Am I Disabled?

Am I Disabled?
aeon.co

While there is some sense of continuum, there is a difference between being hurt and being injured. In a similar sense I feel there is a continuum of "something" and disabled. I don't really know what to call the "something" end of the disability continuum that would be analogous to "hurt" rather then "injured". For me I'll call it "inconvenienced" but I choose that word for me not to insinuate or inflame others.

Serving in Afghanistan, I was "hurt" on many occasions and "injured" once. That injury left a very visible scar on my face, migraine like headaches and some hearing loss.

Am I disabled? I would say no. I can do everything I have always been able to do. The scar is a conversation starter and the rest is manageable. I view it that I am "inconvenienced" rather than "disabled".

I would say, in general, if you are not sure if you feel you are disabled (even if you have been diagnosed) then I would say you are not.

Again, that is just my view and I don't offer it to be combative or diminish someone else's plight.

She spends half her week pleading with medical staff or arguing with insurance about why the drugs and procedures shouldn't be denied. Her eyesight is rapidly degenerating. She's has diverticulosis (they told her to lose weight and stop eating meat... she's thin and vegan). A number of her bones have started to fuse and she has acute arthritis in places that seem to show up without warning and were nowhere to be seen on images from less than a year ago. She's im chronic, sometimes debilitating pain. There's no diagnosis and people keep jabbing her with needles based in what appear to be best guesses. She's disabled. She doesn't want a sticker because it's embarrassing and she's worried about people thinking she's abusing the system and vernally (or worse) assaulting her. She'd rather walk the extra distance I'm horrible pain than have to deal with it.

Being "disabled" means lots of things and wears many faces. The stigma sucks.

For several years, my onset with in 2012 at age 36, I considered it more of a bummer and inconvenience and never thought about it any other way.

Personally I was fortunate that I was only having partial complex seizures which meant that I'd basically space out and stare into the distance completely unattached from my environment for 30 seconds to a few minutes according to my ex-girlfriend and other people I interacted with regularly.

Rarely did I have any indication that I'd had a seizure aside from the occasional, unexpected incontinence. One instance that sticks out was walking back from lunch with co-workers when one walked up to me and said "did you lose something". I dropped my sandwich while I was having a seizure and was walking all the while.

What allowed me to say "yeah... this is a legit disability" was examining how much had changed in my life without the ability to drive. Luckily I'd just basically moved in with said girlfriend who lived 10 minutes by bus from my job downtown, this was well before I worked from home and there's little chance I could have gotten to work from my rural home an hour away with essentially no transit.

I was really living a normal day to day life, I just had to make some adaptations to how I got around and had to stop using power tools without dead man switches.

Slightly hyperbolic maybe, but I can make a good case for how epilepsy cost me that house, relationship and severely impinged upon my job search.

Hindsight... it's a hell of thing. I don't know that I'd have felt any different being labeled or self-identifying as disabled but it goes a long way to describing the impact it had on my 30s. I'm also a guy that occasionally drove 50k miles in a year to travel for shows and work and various other road trips.