Pacing as Resistance
Dynamic Disability and the Refusal to Earn Rest
“You know you don’t have to earn rest, right?”
My client looked startled. Then laughed. Then: “Rude, Libby.”
We sat with it.
Most pacing advice assumes a stable baseline. Find your limit and stay under it consistently.
Dynamic disability doesn’t work that way. Our baseline moves. Monday’s capacity isn’t Wednesday’s. The work isn’t finding the limit — it’s reading today’s limit accurately and responding to that.
Underneath the practical challenge is something else: the belief that rest must be earned through depletion. That you have to prove you need it — to employers, to insurers, to yourself — by first collapsing, because rest after collapse feels justified.
It serves the system perfectly.
The cycle is familiar: overdo on good days, crash, feel guilty, overdo again when capacity returns.
This is sometimes called poor pacing or self-sabotage. It is rarely called what it often is: an adaptation to unpredictable capacity.
“When it’s safe, when it’s possible, do everything — because you don’t know when you’ll have access again.”
This is scarcity logic, not a character flaw.
Boom-bust also serves extraction. When you overperform on good days, you generate evidence that you “can” function at that level. Systems use your best days against you. You become the proof that you’re not as disabled as you claimed.
Insurance wants stable diagnoses with predictable trajectories. “Some days I can, some days I can’t” doesn’t code cleanly. Dynamic disability resists commodification because it can’t be captured in billable units.
The system punishes variability because it can’t extract from what it can’t predict.
You learn to hide the good days, or maximize them, or distrust them entirely.
None of these are freedom.
Abundance logic starts here: you will have capacity again. Not today, maybe. But again.
A good day is baseline to protect, not surplus to spend. The “wasted” weekend is successful recovery. Rest before depletion — not after collapse, not after proof, not after the system gives you permission.
The cost arrives delayed. Twenty-four to seventy-two hours later, your body sends the invoice for what you spent. Scarcity logic ignores the invoice until it arrives as a crash. Abundance logic accounts for it before it’s due.
In practice: trusting your body’s information before the crash confirms it. Resting when you feel fine because you know the math, even when the math makes you look lazy to people who don’t understand the lag. Letting the laundry exist. Choosing one thing, not everything, and letting that be enough.
The guilt about doing nothing is extraction logic internalized. Worth measured in output. Rest justified only through visible suffering.
Pacing from abundance is resistance.
You’re not maximizing output. You’re sustaining a life the system isn’t designed to value.