Small Life: Calculating Worth with Diminished Returns

[SNT Gatchaman]

Another blog post by Fred Rossi, following on from Why I Can’t Just Meet You for Dinner: The Reality of Post-Exertional Malaise

The Small Life

Calculating Worth with Diminished Returns

substack.com

This isn’t a redemption narrative where chronic illness becomes a blessing in disguise. It’s not. It’s still limiting, frustrating, and profoundly unfair. But within severe constraints, something unexpected happens. You stop optimizing for breadth and start optimizing for depth. You stop trying to do everything and start asking what actually matters.

Healthy people optimize their lives through addition: more experiences, more connections, more accomplishments. I’m optimizing through subtraction. And the clarity that comes from extreme constraint is something I never expected to value.

Healthy people measure meaningful lives in big metrics: career advancement, travel destinations, social circles, major accomplishments. That scale doesn’t work when leaving the house costs three days of function.

The healthy world measures output. I measure energy preserved, crashes avoided, moments of genuine presence in my own constrained life.

That recalibration was brutal at first. It felt like admitting defeat, accepting diminishment, giving up on ambition. But once I stopped fighting it and started actually building at the scale I have access to, something shifted.

I’ve discovered that rest isn’t the enemy of living. Before illness, rest felt like wasted time, something to minimize so I could maximize productivity. Now rest is how I preserve any capacity to participate in life at all. That perspective shift changed everything. Rest isn’t failure. It’s how I survive.

I’ve discovered that animals understand suffering in ways that bypass language entirely. Geno and Genie don’t need to comprehend post-exertional malaise or dysautonomia to know when I’m struggling. They just know. And they respond with the kind of uncomplicated compassion that doesn’t require explanation or justification.

I’m not going to tell you that chronic illness is a gift or that limitation leads to enlightenment or any of that inspirational rhetoric that makes disabled people want to scream.

But I will tell you this: hope at limited capacity looks different than hope at full capacity, but it still exists.

The small life isn’t what I wanted. But I’m learning to live it with purpose anyway. To find meaning at reduced scale. To celebrate victories that healthy people would consider baseline functioning. To build something worthwhile even when the materials are scarce and the timeline is uncertain.

This is what perseverance looks like with chronic illness: not pushing through limitation but building within it. Not denying constraint but working with radical intention inside the boundaries that exist.

The life is smaller. The intention is larger. And somehow, that’s enough.

Not every day. Not without grief for what’s lost. But enough to keep building, one careful choice at a time.

 

[rvallee]

Very well written, and more insight in this one text than everything I have seen out of biopsychosocial anything, combined. Not that it's a high bar to cross, but still.

 

[CorAnd]

”Rest isn’t failure. It is how I survive.”


It took me a very long time and a lot of suffering and pushing through PEM to understand this.

 

[Binkie4]

So calming to read of the coming to terms with positives of a PEM bound life.

I kept finding words and comments I could relate to. I am glad I read it because while the losses are acknowledged, so is the benefit of having to make choices and what it teaches. I could relate to that.

I'm not finding it easy to write at all at the moment so I decided that what came reasonably freely would have to do. Thank you @SNTGatchaman for distilling important points.