Date: 2020-12-20 04:56 pm (UTC)
brin_bellway: forget-me-not flowers (0)
From: [personal profile] brin_bellway
I could've been one of them. Maybe that's the most painful thing, is knowing by how small a margin I fell short of their charmed lives. If I'd been a little faster, a little richer, a little more focused on a goal that felt like it would never arrive.

I hate knowing they were right. Everyone who told me that school was the most important thing, that I should pour my heart and soul into it, sacrifice everything if it meant getting a certificate in a single year, or an associate's in two, or a bachelor's in four.

Okay, they weren't *actually* thinking about the risk of being left behind when quarantines inevitably hit, but they *could* have. *We* could have. I amped up my standard anti-disease procedures when I started working here, ran faster and *still* couldn't stay in one place: I went from a cold every year or two to a cold every few months. There was nothing to *stop* me from following that train of thought a little further, connecting the dots, thinking about that one friend of a friend with what I suppose we would now term Long H1N1 (so much suffering, months of being unable to function, a probable lifetime of frailness).

Maybe it still wouldn't have been enough. The paycheque isn't what's holding me to this job *now*, but it was very much important when I started. All those hours I couldn't spend on school because I needed to go and earn money instead, all that disruption to clockwork study schedules. Hell, for a while there I was working menial-Internet-labour 3 - 4 hours a day on *top* of waged work.

(What *is* holding me to this job, you ask? Primarily, the ability to *say* that I did: to put "July 2017 - Present" on my resume, to not have government or potential employers or anyone else look at me and say "that essential worker abandoned her post in time of need" and decide to treat me accordingly. God knows I'd have been fucked over so hard if I'd quit in March like I was tempted to: the government absolutely *did* later punish people who did that, left them to starve while those who continued were given bountiful aid.

Nobody's promised anything last I checked, but the government's considering the possibility of maybe, just maybe, making me third in line for the vaccine after healthcare workers and nursing-home people. They *specifically* framed it as a reward for staying the course and feeding my safety into the coal-fires of society. (well, okay, those weren't their *exact* words, but it was very much framed *as a reward* for having performed these services and *not* as "since you get exposed to so many people, you actually *are* one of the highest-risk groups and *should* get high triage priority"))
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brin_bellway: forget-me-not flowers (Default)
Brin

May 2025

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