Working from bed isn't lazy: how disabled people have benefited from the move to WFH

When the pandemic hit, we all moved inside and brought our work home with us. As much of the workforce went from the office to wherever we could in the house, an old school of thought that disabled people have had to contend with for years reared its ugly head. 

“You shouldn’t work from bed because it’s lazy.” 

This crops up in think pieces, “how to be more productive” articles, twitter threads and lifestyle magazines alike and with it comes a slew of abuse and ableist remarks in the comments. 

However, the problem with comments like this is that it dismisses one important voice – disabled people.

“the jobs I’d been denied access to were suddenly made available from home when they needed to be for non-disabled people”

I work from home as a freelance journalist and writer, the reason for this is that as a disabled woman, a full time office based job just isn’t an option for me. I tried to work in those environments for years, but my chronic fatigue and ability to catch every bug going made it nigh on impossible. I applied for full time journalism jobs but everywhere told me it was essential that I be in the office, so I took control of my own story and carved out a successful career as a freelancer. So you can imagine how much it hurt when the jobs I’d been denied access to were suddenly made available from home when they needed to be for non-disabled people.

 Despite all of my successes, I still held onto much of the ableism I had faced in the past that had lost me jobs in the career I loved in the past. 

I felt like I had to work at a desk because working from bed was “lazy” and it meant I was just lying in bed all day. I ignored the pain this caused in my body, that my hips, legs and pelvis were on fire, exhausted from fatigue and barely able to do anything else in the house and the sunlight from where my desk is making my lupus worse and bringing on migraines. 

I would struggle through a whole day of work putting my body through this extreme stress, then be out of action for the rest of the week. Having to stay in bed or rest for 4 out of 5 working days made me feel even more useless, which in turn made me push myself even harder the next week.

“I had to release the feelings of shame and guilt that I wasn’t doing enough”

When I went full time as a freelance journalist I realised that as a disabled writer who worked to highlight disability rights issues, I had to also look after myself. To do that I had to release the feelings of shame and guilt that I wasn’t doing enough. It took a mind shift and a lot of reassurance from those close to me. I wasn’t being lazy; I was working in a way that was best for me and made my life easier. 

The shift to working from home has made life easier for disabled people who struggled at work previously, such as Tricia*, who after surgery last year struggles to sit for a long period of time. 

“Whilst for video calls I work from my kitchen table, I spend a lot of my working day lying on my front with my laptop out. This helps me manage my fatigue and takes the pressure off my surgery site. 

She worries about what life will be like when the world goes “back to normal”.

“I know I can’t tell anyone at my actual job that this is how I work because there’d be so much judgement and I’m not compliant with my organisation’s equipment setup guidance. I’m dreading being back in the office though where I’d have 90 minutes of commuting plus being sat upright all day” she told me.

For Lolly Cooper, a freelance copywriter and journalist, working from bed is easiest for her:

“I’m often fighting against whatever symptoms I’ve woken up with that day, while trying to meet deadlines. Occasionally those symptoms threaten to impact the quality of my work and do require me to take the day off.”

Lolly who has Fibromyalgia, Interstitial Cystitis, POTS and JHS also disagrees that working from bed means laziness: “most of the time, particularly as someone who is very used to living with chronic illnesses, my very best work happens when I’m sat in bed, precariously balancing my laptop on the hot water bottle across my lap!”

My hope is that this pandemic sets a precedent for home working and leads to serious discussions around how we can make businesses more inclusive for not only disabled people, but everyone.

When we have discussions about the most productive way to work in the future, we need to remember that productivity is not one size fits all so we need to hear from a wide variety of people, but especially from those who benefit from a more adapted and flexible world.

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