As a person living with dynamic disability, my functional capacity differs day-to-day on a number of levels.

Some days on here, the best I can do is signal boost content by others and try to be kind.

Other days, I can write threads that take hours.

Just putting that out there.

Variable capacity is common to human experience and not limited to those living with chronic illness, chronic pain, and other disabilities.

Variable capacity is simply part of life more pronounced for some of us. Human beings aren’t machines or computers.

We never have been.

I would be interested to know when this idea of human functioning being a constant state rather than a highly variable one came to be.

I imagine it might have been during the “industrial revolution” and the period when our humanity was reduced to labor and our worth to output.

If anyone knows more about this subject, please feel free to share. I also welcome any recommendations in terms of reading or thought leaders on this subject.

For anyone out there who tends to beat up on themselves about this, please know you are more than your “productivity”

I feel like concept of constant state functioning must also be rooted in the rise of male supremacy and patriarchy.

Girls, women, and others who menstruate live with self-aware capacity variability as our baseline from an early age.

Not to mention pregnancy and breastfeeding.

I recently watched a documentary about pre-historical Britain.

One expert was asked to when she would date the beginning of civilization. I thought she was going to say argriculture or something like that. What she said blew my mind.

What she said was: evidence of bone-healing.

She talked about how anthropological evidence of healed bone injuries showed the true origin of human community, of the capacity and willingness of human beings to give care to one of their own when that person was unable to “contribute” in the ways we tend to value so highly.

In other words:

The capacity for caregiving is the foundation upon which civilizations have been built.

Not engineering or agriculture or religion.

Caregiving.

Read that again and take it in.

Then think about where we are.

If we are unable or unwilling to give care to those in need, can we say we are still a civilization?

At best, I would argue our failure to value and provide caregiving is evidence we are a civilization in decline.