Story time y'all! Gather round!
Yesterday, I had a meeting with one of TWC's vocational rehabilitation counselors. Somehow I have managed to get approved into the program, which these days feels like an achievement in itself. Most programs are pretty overwhelmed by need from what I have seen.
In any case, we had a wonderful conversation. Mind you, this sweet woman is barely older than my children, so I was a little skeptical about her ability to help me. But she immediately redeemed herself with two things: empathy and listening. She didn’t assume that she knew anything about me because I fit in a box called “disabled” or “unemployed”. She asked for my unique perspective on both. So I told her. And that uncovered a third disability I rarely ever get to talk about but have had all my life.
My first invisible disability is PTSD. From childhood through adulthood, and due to a series of traumas with the most recent one being in 2023 when I was attacked by a stranger on the street outside my apartment. I beat the hell out of him, broke my right pinky, and had to have two surgeries to fix it because I type for a living, but I survived. And he now has a memory of a woman who fought him like a wildcat for twenty minutes and won. Maybe he’ll avoid attacking anyone else next time. Heavens knows when he saw me three months later he took off running like the hounds of hell were after him. And he wasn’t wrong.
My next level of disability is a cluster of physical limitations. I have two herniated discs in my spine, in the unfortunate locations of C3 and the other at L4 from being hit by an uninsured driver in 2015. C3 gives me chronic migraines and neck pain, L4 makes any physical movement or even sitting or laying down hurt. 24/7. So between the two that’s already a lot of pain that I manage every day. Then I have two hernias, an umbilical and a ventral, both covered with a mesh patch (which I’m pretty sure is failing currently).
The third disability is one that’s been so much a part of my life I forget about it. It’s also the most visible to others. I have a lazy right eye also known as strabismus. Been that way since birth (I was a preemie) and I also have severely low vision. Together they create significant visual impairments no one else knows exist. I’m not legally blind but pretty close. Without my contacts I can’t see six inches in front of my face except for shapes and colors. Even with them my depth perception will cause me to miss important cues in the environment like the slope of pavement, uneven pavement, even a curb. I’ve broken two toes because of it. I’ve walked into glass unexpectedly. And that doesn’t even count the migraines I get constantly from my vision being unequal while staring at a computer screen for 8-16 hours a day.
I don’t say any of this for sympathy or pity. If that’s where you’ve landed, you’re already missing the point. Look at my profile. Look at my achievements. Look at all I’ve done in my life. Now look at the disability and see what I’ve been forced to overcome to do it. People get disability wrong. Disability is evidence of adaptation, not limitation.
I’ve spent my entire life adapting to the world around me. At extensive personal cost. But now at 46, I’ve run out of ways I can adapt alone. I’ve reinvented myself so much at this point I feel like THAT is a professional skill set. And somehow worked myself right out of another career in the process. It’s the fourth time in my life I’ve done that.
Honestly, at some point there is a limit. I’ve realized that contorting myself endlessly for survival and the employment market is simply impossible. Even a strong tree breaks when you force it to bend too much. At some point, the employment market has to bend too. I cannot be the only one.
So TWC is going to help me try to address some of these issues. There’s three paths before us right now and the first is to try to fix the vision issues so they don’t impact my life anymore through two different surgeries. SURGERIES. That’s the next level of adaptation I need in order to hopefully overcome this lifelong disability.
I currently don’t take pictures because of it. I don’t do videos because of it. I refuse video interviews because I know people will judge me for it. “What are you looking at?” has been a question all my life. I can’t look someone in the eyes with confidence because I know exactly what they see. I look in the mirror every day, trust me I know.
We’re going to address some of the PTSD through workplace accommodations I can use, and education rehabilitation toward a law degree. Finally after adapting all my life, someone is stepping forward and saying “You know what? You’ve carried enough on your own. Let us help you remove the obstacles to success so you can finally thrive.”
If I have any regrets it’s that I didn’t do this sooner. That I tried for so long doing it alone when I could have asked for help. But hopefully doing this sets me up for the next 30 years of my life so I can actually do what I’m on this earth to do: help others. Hopefully, through this process, I can learn what becomes possible when I don’t have to spend as much time compensating for and adapting to the environment around me.
If this resonated, I'd love to hear from you.
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