Expectation and ability

I didn’t mention it at the time but mid-last-year I was diagnosed with adult ADHD and started on meds. “Disability” is, as @tinygorgon notes here, a socially constructed thing; like most words there is a core of broadly-accepted-meaning but it fades to ambiguity at the edges.

The concept of being disabled (or for that matter the unmarked “abled”) is contextual and situational. Being colorblind — inconsequential in many ways but enough to keep me out of certain work, simply because I’m incapable of doing it safely.

ADHD has similar contours depending on how much it affects someone’s life. I spent a lot of my life convinced the challenges I had with focus and task initiation were moral — procrastination and laziness that could be fixed by a commitment to virtue.

Turns out that was never true, though believing it was fueled a desperate quest for good coping mechanisms that ended up serving me well for decades. (Whiteboards everywhere, triple-fallback-reminders, meticulous breakdown of big projects into bite sized tasks…)

But quite a few characteristic symptoms of ADHD were also treated as superpowers as I moved into the world of tech and digital publishing, early in my career.

Chaotic projects with lots of fires to put out? Bring it on! Complex business domains that required days of hyperfocused study to put together an accurate mental model? Yum!

…Two clients at the same time with reasonable workloads but no immediate deadlines? ruh roh

Something is only a “disability” insofar is it chafes up against what’s expected of us. Some of us are tremendously and are only asked to do what we can do well. Many are not so fortunate.

So, at the end of all this what I’m getting at is not “Wow, I am <X>!” but rather that this concept of “dis-ablement being visited upon the person”, as a friend said, has been eye-opening for me.