A Kind World

Preface

As this fall started, I spent a lot of time laying in bed. I had been sick since the beginning of August, and mono seemed to be hitting me hard without relenting.  Once classes began, things got a lot more complicated. Every day came with a decision: do I do classes today, do I email a professor asking for special consideration, or do I accept a zero? Advisors told me to do what I can and inform my professors what I couldn’t do, but it’s never that simple. 

I’d been anemic for months. Eating nutritionally had been hard for me, for reasons more complex than poor grocery list decisions. My history with rocky mental health and undereating made emotionally paralyzed, nauseous, midday bedtime with the curtains drawn as tight as they could the norm. While my anemia had caused similar fatigue to the mono, there was never an option for special considerations like mono had. Because anemia wasn’t a disease, but a condition resulting from lifestyle, I had never received any grace. 

So when my alarm went off at 8am in the mono days, the wall of exhaustion that hit me was already pretty familiar.  Navigating healing from an illness is like walking a tightrope. I could work, but without rest what if by the end of the day I'm iller? What if I push myself too hard and by the end of the week, I won't be able to do work at all? This is exactly what happened to me immediately after moving back to campus for the beginning of the college semester. My symptoms hadn’t been severe for weeks, but after pushing myself a little too far, within a week I ended up back on a hospital bed, a concoction of medications dripping into my arm from an IV bag. 

Professors often give flexibility to those suffering illnesses, but not those with other excuses.  So as my other symptoms left and fatigue was the only thing that remained, it became impossible to tell when my illness had actually ended.  Was this fatigue a result of the mono, the anemia or just the result of my own lack of self care? And if it isn’t the mono, but a result of something else, why does it need to be treated so differently? When does my underperformance become their responsibility to accommodate instead of my own to accept the consequences? At the end of the day, most of the time, accepting a zero felt like the easiest option. 

The experience I had this fall is no way unique. In fact, the same questions I asked myself laying in bed after my 8am alarm felt similar to questions I’d asked myself at my summer job, as a designer, and as a friend and family member. 

When should I ask for accommodations for my ADHD in work, school, and my interpersonal relationships? 

​

How should I use my time to balance designing for people with disabilities and designing for the majority as a developer and UX designer?

​

When should mental health issues like anxiety and depression be treated like a disability for me and others?

​

Is our treatment of disabilities in this moment and place in the world fair?

​

These disability and accommodation gray areas invoke what feels like endless questions.  Is it fair to use the language and systems we use for disabilities for this wider, greyer, looser group of things? In my own life, I've found myself frustrated at the lack of clarity of which things are worthy of an accommodation and which are not. By learning more about the systems in place for disability and speaking with those that have encountered disability questions in their own lives, I hope to have some of my questions answered, or new ones created.

Let's begin.