I had surgery June 1! Specifically, I had a revision from my top surgery back in 2017--removing a bit of loose skin from the front of my incisions that's been bothering me all this time...^_^;; Please bear with me if I'm a bit scattered, I'm not on The Good Drugs anymore (just some anti-inflammatories), but I am having a decent amount of exhaustion and accompanying brain fog! I also had a therapy session today, and yanno, it got me thinking:
Okay, so, hopefully that reads as sorta a joke. Like, the concept of "being lazy" had been weaponized against me constantly for the entirety of my formative years. "Why didn't you do that? You must be lazy." "If you'd just done the extra work...! You are so lazy." "Why do I have to tell you that again, you are so lazy." Quite frankly, I'm to the point where I don't accept "laziness" as a concept, and using "lazy" to describe what you've surmised as someone's issue is, to me, "lazy". Be it real exhaustion, lack of interest, disability, lack of understanding of what's required, need for support with what's required, or any of a myriad of other things, there's always a better explanation than "lazy", and I'd rather we ditch the idea of "lazy" as a concept.
...but that doesn't mean it's still not my own personal cudgel against myself. Didn't clean the litterbox? LAZY. Three weeks in and I haven't been able to put away my laundry? LAZY. My car is dirty? LAZY. It's so elegantly precise at skipping right over the why and directly into the blame. Super great tool for abusing someone.
So, let's tell some stories! All about times I was (maybe not actually) lazy!
I grew up around horses. I absolutely fucking adore horses. Horse people though...I've had some rough experiences with them. That didn't mean I didn't want the connection and friendships that the Saddle Club, Pony Pals, and Pony Tails promised me. I think most of us horse crazy kids seemed to have grown up on those books, and we all were looking for those close friendships. Buuut I was still an outsider, and I think the girls at the barn I grew up in cast me more as a Veronica than a Stevie, Carole, or Lisa in their thoughts. They obviously thought I wasn't up to snuff, and didn't work hard enough. I wasn't there as much as the other barn rats (a title to be earned and worn with pride), and wasn't allowed to apply for the miserly $2.50 paying "job" the girls had with the barn--prepping lesson horses and doing odds and ends for the owners as needed...so for years, the barn was a pretty lonely place for me. It was great to be with the horses, but...they're pretty quiet conversationalists.
So when I changed my major from Art to Equine Science two years into college, I knew the sort of personalities I might be dealing with, and I was determined to try and make friends. I also had my parents' advice ringing in my ears, "Join in! Be a part of something! Join a club, that's how you meet people!" So I did. Due to graduation cycles, a lot of the club members had apparently freshly graduated from the school, especially since the horse clubs were populated exclusively by the small Equine Science major. The one active horse club focused on competing in the show circuit, so I joined it. I was a bit worried going in, the temporarily defunct clubs were more my flavor of horsemanship than a club that focused on showing, but I was up for whatever new experience I could get. Or so I thought.
The first event the club did was for us to host a show--not on-campus, but at a local private show barn that was really the heart of the club. The seasoned club members (about 5 upperclassmen making up the club's President, VP, that sort of thing) boarded their horses there, rode under the instructor, and showed with her barn's show team. The rest of the club was made up of the current crop of Equine Science majors from my own class of about 20. It became extremely obvious that the campus show team was little more than an extension of this barn's, and didn't have the faculty to make a college show team happen. Which meant that none of us without horses of our own or funds to share-board and hire trailers to haul horses would have an opportunity to participate either--the bylaws of the club even required us to take lessons at the private show barn, for the same going rate as any other student--despite the Equine Science program including riding lessons through the university. I'd been hoping that involvement with a campus club would help to bridge some of the gap to competing through use of the school's lesson horses and transport, but that obviously wasn't going to happen.
I was quickly becoming disillusioned by the whole thing, but hey, our first event? I could at least see that through. Maybe I'd get to know some of these girls, make some friends. I'd heard enough stories about the tight bonds formed in traveling together for team events, and I wanted some of that in my life. I'd always been one of the outside people in those bond-building events before, but maybe it could be different here, doing this. Maybe.
The week leading up to the show, we were all assigned stalls to keep clean. Which was a bit weird, given that this was a running lesson and show barn with, presumably, staff who mucked out stalls. But I wasn't averse to the work, so fine, I would look after my horse's stall. I understood why they'd want us to spot clean throughout the day of the show itself, it was cleaning the stalls the whole week leading up to the show that confused me.
Shows are a lot of work, and they wanted the facilities looking their best. They intended us to clean and repaint all the jump standards and rails, especially since this was the first show of the season, which, again, made sense. But then we were told to scrub all the walls of the barn.
I'm sorry, what? That was such utter exploitative bullshit I could barely process it, most of us had absolutely no attachment to this barn, let alone stake or membership within it. Requiring their sudden pool of free labor to do something that shitty, extraneous, and tedious set me right off. Especially on top of our already grueling requirements with the Equine Science major at our school, doing the backbreaking labor we were barely getting class credit for. I showed up and put some time in with the scrub brush, but I also happened to get sick that week, and between sneezing, coughing, and just generally feeling like shit, I didn't put much time or effort into the project.
Finally, the show weekend rolled around. We met in a parking lot on campus at about 5 AM to be carpooled to the barn on the pretense that there wouldn't be enough parking for all attendees. Which was true enough, but it wasn't the most pressing reason for them to eliminate our freedom of movement. But whatever, we'll get to that. We had an introductory huddle, did the morning round of chores, and then dug in to whatever needed doing for the show.
I actually really like staffing events, I've since staffed several fur cons in registration and con suite spaces, and can confirm I love working on teams with friends and traveling to events, but there's a difference between staffing an event where you're a valued member of the team with a pre-agreed Job To Do and undirected labor expected to Just Find Something. After an initial stint of being at a loss for what to do, and being unwelcome on the tasks I tried to join on, I took it on myself to water and rewater the horses.
It was a hot day, upwards of 90 degrees, and the barn had a ton of horses with apparently no turn out space. Which, quite frankly is a HUGE pet peeve of mine. Living full-time in stalls is TERRIBLE for horses, it severely damages their mental AND physical health, you can't just hotbox them together in barns like that, they REQUIRE you have the acreage for proper turnout. I know it's expensive. Horses are expensive. But if you purport to care about their quality of life, and literally every horse person does... you need to actually fucking meet their needs. They're social animals, and, at rest, have been shown to just wander 10 miles a day for funzies. Isolation in a 10x10 box stall, or even a foaling stall, will NEVER be enough. Add to that how unyielding the heat feels in a barn on a hot day with no air movement (and usually any fans are focused on the aisles or broken), and you get a pretty oppressive environment. I know it's normal, but normal doesn't mean "good".
So I took it on myself to start a cycle of unspooling the hose, watering all the horses, respooling the hose, checking the stall I was responsible for, and then doing it all again, because by the time I came back around to each horse, they needed more water. I worked like this for a several hours before I finally tried to take a break for lunch around 1 or 2. "Tried" because not two minutes after I'd fixed myself a sandwich and sat down, one of the upperclassmen burst into the "break area" to chew everyone there out for being unconscionably lazy, and how dare we not be working. Yeah, I was pretty pissed.
The day wore on in a blur, until the show day was over, and it was time to get the place ready for the next day of showing. At about 10 PM, we were all dead on our feet, the horses were fed, and we were set to clean our assigned stalls one last time. And of course, before we could get started, the barn over had to get out a shot about how it was a good thing we didn't have access to our cars, since we all would have abandoned them, leaving them high and dry if we could have.
As I numbly fumed and cleaned my stall, the girl cleaning the stall next to me finally cracked. And I got to listen in on everything. She was one of the more liked underclassmen, a girl who worked hard and fit in better than I ever could. The seasoned club members and President noticed her crying, and asked her about it. Naturally, she was heartbroken about the comments implying that she would have left, that she would have abandoned them. And they were quick to console her. The instructor hadn't meant her, but all these other girls, they would have left in a heartbeat. They knew she was one of the good ones!
My stomach turned to lead, and I cleaned powered by sheer, pissed off anger. Of course they were just reinforcing the bullshit. Of course they were still saying we were all piss, and that no one cared, and that we were all lazy sacks of shit. It didn't have to be about reality, it had to do with control. And they were going to leverage what little crumbs of acceptance they could to make us fall in line, and use us as weapons against one another.
After we reconvened after the stall cleaning, they finally, finally deigned to give even a little bit of recognition for the long, hard day we'd all put in. They even, to my actual shock, singled me out as doing well with watering the horses all day.
I couldn't keep the Piss Off off my face, losing me all the social currency I might've scraped together with all that hard work. I was done. I'd decided that after this event, this show, I was done with the club. I'd even started teetering on whether I'd show up the next day.
I didn't. Show up that is. They drove us, at long last, back to our parking lot, and rage flared in me again, as I staggered to my car and contemplated the fact that I still had to drive across campus to get home and settle in enough through my seething rage to get some amount of sleep, all to do it all again at 5 AM the next morning. I looked at my car's dash, the amber "11:45" staring balefully back, and realized how little sleep I would be getting for a club I was absolutely done with...and I decided no. No, I absolutely was not doing this again. I'd had every intention of seeing it through, but it Just. Wasn't. Worth It.
So instead I had a lazy, nerdy day with some of my friends from the campus's DnD club instead.