An Ode to a Bed Day

written from bed

I’m watching a vase of grocery store sunflowers wilt beneath my bedroom window. The curtains are closed. Too much sunlight still sneaks through. 

I jolt awake at 3:00am, flashes of a nightmare spinning in my mind. I turn on all of the lights. Sweat soaks new bedsheets, skin suffocatingly clammy. 

Alarms light up my phone in the dark of early morning. I sip iced coffee out of a glass that reads “out of spoons” and clench my hands, tensing swollen joints, soccer on the screen of my laptop. Sam Kerr scores and I leap up, jumping on the bed, shouting. My dog joins me, not understanding the outburst but thrilled nevertheless. 

A podcast plays with a sleep timer set. I refresh it - once, twice, give up on the third. 

Propped up with the largest pillow I can find, heating pad draped across my abdomen, ice pack tight on my head, I watch the muted sitcom I’ve seen countless times. I beg my eyelids to droop. Toss, turn, repeat. 

Several books rest on the duvet. When I work up the courage to read them, the words swim across the page. Veins in my temple pulse. I squeeze them, imagining my skull is a watermelon, wishing it would burst. 

A friend calls. She asks me about my latest appointment while on speaker. I stare at the ceiling in the dark. Tears leak down my cheeks, tracing paths down my neck, dampening the sheets I need to wash. I do my best to laugh through them. 

Resilience, I have found, often looks less like putting on a brave face and more like giving myself permission to stay under the covers. 

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The first time I read about the act of writing in bed, writing while occupying crip time, was in the essay “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time” by Ellen Samuels. It’s one of many incredible essays in the anthology Disability Visibility edited by Alice Wong. In it, Samuels shares a quote from Laura Hillenbrand, who had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome:

“Because looking at the page made the room shimmy crazily around me, I could write only a paragraph or two a day. When I could no longer stand the spinning, I’d take a pillow in the yard and lie in the grass… When I was too tired to sit at my desk, I set the laptop up on my bed. When I was too dizzy to read, I lay down and wrote with my eyes closed.”

It is perhaps not a revolutionary thing to write (read, watch, exist) from bed, but to me it often feels like it. Growing up, I was taught that disability - chronic pain, fatigue, illness - was something to be fought tooth and nail. Sick days were never to be used. The only way to survive in this world as a sick person was to wake up each morning and grin and bear it. Be so strong, so reliable, so unflinching in the face of life altering, disabling illness that no one could ever doubt your ability. Don’t show pain. Don’t show weakness. A day in bed will inevitably turn into a month, a year, a lifetime. 

And so what if it did?

It is not a failure to spend a day, a week, a month, or a lifetime in bed. We often talk about rest as being essential. “Rest is self care!” proclaim brightly colored Canva graphics. “Give yourself permission to rest,” says a screensaver on Pinterest, likely curated for the workaholic in need of a lunch break. These statements are not untrue, but for those of us who are disabled and chronically fatigued, they can feel insufficient. Our rest is rarely aesthetically pleasing. It isn’t a day off with scheduled manicures and pedicures. It may not involve making a well balanced meal or going for a replenishing hike. It’s often the type of rest that doesn’t easily translate to an Instagram feed, and there may never truly be enough of it.

My rest is a bed day. A day in which I languish in bed - miserable, weepy, exhausted. I do not shower or cook a meal or brush my teeth. I let my skincare collect dust on the bathroom counter. Lights stay off, unless I decide I have enough energy to prop myself up with a pillow to read, in which case I will turn on the bedside lamp. I do not put on a bra. I rarely put on pants. I watch as much TV as I want without a lick of shame or embarrassment or regret. 

Historically, I’ve found it difficult to accommodate myself. Few of us grow up learning to listen to our bodies. We are, disabled or not, encouraged to comply to societal expectations for work, school, and extracurriculars. These expectations seep into rest. Self care, like many inherently good things, has been commodified and turned into a marketing tactic. It encourages us to buy a new face mask (though not the kind that protect ourselves and others amidst a global pandemic) or to subscribe to a gym membership. While an elaborate skincare routine and moving our bodies can be self care, they don’t have to be. The beauty of a bed day is that there are no requirements. There is no shame. There is only rest, in its rawest and most unfiltered form. 

To grow comfortable with allowing myself this type of rest - the type in which I rot more than recharge - I’ve had to reframe it as being a bit silly. In the same tone as “girl dinner,” the viral sensation that is piecing together snack plates and pantry odds and ends to form a meal, “bed day” is a practice that some may frown upon but I’ve taken ownership of. It feels silly, to need to reclaim something that should be inherently neutral, but when so many of us feel guilt for cancelling plans, turning off our phones, not checking our email, or asking for an extension, it seems much more necessary. 

Needing to rely on and find glimpses of joy in bed days is not without waves of guilt. It’s meant missing the concert I thought about going to for months. It’s meant learning to balance the envy of watching others experience things that are out of my sphere of ability with my happiness for them and my desire for them to thrive. In my experience, it doesn’t get easier. I watch so much of the world pass me by while I spend days in bed, tucked under the covers, alone. 

Alongside the grief, however, is the intense relief of finally relaxing. Softening my muscles and sinking into the mattress. Turning the alarms off and keeping the curtains closed. Allowing sleep to come as it pleases, drifting into halfhearted dreamscapes. Resting in this way is a way of honoring my disabled body. Finding ways to take pleasure in these days is a way of honoring my heart. Bed days are celebratory, and though the joy may not always come naturally, it isn’t any less spirited. 

So, when’s your next bed day?

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Recent Bed Day Highlights include:

• Watching women kick around a ball. Jumping back into soccer fandom has been an unexpected but welcome stream of serotonin. I’m currently making my way through replays of this year’s Women’s Super League games and loving every second.

• Liking an unhinged amount of TikTok edits of Sam Kerr, Katie McCabe, and Lucy Bronze that were probably made by obsessed teenagers. Bed days mean I can fangirl as much as I want, thank you.

• Watching Greta Gerwig’s Little Women for the first time and sobbing the entire movie.

• Catching up on And That’s Why We Drink, a supernatural true crime podcast. The best (and only correct) way to listen to podcasts is to start at the beginning and listen in order. This is a rule I stand by.