Obsessing Over Words: Chronic

The word chronic comes with a lot of baggage, evoking thoughts of illness, drugs, bad behaviors.  I’ll stay away from dictionary definitions here, but I’ll give my own version of its basic definition. 

Chronic.
Recurring over a long period of time. 

That really doesn’t capture it, does it? If that was all, why not use the word recurring, or repeated, or constant? The thing about chronic issues is that they recur, but they don’t always recur. They are not constant. My chronic back pain does not happen every day, but it happens most days. On the days of inexplicable absence, most people would swear up and down that there is nothing wrong with me at all. 

Chronic illness, chronic pain, chronic behavior–there are gaps in it. These gaps provide the mental wiggle room for forming narratives. A chronically ill person who’s not really sick, because it goes away just often enough that they seem perfectly functional. It’s just a thing that happens sometimes. Everyone gets sick sometimes, but there are always good days, so it’s fine.

It’s funny how that logic disappears when you apply it to other things. If you chronically left your keys in your car, those sometimes moments where you remember to take them with you don’t make up for the danger of losing your car 80% of the time. If a partner has chronic anger issues, those sometimes moments of being gentle, sweet, and loving don’t erase the danger and pain of violent words and action.

By now an obvious connotation has been uncovered: harm. Chronic things are rarely good, happy things. They are painful, harmful, hurtful–to such an extent that their occasional-yet-consistent repetition is a serious problem. So we use the word chronic when someone lies constantly or is sick often, and we establish that it is not just an annoyance, but a hindrance to self and others. It’s both an indictment (although ideally not against the sick person in particular) and a warning flag, a word that signals that there is a problem here that must be monitored, avoided, or dealt with.  

And yet…

It also carries a sense of inevitability. Things that are chronic are not just those that have lasted for a long time from past to present, but those that will last for a long time going forward. Labeling something as chronic is a form of future sight, or tactical prediction, based on present knowledge, that whatever this problem is will persist for the foreseeable future. There is an inevitability to it that defies fixing on a fundamental level. It brands the subject with the expectation that effort may not be enough to change its fate. This can be demotivating.

I’d like to make this an amoral statement, but it is difficult. Depending on what it’s applied to, the word chronic begs for completely different reactions. I’d argue that there is a moral imperative to stop chronic abuse, even if it may require extreme effort, cooperation and creativity to achieve. Abuse is serious, harmful, and unacceptable, regardless of whether the abuser or abused is capable of halting the pattern. In this case, the concept of inevitability is rejected.

When it comes to chronic illness, one must hold two competing interpretations at once in order to best support the ill person: that this illness cannot be fixed or cured and the expectation that it must be is harmful, and that this illness must be treated and support given to the greatest extent possible for as long as necessary. In this case, the concept of inevitability is accepted, though  attempts to change the chronic condition are still critical.

We may be faced in our lives with many people who chronically lie, or manipulate, or just chronically leave their socks on the floor (granted, that one is a stretch to the sense of ‘harm’ I discussed earlier). And in many of these cases, I would posit that it’s perfectly acceptable to throw ones hands up and declare that nothing can be done. This is a facet of objective reality that must be lived with unchanged. The lying, manipulating, and sock-strewing will continue, and the answer is to adapt without attempting to end it. In many cases like these, chronic things are a perfect opportunity to exhibit grace.

Tl;dr:‘Chronic’ as a word is a bit too nuanced to get down in the span of a single definition. It is something that lasts a long time, and will last long into the future. It is a pattern, consistent but often not constant, with any number of gaps between occurrences. It is harmful, or hurtful, a largely negative word that suggests that this is an unwanted thing that keeps happening and serious enough to matter even if it doesn’t always happen. The word comes with a sense of inevitability, though whether or not this means we should fight to change it depends on the specific case.

Oh? What is my definition of grace? Well, don’t worry. I’ll obsess over that one another time.