Self-disclosure

I try very hard to be judicious in avoiding intermixing what I do for a living with my private writing, for several reasons. First, I have to be very careful not to let the thought police at my company think they have the right to edit my personal blog. Then there’s the fact that I teach in this area and I’m careful to separate what I believe and choose to put in these musings from what I know to be true and am willing to advocate for as a laborer in the field. And of course, I spend my work days and way too many of my non-work days on this topic, so it’s nice to use this blog to explore other thoughts.

But tonight, I find myself thinking about self-disclosure of disabilities.

I had a long conversation recently with a young women who is struggling with the idea of telling her boss and the folks at a local college about her learning challenges. It’s a big decision in her mind because while she is dependent on accommodations to test into her master’s program, she is fearful that sharing this information will make an unenlightened admissions counselor doubt her ability to succeed. And it’s a fairly selective admissions process. (I should interject here that I work with LOTS of people in her chosen field and she would be a natural.)

The other side of her dilemma is that she hasn’t discussed her problem with her boss, even though both the boss and the company for which they both work would most certainly be very supportive of her aims. The problem is that she told me. And I can’t help her without sharing information she provided me in confidence. And of course I am barred from violating this trust by both law and probity.

This is a frustrating place to be and one in which I find myself all too often. Folks living with disabilities are frequently reticent to open up about their challenges due to deep-seated fear of discrimination. And the sad truth is that this is a very reasonable fear. Even well-meaning (but ignorant) people will unintentionally discriminate against people living with disabilities. For example, there is a gentle tendency to discount people we see as somehow less – less capable, less discerning, less…whatever. We so generously give folks the ‘benefit of the doubt,’ and it’s that doubt that’s so damning.

Less well-meaning folks openly discriminate against folks living with differences. And many of them – a couple of VERY well known movie stars and several politicians come to mind – are in a position to cause loads of harm. It’s very difficult for a person with a cognitive or learning disability to be brave when people around him are cracking up at Ben Stiller’s much publicized ‘retard’ jokes.

It’s ironic that if all the people living with physical, mental, or emotional challenges fully self-disclosed, a lot of the discounters would find that they have already been working with, next to, among folks with all sorts of disabling conditions. And they do so quite successfully on the down-low, which only demonstrates that disability is an attribute, not an identity. And in the vast majority of cases, a simple accommodation can make all the difference. And for many of our co-workers, there are accommodations in pace that we never recognize as such, simply because of language – we never identified this person as having a disability.

It is one of the best things I can say about this country that people like me are employed specifically to help level the playing field. It’s one of the gravest indictments and saddest failures of our society that it’s necessary for anyone to do what I do, originally as a volunteer and now, for a living.

A friend and colleague likes to say that meaningful employment is one of the greatest social programs. And I believe she’s spot on. Without a job, we feel disconnected, cast loose, excluded and unwelcome. A job brings not just a salary and benefits but inclusion, validation, an opening into the circle of life. And employment, or not, is frequently a fertile field for expression of our prejudices. People should be hired or not according to their ability to do the job, given appropriate training and reasonable accommodation.

We struggle with that word reasonable and well we might. But some decisions should be easy. Some folks can’t work around fluorescent lighting. Or sudden loud noises. Or strong perfumes. Others might require swing room for a chair or simply permission to stand and stretch every twenty minutes or so.

A person with some types of learning disabilities may need to be able to pace their intake and many times this can be accommodated simply by allowing the person a little extra time, such as by adjusting their work schedule, etc.  In production situations, the entire accommodation may be accomplished solely by altering the arrangement of the work area. Or raising or lowering the work surface.

Yes, there are folks who need fully supportive chairs and special computer stations in order to work and we should accommodate those needs, as well. I knew a guy who was a combination front desk and phone attendant, human resources clerk and payroll specialist for a small company on the Oregon coast. I spoke to him fairly frequently over several years and it was not until I went there in person that I realized I had been working with a guy who spent his days in a fully supportive motorized wheelchair with sip-and-puff controls. It hadn’t made any difference because I’d not been aware of any difference between this guy and the other faceless folks I’d dealt with by phone and e-mail. And having met him, it still made no difference.  Because he did his job and did it well.

This guy was a vital contributor to his company and his boss made clear that they would have been in the deep water without him. He was utterly competent. Also utterly dependent on certain technological aids to, well, do just about anything.

The thing is, at most companies, this guy would never have been hired. Because neither most hiring managers nor this guy himself could have foreseen how very little it would cost to hook him up with the tools he needed to do his job.

And the knowledge that this is so frequently the case, accompanied by the entirely human fear of rejection, is what prevents this young woman from coming out from behind the protective veil of privacy.

I don’t blame her. But I hope I can help her change her mind.