Hello discoverers!

There is a special kind of gaslighting that nobody intends. It lives in the well-meaning question – ‘have you tried magnesium?’ – and in the friendly observation that someone looks well. It’s in the get-well cards we send, with their built-in assumption that getting well is, in fact, what happens next.

But for the chronically ill, it isn’t. And we’re incredibly bad at sitting with that.

Kristie De Garis has been ill since she was 21. She spent two decades doing everything right – cutting out sugar, gluten, dairy, alcohol, stress, late nights – accumulating an ever-longer list of restrictions that did not, in the end, produce the improvement logic seemed to promise.

In her short essay on chronic illness and meritocracy she reflects on the unintended ableism our system perpetuates.

“We tend to understand illness as something you either die from, or recover from. Those of us who are chronically ill live in the awkward inbetween space. Not dying, but not getting better either. Not an emergency, not something fully resolved.”

That inbetween space is where most ableism lives. Not through intentional prejudice, but through a belief system that treats effort as a moral virtue and outcomes as its rightful reward. Chronic illness is, by its nature, a rebuke to that belief:

“The idea that illness might be something you manage indefinitely, without progress, without reward, is deeply uncomfortable to a culture that has an ingrained belief that effort always produces results.”

“Chronic illness disrupts that extremely saleable, inspirational narrative. It produces people who do everything right and still don’t get better. In fact, I have never met a group of people who are doing more right than the chronically ill. And society, rather than question the belief, questions the person.”

Her strongest reframing is of ableism not as individual cruelty but as something with an economic logic behind it:

“Ableism isn’t just cruelty or ignorance. It’s the enforcement arm of meritocracy, which exists to protect the hyper-capitalist belief that ‘more’ always pays off. The existence of chronically ill and disabled people challenges this simply by the fact that they continue to be ill.”

The chronically ill aren’t just inconvenient to the story we tell about effort and reward – they actively destabilise it.

De Garis is careful not to fully exempt herself from this logic. She writes about still catching herself searching for the magic lever, the right supplement, the adjustment that might finally tip things. She knows it’s internalised ableism – knowing doesn’t dissolve it.

“Part of this is fear. Fear that if I stop striving, I will have no one to blame but myself. But also that other people will read any acceptance as giving up, or laziness, or self-pity.”

If I’m finding the counterweight here, it’s something like this: The belief that effort matters isn’t wrong. The problem is the assumption automatically attached to it – that outcomes will always match. As a framework for understanding human bodies, it falls apart.

Her reflections are well worth a read, particularly if you have someone in your life navigating this terrain. It won’t give you the magic question to ask them. But it might help you retire a few of the unhelpful ones.

And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai