I Thought I Could Outwork My Body: Examining Disability Series Vol. II
A few days ago, I came across a Jacobin article with the headline, “Universities Are Teaching the Virtue of Overwork.” As a chronically ill, disabled overworker in recovery, the title alone was enough to make me click.
The article argues that some of America’s most elite universities are asking students to do more than learn, think, question, and develop expertise. They are also being asked to prove how much pressure they can withstand. Exhaustion has become so normalized that being constantly busy can feel like part of the credential itself, even when the cost is mounting stress, burnout, and declining emotional and mental health.
The student who can juggle classes, internships, leadership roles, networking, extracurriculars, research, and everything else we have decided a twenty-year-old should be doing becomes evidence that the university is still essential, still worth the price, and still capable of producing the kind of resilient overachiever employers want on the other side of that coveted degree, especially now in the era of AI. Increasingly, proving your worth as a college student can look a lot like proving how much overwork you can tolerate.
Nearly twenty years have passed since I graduated from undergrad, but that bargain felt immediately familiar to me. Long before disability forced me to question the logic of overwork, I had already spent years believing that doing more, enduring more, and asking less of the world around me was how I proved that I belonged.
Overwork as Hard Work
I worked my way through college with the same mentality I would carry for years afterward: keep going, figure it out, do more if that is what it takes. I was fiercely independent and already deeply invested in the idea that hard work could somehow level the playing field, even when I knew that historically, as a Black man, this reality would elude me. Despite what I knew in my heart, mentally I drank the Kool-Aid. I tied my self-worth to how much I could perform, achieve, and do in a white supremacist system designed for me to fail. I stayed up late and pushed through the stress, the cripping anxiety, and the nausea and abdominal pain that always seemed to be lingering somewhere in the background. I treated those signals as inconveniences, not warnings, because slowing down never felt like an option. So I kept piling more on. I got my standard 12-credit course load amended to 18 credits, added online classes through other programs, worked a full and part-time job, and completed a 4-year degree in 3 years. For me, this is what ambition looked like.
Hard work became a kind of salve that made the inequities sting a little less. In my mind, it was a workaround for the systemic racism that had placed barriers in front of me before I could fully understand what those barriers were or how deeply they shaped the world I was trying to move through. I told myself that, at the end of the day, people might question me, underestimate me, or even question whether I belonged, but they could not take away what I had earned. My degree, my credentials, my record of achievement were undeniable. I knew I had to work harder and be sharper just to get in the room, and even then I might still be questioned. But those credentials were something no one could erase.
As long as I worked hard, I believed I could and would get what I wanted. I did everything the system told me to do: worked hard, played less, saved my money, achieved, and became the model student and young professional. I thought that if I followed the rules closely enough, I could make myself undeniable. I carried that same overwork ideal straight into my early career. By then, work had become more than something I did. It was proof, protection, and one of the few variables I believed I could control. So I controlled the hell out of it.
A Body Doomed to Fail
By 2010, that logic had become so deeply embedded in me that when my body started to fail, instead of questioning the logic, I questioned myself. Up to that point, there had been very few obstacles I could not work around, finesse, or somehow find my way through. I prided myself on being resilient, but more than that, I was resourceful, sharp, and, in my own mind, pretty damn unstoppable. Surely, if I just worked harder and pushed myself a little more, my body would eventually understand the assignment and carry me through. Instead, the pain intensified, and the fatigue deepened. I was told at different points that I had some unnamed virus, then mono, and I was given antibiotics along the way, but nothing really explained why I continued to languish and feel so debilitingly unwell. By then, we were in the heart of the Great Recession. I had finished graduate school and was trying to push forward into adulthood and a career, still believing that effort could get me through just about anything. I did not have the language for it then, but I was burned out. And I had no idea how much worse things were about to get.
After almost two years of endless medical appointments, excruciating pain, debilitating fatigue, and a shattered sense of self-worth and purpose, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and myalgic encephalomyelitis in late 2011. The diagnosis, which my doctor arrived at in part because of my tireless self-advocacy, gave me an odd sense of clarity. I finally had a name for the source of contention within my body, but that understanding quickly became fuel for another project. Somewhere beneath my determination was a great deal of latent ableism, and I became convinced that I could and would “defeat” this invisible enemy. I would do everything humanly possible to get back to normal, back to my hopes and dreams, and back to the version of myself I remembered: a body that moved when I told it to, unencumbered by pain and not constantly overtaken by aches, brain fog, abdominal pain, and fatigue.
The medical advice I was getting only reinforced what I already believed about myself and my body. I was told I was too fat and needed to lose weight, and I heard that as a kind of prescription: change your body enough, and you’ll be able to fix this. So I did what I had always done. I made a plan and went all in. I stopped eating bread almost overnight. Then came the cabbage soup diet, cutting calories, fasting, and eventually stretches where I was barely eating at all. I bought books about veganism and raw food, chugged down protein shakes and smoothies, and kept telling myself that these were healthy choices. Some of them probably were on their own. What was not healthy was the way I was using them. I wanted the weight off== because I had been told, directly and indirectly, that the weight was the problem. I took up running and became even more restrictive about what I ate, convinced that every pound I lost was proof that I was finally getting somewhere. In a little over six months, I lost nearly 100 pounds. At the time, I did not see how extreme any of it had become. What I saw was success, and I thought the plan was working.
Looking back, I can see that I took the same lesson that had carried me through college and into my early career and eventually turned it against my own body. Hard work had always been the workaround. If something was difficult, I worked harder. If I was tired, I pushed through. If there was a barrier in front of me, I figured out how to get around it. Why would illness be any different? I had spent years learning to override discomfort in the name of reaching my goals, so when my body began asking something different of me, I didn’t know how to listen.
And disability? At that point in my life, even considering myself disabled was unfathomable. Disabled people existed somewhere over there. That was not me. I was young, ambitious, working, building a career. I was the person who figured things out. So I continued treating chronic illness as something standing between me and the life I was supposed to be having. Rest remained something I could get to later, after the work was finished, after I had solved the problem, after I had gotten myself “back.” Of course, later never really came. There was always another thing to do, and for years I genuinely believed I could outrun, outwork, or somehow outmaneuver chronic illness if I just worked harder.
My body had other plans. It kept asking me to slow down while I kept finding new ways to demand more from it. I read the pain and fatigue as evidence that I needed to try harder rather than information about what was actually happening to me. By the fall of 2012, I crashed. And the pain I had spent so much energy trying to run away from did not disappear when I became thinner, more disciplined, or productive. It never left. And it remains with me to this day.
Pain and Suffering Idealized
This is where the Jacobin article reaches beyond the university for me. Higher education may formalize overwork, reward it, and eventually send students into the labor market already fluent in it, but colleges did not invent the belief that suffering is evidence of commitment. Most of us have been learning some version of that lesson long before we ever set foot on a college campus or attend college at all. We learn to push through, complain less, and never ask for help. We learn that exhaustion can be impressive if it is attached to the right goal.
I carried those ideas from school into college, from college into my early career, and eventually straight into chronic illness. Disability did not introduce me to this value system. It was what finally exposed just how thoroughly I had absorbed it.
That has been one of the more uncomfortable realizations of becoming disabled. Our culture talks endlessly about resilience, but we have a much harder time making room for limits and boundaries. The stories we elevate most are about the founder who came from nothing, the person who “didn’t let anything stop them,” the athlete who drags themself across the finish line or finishes the game injured, the student surviving on four hours of sleep, the entrepreneur who brags about never taking a vacation, the teacher who never takes a personal day, the nurse working another double shift.
Remember when we rang bells for nurses during the pandemic? We called health care workers heroes, praised their selfless sacrifice, and talked about how much we depended on them. Then the moment passed, the applause faded, and the expectation that they keep carrying impossible workloads remained. We do the same thing in families, admiring the parent holding everything together with caffeine and prayer instead of asking why we have no social safety net, universal healthcare, or demanding that people bear children on a minimum wage salary.
The Body the System Rewards
This is where, for me, overwork becomes inseparable from ableism. The worker our systems are built around has a remarkably cooperative body. It wakes up on schedule, gets where it needs to go, works for eight, ten, or twelve hours, and does not require too many breaks. It does not have unpredictable pain, fatigue, sensory needs, brain fog, medical appointments, or days when getting from the bed to the shower is the major accomplishment. It produces at roughly the same rate every day and, preferably, does not require anyone else to change the pace on its behalf. Expect this idealized “worker” body is a myth. Human bodies do not behave predictably and on demand in the way we have come to mythologize. This idealized worker body compels many to mask their aches and pains, hold their overactive bladders, and clock in regardless of how they feel on any given day.
Chronic illness teaches you how much you’ve been masking and pretending, so once your body no longer fits this mythologized expectation, you begin to see how much morality you’ve attached to productivity. The person who can do more (or pretend better) is more disciplined. The person who cannot is questioned by the system:
Are you trying hard enough?
Could you work part-time?
Have you tried exercising?
Taking this supplement?
Shifting your mindset?
Why do you need to use a scooter?
Disabled people hear versions of these questions so often that, eventually, you start turning them inward. That is why the connection between ableism and eugenic thinking matters here. I am not suggesting that every manager who praises overwork or every professor who assigns an unreasonable workload is consciously thinking in those terms. I’m talking about the older hierarchy underneath it all, the one that sorts bodies according to usefulness and treats independence as inherently better than dependence.
In that system, strength is moralized and needing care becomes something to defend. People who can produce reliably are granted easier access to money, housing, health care, security, dignity, and social legitimacy, while people whose bodies cannot participate as consistently can spend an astonishing amount of energy proving they deserve those same things.
What makes this difficult to write is that I am not analyzing some value system that only existed outside of me. I believed it too. One of the hardest parts of becoming disabled was discovering just how much of my own sense of worth I had attached to productivity. There were years when my body would be begging me to stop, and my mind would answer, after this email, after this meeting, after this project, after this semester, after this event. Just one more thing. If I’m being honest, I still have a hard time not thinking this way.
When you, like me, have built an identity around being capable, hyper-independent, and productive, asking for help can feel more frightening than exhaustion. Slowing down can feel like you are becoming somebody you do not recognize. Rest can feel suspicious, even when you desperately need it.
Rest Is Not a Reward
That is why Tricia Hersey’s seminal work, The Nap Ministry, has meant so much to me over the last few years. Hersey’s framework of “Rest Is Resistance” is not a cute wellness slogan, and it is not really about naps in a white-washed Lululemon way. Tricia’s rest-is-resistance scholarship places rest inside a much larger conversation about Black liberation, ableism, womanism, capitalism, white supremacy, racial trauma, and the long history of bodies being valued according to how much labor can be extracted from them. For my Black, disabled, fat body, that has become more than a mantra. It has become a pedagogy. I have had to learn that rest is not something I earn after producing enough. It is not a reward for being good. It is not evidence that I have given up. And I am still learning this, because knowing something intellectually and actually living it are two very different things.
Capitalism is remarkably good at taking a critique, sanding down the edges (the parts that make you sit in discomfort) and selling it back to us. Even rest gets folded into productivity.
Sleep eight hours so you can perform better tomorrow.
Meditate so you can tolerate the workload.
Take a mental health day so you can come back refreshed enough to keep doing the work that exhausted you in the first place.
Download the mindfulness app, sit in the nap pod, attend the resilience seminar, and then, of course, get back to work.
This is where I keep returning to the Jacobin article. The problem is not that universities offer students meditation, counseling, wellness programs, or mental health support. Students need more support, not less. The problem comes when support becomes a substitute for questioning the conditions that are making people unwell in the first place. There is a difference between helping somebody navigate a difficult moment and teaching them that their inability to tolerate an inequitable system is a personal failure.
Disability has made that distinction impossible for me to ignore. No meditation app will make an inaccessible building accessible. There is no planner, morning routine, supplement stack, or productivity system that will make a chronically ill body behave like a nondisabled one on demand. Sometimes the system really is asking too much. Sometimes the workload really is unreasonable. Sometimes the body saying no is not a character flaw. It’s vital information that we need to listen to.
Is Your Body Disposable?
Class complicates all of this even further. We have created an enormous status hierarchy around different kinds of labor. Manual work has long been treated as less intellectual and therefore less deserving of compensation and prestige, even when it is physically exhausting and essential. Knowledge work, meanwhile, became a kind of escape route. Get educated. Get the degree. Use your mind instead of your body. Move into the professional class.
The hierarchy never made much sense to me. We treat so-called knowledge work as if thinking only happens behind a desk, when a cleaner, a home health aide, or a line cook is constantly making decisions, solving problems, remembering details, adjusting in real time, and using their body to get the work done. Meanwhile, the executive in the corner office may have more status and insulation, but they are still living in a human body with the same basic needs for food, sleep, care, and rest.
What wealth can buy is distance from a great deal of the labor required to maintain a human life. Someone else cleans the house, prepares the food, cares for the children, maintains the yard, delivers the groceries, walks the dog, manages the calendar. Wealth does not eliminate labor so much as redistribute it, usually downward, while allowing the people at the top of the arrangement to continue performing “independence”.
And now artificial intelligence is complicating that hierarchy in ways we are only beginning to understand. For decades, education was sold as a kind of holy grail: get the degree, become a knowledge worker, move into the professional class, and your mind will secure the future your body might not. That bargain already excluded plenty of people, but it was still the promise. Now some of the very work we were told would make us economically secure- software engineering, computer programming, coding, research, customer service - is increasingly being shared with or handed over to bots.
The line between knowledge work and expendable work is getting harder to differentiate. I am not suggesting that work is disappearing tomorrow or that AI is about to replace every knowledge worker. I am much more interested in the contradiction it exposes. If we have spent decades telling young people that productivity determines value, what happens when machine learning can produce more and faster? If economic usefulness is the thing that earns a person security, what happens when the market decides it needs fewer people for certain kinds of work?
And who exactly do we think will absorb the fallout?
History gives us enough reason to be skeptical that the people with the most wealth and insulation will bear the brunt of it. It will be workers living paycheck to paycheck, disabled people already navigating hostile labor markets, Black and brown communities, refugees, immigrants, poor people, and anyone whose livelihood disappears faster than our social safety net can respond.
Relearning Life In a Disabled Body
This is why I have stopped believing that conversations about work can be separated from conversations about human worth. I am a visionary. I love taking an expansive, ambitious idea and turning it into something real. In fact, I have spent the last few months making plans to do exactly that. Disability has not erased that part of me, and I do not want it to.
What it has forced me to untangle is the belief that my worth as a human is inherently tied to how much I can produce. For years, I believed some version of the same bargain: work harder than everyone else and you will thrive. Make yourself indispensable, and no one can discard you. Push through, and eventually your body will cooperate. My body did not “cooperate.” In fact, it did exactly what bodies do: break down, get sick, slow down. My body did not care how many credentials I had, how resourceful I was, how much I could accomplish, or how badly I wanted to return to the person I had been.
Eventually, I had to confront what I had spent years trying to negotiate around: my body has limitations ambition cannot outwork.
That realization has changed what rest means to me, but it has also changed what I think ambition should cost. I spent years believing that the answer to every barrier was more effort, more discipline, or more endurance. College rewarded that in me. Work rewarded it. Even when my body began breaking down, I kept trying to apply the same lesson: push harder, prove yourself, don’t stop. What disability finally forced me to understand is that a life cannot be built entirely around proving how much you can withstand, nor can you tie your worth to your body's ability.
That is the part of the Jacobin article that resonates with me the most. We should be asking more than whether students and workers can survive the pressure we put on them. We should be asking why exhaustion has become evidence of seriousness in the first place, and why needing rest, help, or accommodation is so easily treated as weakness. I learned those lessons early, carried them into adulthood, and eventually paid for them with my own body.
I am still ambitious. I still want to build big things. But I no longer believe my worth rises and falls with my output, and I do not want to wait until my body is in crisis to permit myself to stop. Maybe that is the lesson I hope someone else takes from this before they have to learn it the way I did: your body does not have to break before you are allowed to listen to it. Your life is not more valuable because you exhausted yourself proving that you could keep going.
Sources & Further Reading
Liu, Nicholas. “Universities Are Teaching the Virtue of Overwork.” Jacobin, 10 Sept. 2026. https://jacobin.com/2026/09/higher-education-overwork-credentialing-exploitation
Rest, Black Liberation & Womanism
Hersey, Tricia. Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto. Little, Brown Spark, 2022. https://www.mahoganybooks.com/9780316365215
The Nap Ministry. “Rest Is Anything That Connects Your Mind and Body.” 21 Feb. 2022. https://thenapministry.wordpress.com/
The Nap Ministry. “About.” https://thenapministry.wordpress.com/about/
The Nap Ministry. “Our Work Has a Framework: REST IS RESISTANCE!” 11 Jan. 2021. https://thenapministry.wordpress.com/2021/01/11/our-work-is-has-a-framework/
“Rest Is Resistance — Featuring Tricia Hersey.” YouTube video.
Dray, Sally. “Black Liberation Movements: Then and Now.” House of Lords Library, 1 Oct. 2020. https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/black-liberation-movements-then-and-now/
Younger, Stephanie. “What Alice Walker’s Definition of Womanism Taught Me in 2020.” Black Feminist Collective, 14 Nov. 2020. https://blackfeministcollective.com/2020/11/14/alice-walker-womanist-movement/
Howard University School of Law. Civil Rights History: Womanism. https://library.law.howard.edu/civilrightshistory/womanist
Black Metropolis Research Consortium. “Womanism.” University of Chicago. https://bmrc.lib.uchicago.edu/portal/curated/womanism/
Ableism, Anti-Fatness & Disability
Dunn, Dana S. “Understanding Ableism and Negative Reactions to Disability.” American Psychological Association, 15 Dec. 2021. https://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/psychology-teacher-network/introductory-psychology/ableism-negative-reactions-disability
Access Living. “Ableism 101: What Is Ableism? What Does It Look Like?” https://www.accessliving.org/newsroom/blog/ableism-101/
Harrison, Da’Shaun L. Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness. North Atlantic Books, 2021. https://highlandercenter.org/product/belly-of-the-beast-the-politics-of-anti-fatness-as-anti-blackness/
Harrison, Da’Shaun L. “Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness: Violence at Home, Violence Abroad.” Prism, 25 Nov. 2024. https://prismreports.org/2024/11/25/anti-fatness-as-anti-blackness-violence-at-home-violence-abroad/
Clinical Problem Solvers. “Episode 23: Anti-Blackness, Anti-Fatness, and Food Shaming.” AMA Ed Hub, 9 Jan. 2024. https://edhub.ama-assn.org/clinical-problem-solvers/audio-player/18843339
Upstream. “[UNLOCKED] Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness w/ Da’Shaun Harrison.” Spotify.
Eaton, Calvin. Living with Fibromyalgia: A Young Man’s Journey to Peace, Inspiration, and Empowerment Through Poetry and Uplifting Words, Vol. I. 2013. https://www.calvineaton.com/books
Eaton, Calvin. Cooking with Fibromyalgia: A Young Man’s Guide to Simple and Delicious Vegetarian, Gluten and Dairy Free Meals. 2013. https://www.calvineaton.com/books
Eaton, Calvin. Living with Fibromyalgia: The Blog That Started It All. 2015. https://www.calvineaton.com/books
