Well, what is laziness? The unwillingness to work or use energy? A negative thing? Well, that’s what I got taught it was growing up. I don’t believe in that anymore, even if I feel like that’s how I feel when I do feel lazy. But to me, even in my times of feeling negative about what laziness is from growing up with negative influence surrounding it, I believe that it’s just taking things at your own time, when you’re in a good mental state, doing things a smarter and easier way, the most helpful to yourself physically or mentally at that point. Whether for reasons of being overstimulated, overwhelmed, injured, emotionally drained, or just not feeling up to doing the “non-lazy way.” I think laziness isn’t and shouldn’t be seen as a negative thing, but instead, be seen as a neutral thing, and even, something that can be positive.
To me, it looks like not doing my dishes, that’s the most common form of laziness for me anyways. This is because I cannot stand the textures of cleaning the dishes or the sounds of the clanging of them. So, I leave the dishes in the sink until I have none left to use and am forced to wash them. Most people would call leaving my dishes in the sink lazy, but for me, it’s a mental thing, it’s not like I don’t have the motivation to do the dishes, it’s that I physically cannot stand doing them, and mentally it’s horrible, so I leave them until I have to. Others also do this or maybe it’s not making your bed or doing your laundry. But the thing is, it’s not “lazy” to not do so regularly, it just depends on your mental health, in my opinion anyway. For example, I know myself, my whÄnau, and my friends all can do our house cleaning and chores when we feel mentally alright or have a burst of dopamine. But when we don’t, we will get the job done.
Above are images I took of my laziness
But one thing is, how can we get past the idea of laziness and speak to difficulties of emotional spaces and ableism? Because I know at least for me, the majority of the time I’m called lazy is when I’m in a bad emotional space or am unable to do something due to my ADHD or Autism, which to others is “unacceptable and ridiculous.” Society has deemed neurodivergent behaviour and traits as lazy, and we should get past this, I mean it is almost 2022 at this point, so it’s ridiculous people are still ableist nowadays. I think if school’s taught about neurodivergent people, traits and how to help and support/understand them that people could at least have a more positive outlook on us. Maybe even start to see that we’re not being lazy, we’re trying out hardest to complete tasks that neurotypicals can do easily every day. Along with that, teaching that laziness isn’t a negative thing. That it’s purely just an adjective that we get taught for some reason is bad by our p.e teachers, parents and social media from a young age. If we flip it to being a more neutral or positive idea then it would help as well. Also raising awareness and making emotional distress/being mentally drained a more societal approved thing rather than seeing as a bad thing. Learning about how being in a bad emotional state can affect your ableness to do simple tasks.