My April 2012 TweetCloud.

Understanding my physical challenges: An analogy

So, I've been trying to come up with a way to explain to a non-disabled person what it's like to face physical challenges at work, as a person with a disability. My current workplace is very physically demanding, even for me, a wheelchair user with long arms, full reach, abdominal muscle control and good balance. After 2.5 years of just getting on with it, despite the inaccessibility of large areas of my workplace, I'm at a point where I'm having to say, 'Enough. I can't do it any more.'. My employer is struggling to understand what's changed. Why is my workplace 'suddenly' inaccessible? What has changed with my health, to make my work so arduous for me now? Here's my analogy*: Imagine that you are looking for a job in the field you have just qualified for. A new employer says, if you move out to our location, we'll give you a permanent job. You just have to be able to carry 10kg. Cool, you think, I can do that. I'll uproot myself...

Dear Cleaner, please don't wash my dishes.

(Warning: contains swearing. You'll see why, I hope.) Considering that I am constantly fighting with piles of dirty dishes in my little kitchen, you'd think that the first thing I'd want my cleaner to do is wash them. And I used to. But I quickly realised that although the dishes moved from the pile, through the soapy water in the sink and to the drainer, the vast majority of them didn't end up being clean. It turned out to be a great big waste of time - and a huge disappointment - and I had to wash the stupid things myself anyway. Mine aren't as pretty, but I do have a yellow bowl. So now I do them myself, eventually. When my cleaner comes, once a fortnight, I'll sit and do my dishes while he or she is doing the housework tasks I find difficult (rather than just annoying). I have also even been known to do a sink full of dishes in between cleaning visits, often in the middle of the night when I can't sleep, or when I have other pressing things to d...

Health vs Weight

I unexpectedly ended up at the Sporting Wheelies gym the other day, after avoiding it for about a year. I was going out to breakfast with a friend who also used to work there, and she detoured us on the way to drop in and say Hi to whoever was there. It was pretty early in the morning, so only the gym was open, so we went in and chatted to a few people. It was actually quite painless, despite my fears of humiliation and mortification. The Gym at Sporting Wheelies (that's not me!) The main reason I've been avoiding the gym there is not that I used to work there, but that I've put on so much weight over the past couple of years I'm too embarrassed to show myself there. I've also been avoiding other situations, because of feeling insecure about my weight and how I look. I've been steadily gaining weight for the past few years, and one of the reasons for that is that I've been trying to work more on my health than my weight. Since I was about 15, un...

Compostable Kate

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