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The Chronic Worker is a field guide to making life with chronic illness more workable.

This is a place for asking practical questions:

• What actually helps?
• What makes everyday life harder than it needs to be?
• How can we notice patterns without turning ourselves into full-time research projects?
• What would work, healthcare, and everyday systems look like if disabled and chronically ill people were expected to be there?

You don’t need to read everything here in order. Just pick the trail that sounds most useful right now.

What do you need right now?

I need help finding workable work

Finding a job is one thing. Finding a job that might actually work with your body, brain, responsibilities, and access needs is another.

The Chronic Worker’s employment resources look beyond whether a job is technically available or advertised as “flexible.” We’re interested in what the work requires, how it’s structured, what support exists, and what using that support might cost you.

Start with:

• Job Resources for Disabled Workers
  A growing guide to disability-focused job boards, mainstream job sites, employment programmes, and other places to look—with notes about who each resource may be best for and what you should check before investing your time.
• Disabled and Unemployed. What’s Next?
  A personal look at what comes after job loss when disability, health, money, and the need to recover are all part of the equation.

You’ll also find reporting and resources about job requirements, hiring, accommodations, disclosure, retention, and the larger question underneath all of them: What makes a job workable?

Explore work and employment resources →

I’m trying to make everyday life more workable

“Workable” doesn’t mean perfectly optimized, endlessly productive, or symptom-free.

It means creating a little more room to live inside the body, energy, money, care systems, and circumstances you actually have.

Sometimes that means finding a practical tool. Sometimes it means changing how you do something. Sometimes it means recognizing that the problem isn’t your failure to cope—it’s the amount of work a supposedly simple system keeps asking you to perform.

Here you’ll find:

• Field guides and practical resources.
• Small experiments designed around real life.
• Tools for noticing patterns without tracking everything.
• Approaches to self-management that consider time, energy, access, and burden.
• Reflections on what helps, what doesn’t, and what comes with hidden costs.

The goal isn’t to turn your life into a permanent improvement project. It’s to find useful information, make informed choices, and leave the rest.

Explore practical guides and Field Kits →

I want to understand what’s happening

Chronic illness doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

Symptoms interact with work, healthcare, money, policy, relationships, inaccessible systems, and the everyday labour of managing a body that doesn’t behave predictably. Those interactions can be difficult to see when you’re living in the middle of them.

Here you’ll find:

• SIPS monthly reports and Field Kits.
• Lived-experience research and pattern analysis.
• Reporting about disability, accessibility, employment, healthcare, and public systems.
• Workability Investigations examining the difference between something being technically available and genuinely usable or sustainable.

The questions vary, but the goal is consistent: to make the patterns easier to see, name, and use.

Explore research and reported work →

Show me what this looks like in real life

Not everything arrives as a neat finding or a polished guide.

Sometimes the most useful question is simply: How does another person actually do this?

Start with:

• Chronically Self-Employed for personal dispatches about freelance work, chronic illness, money, identity, AI, and building a working life outside conventional employment.
• Chronic Ways of Working for conversations about how people arrange their days, navigate constraints, adapt their tools, and define workable work for themselves.
• Field Recordings for audio versions and companions recorded in Leanna’s own voice.

These pieces aren’t universal blueprints. They’re examples, field notes, and invitations to notice what might—or might not—translate into your own life.

Explore stories and recordings →

Start with these

If you don’t want to choose a whole trail yet, begin with one of these.

Job Resources for Disabled Workers

A practical guide to disability-focused job boards, mainstream platforms, employment programmes, and other places to look for work—with candid notes about what each resource offers and what you should verify for yourself.

SIPS Month 2: The Long Tail of Recovery

A closer look at the difference between being functional and being recovered—and what Month 2 revealed about capacity, accumulated strain, and the long tail of recovery.

The Chronic Life Observation Field Kit

A low-burden toolkit for noticing patterns in your own life without turning yourself into a full-time research project.

Yes, AI Helped Me Write This

A personal entry point into AI, disability, authorship, and what it means to use a tool responsibly.

Field Recording #2: What Month One of SIPS Taught Me

Listen to the first SIPS monthly reflection in Leanna’s own voice.

How it all fits together

The Chronic Worker is the home for everything you’ll find here.

SIPS—the Starr Institute for Public Scholarship—is its lived-experience research project. Chronically Self-Employed is Leanna’s personal column and newsletter. Chronic Ways of Working is a conversation series about how people actually make work work, and Field Recordings are audio versions and companions for selected pieces.

You don’t need to follow every part. Choose the subject or format that’s most useful to you.

A note about the word “workable”

The Chronic Worker isn’t about helping chronically ill people squeeze more productivity out of themselves.

Workability is about fit.

It asks whether a job, tool, routine, environment, service, or system can be used and sustained by a real person under real conditions. It considers access, energy, autonomy, clarity, time, money, risk, and the amount of invisible labour required to participate.

Something can be available without being accessible. It can be flexible on paper and rigid in practice. It can technically help while demanding more time or energy than someone has to give.

Making life more workable begins with noticing those differences.