhaps they are not the problem.

Perhaps it is a society that can only recognise life when it resembles performance.

And perhaps one of the most subversive things a person can do is simply this: