this is a post for Blogging Against Disablism Day. this is my first year doing it and i’m excited and nervous. please do follow the link; there were such amazing things to read last year, and i’m sure this year will be equally rewarding.
why is the accommodation of flexibility so hard for people to provide? does it have to do with the fact that it would benefit everyone? i can think of so many scenarios in which i just need a little flexibility in order to be a part of things.
i’m not in school this quarter, because financial aid does not care why you need to be part-time; it won’t pay a dime if you want to go less than half-time. my graduate program is hard, invigorating, wonderful, but it requires so much out of me that i consistently struggle when taking two classes. i want to give the program the attention it deserves. i want to do my best. hell, i’m doing this whole thing in the hopes of getting off of disability income – i’m doing computational linguistics, not theoretical linguistics. i’m being practical. but i can’t go to school, because i cannot pay for it myself, and i can’t seem to do well in two classes at once. not without borrowing heavily from the future. i don’t know yet how i’m going to manage in the fall. just hope that my time off recharged me enough so that i have reserves to spend again. and start the whole cycle over.
and anyway, what if i couldn’t do even one class? i’m motivated, smart, suited to what i’m studying, but sometimes life crashes in and i spend the week in pain and fear, with not even enough good time and energy to keep myself fed. i am so jealous of everyone else in my program, who can spend 80 hours on a homework. who can work and go to school. who can flake off sometimes, counting on being able to make up for it later. i have to push so hard to make sure i’m doing work whenever i possibly can, because i never know when i’ll get thrown back into the abyss. why couldn’t i do the work in my own time? these classes are made entirely of homeworks, for the most part. why couldn’t they record the lectures, have me watch at my own pace, do work at my own pace? so many restrictions seem needless to me. accommodations in education have the delightful caveat that if anything is too hard or too different – too accommodating - they don’t have to worry about it.
stress makes my disability worse, which unfortunately tends to work out to mean that the more i need to do something, the less i can. the more important a homework is, the harder it is, the closer to the deadline i am, the harder it is to buckle down and focus. i have to fight through worse and worse panic attacks. i work so hard at just doing it, not caring, not worrying what it will make anyone think of me. but i can’t. sometimes it’s hard to type a single line of code, because i’m afraid the grader will be judging me, laughing at me, looking down on me. when i get a 94 out of 100 i have this barely controllable impulse to run to the teacher or grader and apologize profusely. it’s my job to learn the material; to turn in something that is not right, that i know is not right, feels just awful. it feels like i’m throwing away any chances to be liked or respected.
sometimes i want to scream when i encounter the subtle stigma that hangs around me. i already have terrible social anxiety, so interacting with classmates is exhausting and requires lots of recovery time. but it’s worse to stand out, so i make the effort to interact pleasantly and normally. i always show up early, so i end up having to try to make conversation with the others that arrive early. the first conversation always goes the same: they ask me what else i’m taking, i say that i’m just going part time. they say, “oh, are you working somewhere?” because that’s the story for i think every other part-time student in this program. they have fancy jobs at microsoft or another cushy place; often, their work pays for them to get the degree. (i don’t even want to think about how much debt i’m going into for this. all without the guarantee that i’ll be able to work afterwards – yes, this degree “pays for itself”, but you do have to be able to work for that to happen.) if i say “no” they ask what i do with my time. if i say i’m disabled, they ask me what’s wrong with me. the second that i mention that it’s psychiatric, that’s the second their eyes shut off and glaze over. they retreat from interest and friendliness into politeness.
and when we have to do projects together, i know i’m frustrating to work with. i know they think i’m being lazy when i don’t finish my part quickly. but i swear i spend far more hours than they do, psyching myself up, fighting with bugs for hours when i can concentrate because it triggers my anxiety so very badly to ask for any kind of help. they dash off a quick email to me, letting me know where they are, even asking questions, and it takes them under ten minutes. i spend an hour agonizing over a 10-line email, and i have aeron or edges read it because i worry so much about sounding perfectly normal and appropriate. sometimes i can’t hit “send” and have to have someone else do it for me. then i panic, knowing i can’t take it back, worrying about how they’ll take it. if i can experience any relief at having sent the email, then they reply a day later and the cycle starts all over again. and that’s not even talking about all the time it takes to code, all the hours when concentration completely eludes me.
i don’t mind hard work, but i hate that everyone thinks i have it easy when i’m putting every waking breath into either doing the work, or charging up to do the work. i end up having no time or energy for housework or eating, because those things are already hard for me. and when self care falls by the wayside, then of course it makes it even harder to concentrate and do the work, which makes me struggle with it all the more, leaving even more self care by the wayside. i am so humiliated and frustrated at how hard this is for me. i feel like a failure for this empty spring and summer. eventually, i need to do an internship or a thesis project. i can hardly even handle ordinary classes; how am i going to actually finish?
and when i do, it’s just going to get worse, because i have to try to enter the workforce. getting a part-time job as a programmer is already a rare occurance; what if i need to work less than 20 hours some weeks? why is it so unthinkable to have a variable number of hours? and what if, sometimes, i’d only be up for some of it? what if i needed to telecommute, sometimes or always? they don’t have entry-level computer science jobs like that. not to my knowledge. and of course, on top of that, my social anxiety means that even scheduling the interview will take everything out of me, let alone going to it, let alone shining in it. i’m pretty sure i could never do a technical interview; the pressure would blot out any ability i had. and if i need accommodations for the interview process, then they can decide not to bother with my disabled self, and give some other reason for not hiring me. (like when i applied for an apartment, was turned down because i was on section 8, and then when i informed them it was illegal to refuse me on that basis in seattle, suddenly there was no reason, just “a lot of other applicants”. even though they let me put a deposit down when i applied.)
some of the accommodations i might need, like telecommuting, are already in place, but not for disabled people. they are for people who have “proven themselves” for years, they are not available to people who need them.
people act like receiving disability income is a cardinal sin, a drain on society, a negative. but the same people make it impossible for me and people like me to be employed. we want to “contribute to society”. society doesn’t want to let us; it just wants to complain about us and call us lazy.
i’m not lazy. but sometimes i’m tempted to give up.
