Inconvenient.

My humanity is bound up in yours. - Desmond Tutu

There are two things about chronic illness that they don’t tell you at diagnosis (because, perhaps rightfully, your medical team is generally focused on the good news that you are not dying and that you’ll be just fine with the right treatment), and those are that chronic illness 1) is sometimes exhausting, even when you feel fine, and 2) brings with it a grief that can’t really be explained and that might even seem superfluous, but is no less real.

When my doctor called to tell me I had celiac disease, I immediately went strictly gluten-free. Like, as in that morning I’d had a big fat gluten-y bagel for breakfast and by lunch I was at the grocery store standing in an aisle I’d never before had need of.

And here’s the thing, it was easier that day than it is now. The first year of learning how to really live a gluten-free life was easier than the endless monotony of it 8 years later. It’s old news now, you know?

And old news, and the exhaustion that comes with it, mean that sometimes I take chances I shouldn’t. I sometimes don’t ask the server at a restaurant enough questions. I sometimes fail to say that I’m ordering the gluten-free thing because I have to, not by trendy choice. And I sometimes eat less than I would be best for me because I just don’t want to be that person at the table asking for something special.

It boils down to this: Somewhere in me is deeply ingrained the desire to not be a burden and to not be inconvenient. To be honest, I think many women, especially of my generation, feel this (never mind that Gen X women are in fact holding up at least half the world these days - but that’s another subject for another day). And despite kicking ass in our careers, and raising children who are our own and not our own, and generally making the world a better place, still…we do not want to add to anyone else’s responsibility.

We do not want to be inconvenient.

It was pointed out to me (with great love) this last week that I do not always protect myself the way I would protect someone else who has to eat like me. And honestly I could not argue. I’d send food back like it was my job for anyone else, ask to speak to the manager like I had the name and haircut to go with it, or read every label in the grocery store like a hawk.

Sometimes we need a mirror held up, you know? And whatever that mirror may have shown me about myself, it also convicted me about greater things than myself.

It reminded me that we live in a day and time when so many beloved children of God are being othered, dismissed as less than and not enough, or as unworthy of the rights and privileges those of us who are white and straight and cisgender generally can claim without question.

It reminded me we live in a time when someone else’s needs are often labelled as inconvenient, because we live in a time when a whole chunk of society actually encourages us to put me and mine first, no matter the cost to anyone else.

And so this morning I’m wondering who the hell I think I am to even begin to consider myself inconvenient when I am devastated at the way the country I was born in and loved is treating so many of its people with such cruel dismissiveness.

Whoever you are, whatever you truly need to step into the sun and be known, whatever else your life has taught you, however it is that you learned to dim your light, wherever it is that you were when you first sensed people thought you too much, whatever it is that church or government said that targeted you as unworthy - you are not.

You are loved. And worthy. And made to shine.

And while there are so many voices saying otherwise, there are also lots of us speaking over against the otherwise however we are able. No human being is inconvenient. No human being is less than. We are beloved. From day one until the end and into whatever lies beyond.

May those of us who benefit from a system made to do just that be the very ones who challenge that system, so that things like peace and freedom and justice might be made real, for once and for all.

It might be inconvenient to do so - but you, we, are not.