My youngest brother has some neurological disabilities as a result of a bad reaction to a vaccine when he was a baby. (He went through a lot of tests; that is what our mom was eventually told.) It's definitely been true in his case that professing pro-life Christians haven't been interested in finding ways to include him. Church activities that his non-disabled siblings could participate in simply weren't options for him, and it's been hard for our mom to know how to raise him. He's much more sheltered than any of us were, partly out of necessity. He just can't function on the same social and emotional level as other people, although he isn't intellectually disabled. The inability to easily label him has just made it more difficult. He's close to graduating from high school now--a minor miracle on its own--but trying to help him find work has been a real challenge, since his neurological issues include both physical and socioemotional aspects. He has no friends. Not really sure how he's going to navigate adult life. He's becoming more aware of how he differs from other people, but he seems to really want to get married, have kids, etc., and it's hard to imagine how that would ever be possible for him. We don't want to crush his dreams. We also don't want him to expect things out of life that aren't realistic and end up feeling even more crushed as a result.
Being his sister has made me much more aware of just how challenging it can be for a disabled person and their caregivers to navigate the world. His challenges could, of course, be much worse. But the fact that they don't easily fit under any existing label has made it difficult for other people to accept his differences and for him to get help when he needs it.
I ponder your post again every time I come back to this page, and wonder what can be done. Is it possible that your brother's differences also entail some unique strengths? (I'm thinking, of course, of Temple Grandin, but also people with Downs Syndrome and basically anyone who seems to be "wired differently."
It might be that the "normal" activities and environments that our society has offered him never struck that zing of interest and ability that would give him his chance to shine. I'm sure there's something....I really am. Easy for me to say, I know....and families and teachers can get exhausted with just the "easy, normal" overloads of things to handle.
I think a start would be to share more of him. Even his first name, for prayers and visualizing him having a joyful, satisfying life. If he's willing, share more about him here and in the wider internet-woven and mysterious-energy-woven world. It's a big wide world, and surprising good things happen.
Another mom who also has a disabled son that has faced a similar job situation gave our mom probably the best advice she's gotten--to slow down and let my brother try out different things (and fail at them, as necessary) until he finds something he can do. So right now he's volunteering close to full time at the thrift store run by a local homeless shelter. It's not something he particularly loves--his interests are basically superheroes and audio dramas, which in his case aren't going to lead to a career--but at least he's interacting some with people outside his family in a lower stress environment than most jobs would offer. We're hoping that this might help potential employers later on be more likely to consider him, maybe for a grocery store job or something. He hasn't seemed very interested in college so far, and I don't think there are any trade jobs he could qualify for because he has a tremor that can't be controlled with medication. But our mom is trying to keep that advice in mind and figure things out by trial and error right now.
You never know --- it's becoming increasingly possible to make audio dramas through the Internet, something which doesn't require a lot of high-stress being-with-strangers activity.
The main thing, I think, is to make sure he knows his value doesn't decrease the further he gets from a "normal" life --- you know, the way people are always saying things like, "but it's not so bad, he can still be mostly normal!" as if being mostly not-normal is a tragedy. But I think you already know that.
I’m not sure I have direct answers to this week’s questions, but I do have some tangential observations.
I’ve seen the conversation about accessibility for disabilities and other special needs go poorly. Often, those in power will say something like, “Well, if someone needed accommodations, they’d ask, and then we’d help.” But sometimes leaders don’t seem to appreciate that their reactive stance is already a barrier to accessibility.
But this is a convicting topic for me. I’d like to think of myself as an advocate for the marginalized, but my ideals have been challenged as that’s hit closer to home. Someone in my family has trouble hearing, and to be honest, I haven’t always been the most gracious about accommodating their needs when it actually requires something concrete of me (for example, remembering to speak louder than my normal register). You’d think that would be so simple, and it should be, but it’s really exposed a lot of my own selfishness. Anyway, this is embarrassing to share, but I’m learning that creating accessibility might actually require, uh, conscious personal effort on the part of those for whom the system already works. So I want to try to keep that in mind going forward.
Absolutely. I am really working to grow on this just when it comes to accommodating different dietary needs for a group for a dinner party. I'm much better at writing about providing accommodations than providing them, especially when the need is not as glaring as physical access.
I'll never forget a small family conference with my adult daughter Nancy, and my life partner, Marge, because Marge was beginning to experience a lot of memory loss and confusion. When Marge said "I don't want to be a burden," my daughter exclaimed "We WANT you to be a burden!" It still brings tears to my eyes that she said that so spontaneously. For the years after that, I was able to remind Marge of what Nancy had said, and it would lift her spirits -- and I'm sure it helped Marge realize and ask for what she realized she needed, whether it was a rollator or a ramp, or someone to play a game with her, or take her for an excursion to town for fun.
There's a wheelchair-bound advocate in Atlanta, GA who almost singlehandedly got the Habitat for Humanity there to begin building all their homes as "visitable." I love this concept. It's kind to everyone -- potential guests and to the inhabitants who want to stay at home even if they break a leg, or worse. I love the idea of extending hospitality -- including hospitality to ourselves. (Wouldn't it be great to be able to "childproof" one's home within 5 minutes?) I can feel a sort of inner expansion as I imagine what's possible for my home and those of others.
I work for a community college with a sizeable population of students who qualify for any of a wide range of accommodations, including a number of students with visible disabilities (or at least that fall under the legal "disability" heading, even if they wouldn't consider themselves to have one) - limited mobility, deafness/hardness of hearing, neurodiversity, and others. I guess I haven't thought of accommodations primarily as making those encounters *possible,* so much as their being the logical consequence of the situation our students are in, which is that right now most people need some kind of postsecondary credential if they want a living-wage job. (And that's no knock on non-college options like trade schools, but many trades require a certain range of physical capability, which leaves some students with disabilities needing other options.) So once they're here, classes and services need to be accessible.
Certainly, without things like elevators and ASL interpreters, some of our physically-disabled or D/deaf students wouldn't have access to our courses, but another big thing that helps make presence possible for some of them isn't an accommodation in the traditional sense: external funding. Disabled veterans able to draw on post-service benefits to fund their education, people who come in out of social-service programs, and especially Pell Grants, which low-income students (including those without disabilities, of course) rely on because those funds go so much farther here than at a standard four-year college.
Figuring out "reasonable" accommodations in higher education can be tricky at times. For less complex situations, our Disability Services office has done a lot of plugging of Universal Design for Learning, which is basically that principle where, if you bake certain accommodations into your course or material design, everybody benefits (for example, making sure all videos have decent captions - helps students with hearing limitations, sure, but it's also helpful for non-native English speakers, as well as people like me who sometimes just have an easier time following an extended explanation if I can read it as well as hear it). Like another commenter said, one limitation is that you run up against your own selfishness a lot (it takes a lot more time to caption videos or find ones with existing decent captions - or even to arrange for our Deaf Studies students to add the captioning, as that program offers faculty and staff sometimes as a service). I'm glad I got a chance to learn about some of the UDL principles, though, and hope some students have been helped without needing to do anything special.
"Where in your life do you most frequently encounter people with visible disabilities? What accommodations made that possible?" This question came back to me this week when a woman who uses a motorized wheelchair lectored at Mass this weekend. Our parish is relatively new (founded in the 1940s, church built in the 1990s so it's ADA compliant) and it makes physical space for the physically disabled. There are wheelchair spaces within the pews right at the front of the church, there are ramps up to the altar/tabernacle/ambo (though interestingly, in the discussion of visibility, those are behind the tabernacle while the steps are in front). Yet obviously physical disability is not the only type. There have recently been "reminders" given during the announcements at the end of Mass and written into the bulletin to please take your crying child out of the sanctuary and into the gathering space or the hallway (we don't have a "cry room") which leads me to believe that if your family member had audible tics they wouldn't be welcome at Mass. I'd be super interested to see if we'd spend the money to accommodate deaf or blind parishioners, or if they'd just have to make do.
Also, I would like to take a moment to profess my love for playgrounds that are widely accessible. We have dear friends whose daughter has muscle issues (stairs and sand are both quite hard for her to navigate) and their son is autistic. We love being able to meet them at a playground where there are ramps AND stairs up to the slide, where the surface is rubberized for better traction for her to walk on and to keep their son more comfortable so he doesn't experience sand or mulch in his shoes, which triggers his sensory issues, and where the merry-go-round is flush with the surface so that everyone can climb on board. This discussion is calling me to start advocating to my city parks department to keep these issues in mind when they start talking about upgrading play structures.
Here's a great quote: "The more you write about disability in the music industry, the less niche it seems. There was a stat in New York City that 70 percent of people are close to someone with a disability. It’s not a known issue. We are the largest minority in America, 26 percent. We need to normalize talking about it. I think the music industry has a powerful voice for change. If you normalize it, suddenly, people who wouldn't necessarily care about certain ways of life realize that's not fair, and then they start to care about it."
The normalization she talks about is so critical, I think. It relates back to conversations about shame and conversations about charity vs mutual aid - 1) there is no reason to feel ashamed of your own disability or the way a loved one is disabled by our environment and 2) we need to see people as whole humans who deserve love & fairness instead of a 'lesser' people who 'better' people choose to help.
I also love her focus on the music industry in particular - making sure venues are accessible, etc. We each have a place where we can incorporate advocacy for justice & fairness in our work, it's just a matter of seeing where we can do that good work now, today.
Where in your life do you most frequently encounter people with visible disabilities? What accommodations made that possible?
Where do you or someone you know inhabit the fringes of disability, as Ne’eman describes? How did you decide whether “disabled” fit your understanding of your needs?
______________________
The most obvious examples of this that I have seen have been very private and not obvious, the fringes. so to speak, of caring for elderly family members who have become disabled with old age.
Accomodations are there, for example, in the myriad types of support that are available, wheel chairs, canes, home visits, home attendants.
The problem, though, is that some of them might not want to recognize that they are disabled. It's a matter of pride, that they can manage. They don't want to recognize it. Or declaring vulnerability makes them more vulnerable. They think about how they came to this time in life, especially if they neglected their health. It's very sobering.
They are fearful of what being disabled actually means, the type of support they might require. Included, their fears that those around them, younger relatives might not want to bother, or might want to put them in care because their needs are overwhelming.
Their lives have become harder and they might not want to bother with all the effort it takes to make those appointments. They want to avoid it as much as htey can.
I can definitely understand the assisted suicide route. Someone who is despondent about the changes to come as s/he becomes more debilitated and more dependent. Imagine a person who doesn't feel s/he has people around s/he can trust to support caregiving. That's when the person will feel like a burden, and so s/he might believe it's better to die instead, with dignity than living with the indignity that could follow with lack of care or the indignities of dying through some debilitating illness.
I'm following this. I think, though all real cultural change in difficult, that disability rights have time and time again been "passed over" for opportunities to come to the forefront of our societal consciousness and that even the bumbling efforts, say, of some companies to expand their hiring practices along gender or racial lines would be a revolution in the world of disability.
*has this page up for several days meaning to write a thorough reply when the brain-fog lifts at the same time that I have a chunk of time for it*
*finally gets around to it because I'm sitting on the floor with a dizzy spell*
Hi, it's me, I'm kinda disabled. Most of the time I can function just fine, holding down two jobs which between them require a variety of physical and mental skills, and even keeping my house. . . livable-in, anyway, without much outside help. (I do take a lot of naps though.) I'm autistic, so that affects every area of everything in one way or another; for instance, if I spend too much time in a social setting I pay for it by being completely wiped out the next day (and sometimes having trouble balancing! because I've used up my day's ration of Ability to Concentrate on Where I Am In Space through too much time around other bodies there are Rules for interacting with --- so it can be fun).
The reason I'm sitting on the floor right now instead of cleaning out my fridge (a much-overdue project; out of sight and so very much out of mind) is not directly related to that so much as it is me being female. I have a week every month where when I get up in the morning I cannot predict whether I'll spend the day at work or rotating between bathroom and bed. On such days I am tempted to use the term disabled because (to refer to an earlier discussion) that is a shortcut to making my situation legible to the people who need to know, for instance, whether I can work today. On the other hand it's far from being my constant mode of being, and one isn't "disabled part-time", I don't think.
Where I mostly encounter other visibly disabled people is at one of my jobs. I'm a librarian, and the locations I work at are particularly good at accessibility, from the basics such as not having steps at the doors or anywhere in the building (we're also tiny enough that everything fits on one floor) and the widths of the aisles between bookshelves, to help we provide around computer use, which is a big reason people come in. (My boss is also very supportive.) One of our regular disabled patrons has made a point of telling us we're doing a good job, which is high praise.
My youngest brother has some neurological disabilities as a result of a bad reaction to a vaccine when he was a baby. (He went through a lot of tests; that is what our mom was eventually told.) It's definitely been true in his case that professing pro-life Christians haven't been interested in finding ways to include him. Church activities that his non-disabled siblings could participate in simply weren't options for him, and it's been hard for our mom to know how to raise him. He's much more sheltered than any of us were, partly out of necessity. He just can't function on the same social and emotional level as other people, although he isn't intellectually disabled. The inability to easily label him has just made it more difficult. He's close to graduating from high school now--a minor miracle on its own--but trying to help him find work has been a real challenge, since his neurological issues include both physical and socioemotional aspects. He has no friends. Not really sure how he's going to navigate adult life. He's becoming more aware of how he differs from other people, but he seems to really want to get married, have kids, etc., and it's hard to imagine how that would ever be possible for him. We don't want to crush his dreams. We also don't want him to expect things out of life that aren't realistic and end up feeling even more crushed as a result.
Being his sister has made me much more aware of just how challenging it can be for a disabled person and their caregivers to navigate the world. His challenges could, of course, be much worse. But the fact that they don't easily fit under any existing label has made it difficult for other people to accept his differences and for him to get help when he needs it.
I ponder your post again every time I come back to this page, and wonder what can be done. Is it possible that your brother's differences also entail some unique strengths? (I'm thinking, of course, of Temple Grandin, but also people with Downs Syndrome and basically anyone who seems to be "wired differently."
It might be that the "normal" activities and environments that our society has offered him never struck that zing of interest and ability that would give him his chance to shine. I'm sure there's something....I really am. Easy for me to say, I know....and families and teachers can get exhausted with just the "easy, normal" overloads of things to handle.
I think a start would be to share more of him. Even his first name, for prayers and visualizing him having a joyful, satisfying life. If he's willing, share more about him here and in the wider internet-woven and mysterious-energy-woven world. It's a big wide world, and surprising good things happen.
Another mom who also has a disabled son that has faced a similar job situation gave our mom probably the best advice she's gotten--to slow down and let my brother try out different things (and fail at them, as necessary) until he finds something he can do. So right now he's volunteering close to full time at the thrift store run by a local homeless shelter. It's not something he particularly loves--his interests are basically superheroes and audio dramas, which in his case aren't going to lead to a career--but at least he's interacting some with people outside his family in a lower stress environment than most jobs would offer. We're hoping that this might help potential employers later on be more likely to consider him, maybe for a grocery store job or something. He hasn't seemed very interested in college so far, and I don't think there are any trade jobs he could qualify for because he has a tremor that can't be controlled with medication. But our mom is trying to keep that advice in mind and figure things out by trial and error right now.
You never know --- it's becoming increasingly possible to make audio dramas through the Internet, something which doesn't require a lot of high-stress being-with-strangers activity.
The main thing, I think, is to make sure he knows his value doesn't decrease the further he gets from a "normal" life --- you know, the way people are always saying things like, "but it's not so bad, he can still be mostly normal!" as if being mostly not-normal is a tragedy. But I think you already know that.
I’m not sure I have direct answers to this week’s questions, but I do have some tangential observations.
I’ve seen the conversation about accessibility for disabilities and other special needs go poorly. Often, those in power will say something like, “Well, if someone needed accommodations, they’d ask, and then we’d help.” But sometimes leaders don’t seem to appreciate that their reactive stance is already a barrier to accessibility.
But this is a convicting topic for me. I’d like to think of myself as an advocate for the marginalized, but my ideals have been challenged as that’s hit closer to home. Someone in my family has trouble hearing, and to be honest, I haven’t always been the most gracious about accommodating their needs when it actually requires something concrete of me (for example, remembering to speak louder than my normal register). You’d think that would be so simple, and it should be, but it’s really exposed a lot of my own selfishness. Anyway, this is embarrassing to share, but I’m learning that creating accessibility might actually require, uh, conscious personal effort on the part of those for whom the system already works. So I want to try to keep that in mind going forward.
Absolutely. I am really working to grow on this just when it comes to accommodating different dietary needs for a group for a dinner party. I'm much better at writing about providing accommodations than providing them, especially when the need is not as glaring as physical access.
I'll never forget a small family conference with my adult daughter Nancy, and my life partner, Marge, because Marge was beginning to experience a lot of memory loss and confusion. When Marge said "I don't want to be a burden," my daughter exclaimed "We WANT you to be a burden!" It still brings tears to my eyes that she said that so spontaneously. For the years after that, I was able to remind Marge of what Nancy had said, and it would lift her spirits -- and I'm sure it helped Marge realize and ask for what she realized she needed, whether it was a rollator or a ramp, or someone to play a game with her, or take her for an excursion to town for fun.
A big part of what it means to be loved is that people *want* to be with you in your suffering, even as they are grieved by your suffering.
There's a wheelchair-bound advocate in Atlanta, GA who almost singlehandedly got the Habitat for Humanity there to begin building all their homes as "visitable." I love this concept. It's kind to everyone -- potential guests and to the inhabitants who want to stay at home even if they break a leg, or worse. I love the idea of extending hospitality -- including hospitality to ourselves. (Wouldn't it be great to be able to "childproof" one's home within 5 minutes?) I can feel a sort of inner expansion as I imagine what's possible for my home and those of others.
I work for a community college with a sizeable population of students who qualify for any of a wide range of accommodations, including a number of students with visible disabilities (or at least that fall under the legal "disability" heading, even if they wouldn't consider themselves to have one) - limited mobility, deafness/hardness of hearing, neurodiversity, and others. I guess I haven't thought of accommodations primarily as making those encounters *possible,* so much as their being the logical consequence of the situation our students are in, which is that right now most people need some kind of postsecondary credential if they want a living-wage job. (And that's no knock on non-college options like trade schools, but many trades require a certain range of physical capability, which leaves some students with disabilities needing other options.) So once they're here, classes and services need to be accessible.
Certainly, without things like elevators and ASL interpreters, some of our physically-disabled or D/deaf students wouldn't have access to our courses, but another big thing that helps make presence possible for some of them isn't an accommodation in the traditional sense: external funding. Disabled veterans able to draw on post-service benefits to fund their education, people who come in out of social-service programs, and especially Pell Grants, which low-income students (including those without disabilities, of course) rely on because those funds go so much farther here than at a standard four-year college.
Figuring out "reasonable" accommodations in higher education can be tricky at times. For less complex situations, our Disability Services office has done a lot of plugging of Universal Design for Learning, which is basically that principle where, if you bake certain accommodations into your course or material design, everybody benefits (for example, making sure all videos have decent captions - helps students with hearing limitations, sure, but it's also helpful for non-native English speakers, as well as people like me who sometimes just have an easier time following an extended explanation if I can read it as well as hear it). Like another commenter said, one limitation is that you run up against your own selfishness a lot (it takes a lot more time to caption videos or find ones with existing decent captions - or even to arrange for our Deaf Studies students to add the captioning, as that program offers faculty and staff sometimes as a service). I'm glad I got a chance to learn about some of the UDL principles, though, and hope some students have been helped without needing to do anything special.
Last sentence should say: "...without *their* [students'] needing to do anything special." #editbutton :-)
"Where in your life do you most frequently encounter people with visible disabilities? What accommodations made that possible?" This question came back to me this week when a woman who uses a motorized wheelchair lectored at Mass this weekend. Our parish is relatively new (founded in the 1940s, church built in the 1990s so it's ADA compliant) and it makes physical space for the physically disabled. There are wheelchair spaces within the pews right at the front of the church, there are ramps up to the altar/tabernacle/ambo (though interestingly, in the discussion of visibility, those are behind the tabernacle while the steps are in front). Yet obviously physical disability is not the only type. There have recently been "reminders" given during the announcements at the end of Mass and written into the bulletin to please take your crying child out of the sanctuary and into the gathering space or the hallway (we don't have a "cry room") which leads me to believe that if your family member had audible tics they wouldn't be welcome at Mass. I'd be super interested to see if we'd spend the money to accommodate deaf or blind parishioners, or if they'd just have to make do.
Also, I would like to take a moment to profess my love for playgrounds that are widely accessible. We have dear friends whose daughter has muscle issues (stairs and sand are both quite hard for her to navigate) and their son is autistic. We love being able to meet them at a playground where there are ramps AND stairs up to the slide, where the surface is rubberized for better traction for her to walk on and to keep their son more comfortable so he doesn't experience sand or mulch in his shoes, which triggers his sensory issues, and where the merry-go-round is flush with the surface so that everyone can climb on board. This discussion is calling me to start advocating to my city parks department to keep these issues in mind when they start talking about upgrading play structures.
I was thrilled last week to see that an incredible local musician and disability advocate, Gaelynn Lea, was recently tapped to create the music for the upcoming Broadway production of Macbeth. She talks about her fight for inclusivity and visibility here: https://www.grammy.com/grammys/news/musician-disability-advocate-gaelynn-lea-creating-new-normal-music-industry-call-action
Here's a great quote: "The more you write about disability in the music industry, the less niche it seems. There was a stat in New York City that 70 percent of people are close to someone with a disability. It’s not a known issue. We are the largest minority in America, 26 percent. We need to normalize talking about it. I think the music industry has a powerful voice for change. If you normalize it, suddenly, people who wouldn't necessarily care about certain ways of life realize that's not fair, and then they start to care about it."
The normalization she talks about is so critical, I think. It relates back to conversations about shame and conversations about charity vs mutual aid - 1) there is no reason to feel ashamed of your own disability or the way a loved one is disabled by our environment and 2) we need to see people as whole humans who deserve love & fairness instead of a 'lesser' people who 'better' people choose to help.
I also love her focus on the music industry in particular - making sure venues are accessible, etc. We each have a place where we can incorporate advocacy for justice & fairness in our work, it's just a matter of seeing where we can do that good work now, today.
Where in your life do you most frequently encounter people with visible disabilities? What accommodations made that possible?
Where do you or someone you know inhabit the fringes of disability, as Ne’eman describes? How did you decide whether “disabled” fit your understanding of your needs?
______________________
The most obvious examples of this that I have seen have been very private and not obvious, the fringes. so to speak, of caring for elderly family members who have become disabled with old age.
Accomodations are there, for example, in the myriad types of support that are available, wheel chairs, canes, home visits, home attendants.
The problem, though, is that some of them might not want to recognize that they are disabled. It's a matter of pride, that they can manage. They don't want to recognize it. Or declaring vulnerability makes them more vulnerable. They think about how they came to this time in life, especially if they neglected their health. It's very sobering.
They are fearful of what being disabled actually means, the type of support they might require. Included, their fears that those around them, younger relatives might not want to bother, or might want to put them in care because their needs are overwhelming.
Their lives have become harder and they might not want to bother with all the effort it takes to make those appointments. They want to avoid it as much as htey can.
I can definitely understand the assisted suicide route. Someone who is despondent about the changes to come as s/he becomes more debilitated and more dependent. Imagine a person who doesn't feel s/he has people around s/he can trust to support caregiving. That's when the person will feel like a burden, and so s/he might believe it's better to die instead, with dignity than living with the indignity that could follow with lack of care or the indignities of dying through some debilitating illness.
I'm following this. I think, though all real cultural change in difficult, that disability rights have time and time again been "passed over" for opportunities to come to the forefront of our societal consciousness and that even the bumbling efforts, say, of some companies to expand their hiring practices along gender or racial lines would be a revolution in the world of disability.
*has this page up for several days meaning to write a thorough reply when the brain-fog lifts at the same time that I have a chunk of time for it*
*finally gets around to it because I'm sitting on the floor with a dizzy spell*
Hi, it's me, I'm kinda disabled. Most of the time I can function just fine, holding down two jobs which between them require a variety of physical and mental skills, and even keeping my house. . . livable-in, anyway, without much outside help. (I do take a lot of naps though.) I'm autistic, so that affects every area of everything in one way or another; for instance, if I spend too much time in a social setting I pay for it by being completely wiped out the next day (and sometimes having trouble balancing! because I've used up my day's ration of Ability to Concentrate on Where I Am In Space through too much time around other bodies there are Rules for interacting with --- so it can be fun).
The reason I'm sitting on the floor right now instead of cleaning out my fridge (a much-overdue project; out of sight and so very much out of mind) is not directly related to that so much as it is me being female. I have a week every month where when I get up in the morning I cannot predict whether I'll spend the day at work or rotating between bathroom and bed. On such days I am tempted to use the term disabled because (to refer to an earlier discussion) that is a shortcut to making my situation legible to the people who need to know, for instance, whether I can work today. On the other hand it's far from being my constant mode of being, and one isn't "disabled part-time", I don't think.
Where I mostly encounter other visibly disabled people is at one of my jobs. I'm a librarian, and the locations I work at are particularly good at accessibility, from the basics such as not having steps at the doors or anywhere in the building (we're also tiny enough that everything fits on one floor) and the widths of the aisles between bookshelves, to help we provide around computer use, which is a big reason people come in. (My boss is also very supportive.) One of our regular disabled patrons has made a point of telling us we're doing a good job, which is high praise.