The Social Shield

Why available doesn’t necessarily mean able.

One of the things I never expected after leaving work was becoming more visible. When I was employed, it was easy to explain why I couldn’t do something:

“I’m working.”

And that was usually enough.

If I was tired after a long week, people automatically understood. If I couldn’t meet for lunch or help with something during the day, work provided a perfectly acceptable explanation - my time wasn’t available, and no one expected anything more.

When illness brought my career to an end, I expected to grieve the loss of my work, my routine and my income, but what I wasn’t quite prepared for was losing something much less visible: a reason people immediately understood.

Since then, I’ve noticed that there can be an assumption that I’m more available. In some ways, it probably looks that way - after all, I’m no longer going out to work each day.

What people don’t see though are the hospital appointments, the recovery days, the fatigue that can turn a simple errand into the only thing I manage that day, or the constant calculation about where the energy I do have will matter most.

Leaving work didn’t create more capacity - it simply made the limits of that capacity much harder for others to see.

A little while ago, my husband was invited to do something. He smiled politely and said, ‘Sorry, I’m not available’. Afterwards, I asked what he had planned because I hadn’t realised there was anything in the diary.‘There isn’t,’ he said. ‘I’m going for a walk, then I want to watch something on television’.

At first, I remember thinking that those weren’t really plans - they could be moved.

Then I caught myself.

His walk helps him manage his chronic back pain, and the quiet evening afterwards mattered too. In his mind, he wasn’t available, and I realised I actually respected that completely.

He didn’t owe anyone a better explanation. And it made me wonder whether availability means something different to what I had always assumed.

Perhaps it isn’t simply about whether our calendar is empty - maybe it’s about whether we have the capacity to give something without taking it from somewhere else that matters.

When someone says they’re unavailable because they’re working, we rarely question it. Yet somehow, saying we’re unavailable because we need to rest, manage our health or protect what little energy we have can feel as though it requires a much longer explanation.

Maybe that’s because work is visible - we can picture someone at a desk, in a meeting or on a shift but illness, particularly when it’s long-term or fluctuating, often isn’t.

The need to rest doesn’t disappear simply because employment does, and I’ve come to realise that availability doesn’t necessarily equal ability. Someone can have an empty diary and still have no capacity left to give.

Perhaps one of the invisible losses that comes with leaving work through illness isn’t simply the loss of a role or an income, but the loss of a socially accepted reason to say no.