Fairness

The other day I was talking to the HR rep at work as we were once again trying to find a place, a role, a job that I could perform successfully. Some jobs were discussed that I could perform, but they were held by other people and so they were not available. She explained to me that it would not be fair to those people to take their job and give it to me. I nodded, I knew she was right, I understood that we must be fair; but inside I was seething, because there was no attention given to fairness when I was hurt, but now I have to be fair. Fairness had become the end of my rainbow, always out of reach. When I got home I wrote this:

Fairness

They didn't save my life, they made me not dead. I am alive, but I have lost my life. I am still me, but everything that I was is gone. I may look like I have lost nothing, but how I look is not how I feel.

I have lost my dearest competencies. I have lost my most cherished abilities. I have lost my certainty and with it my confidence. I have only the most tenuous grasp of reality; the reality I have does not seem to be the reality shared by others.

And you presume to lecture me on fairness. Oh please, really? You are going to tell me that what I'm asking for is not fair? Do you really want to go there? When did fairness crop into this situation? When I came to in the hospital and I could not speak, walk, or remember anything, there was no fairness. When I struggled for days, which became weeks, which became months, which became years, there was no fairness. When I fought to put any kind of meaning in my life, a life where friends slipped away, where job opportunities slipped away, where possibility burned off like the morning fog, there was no fairness.

To me, fairness is a luxury so rare and fleeting its occurrence is mere coincidence. Fairness is a naive childish notion, like unicorns and leprechauns, a trite conjuration of innocence to be properly discarded with adulthood. Maybe fairness has weight and meaning for you, but it has none for me.