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Another crack I've discovered (by falling through it) is that disability only matters if it keeps you from doing your job. If instead the *only* thing you can do is your job, and the rest of your time is a desperate struggle to clean your work clothes and shower once a month, that's totally a-ok!

No one would ever look at me and think "disabled." I am still an avid runner and cyclist 9 years after stage 4 colorectal cancer diagnosis at 44. But I have to very carefully arrange life around the toilet. Bad days can totally take me by surprise and keep me from leaving the house.

the bad guys are being really bad

They needed to study it to find that out?

Even working as a substitute teacher where I CHOOSE WHAT DAYS I WORK, the third party I work for says, "We won't renew our sponsorship of your license because you didn't work enough and took too many medical appt days.

Sorry, capitalism demands all butts in seats so mediocre middle managers can keep their jobs.

What's also important to note is even if you find something that you can make work, your job is very dependent on current management. I found a manager who was amazing and willing to work with me when my health was at its worst. 1/

Having a sensitive stomach is incompatible with anything customer facing

Often fewer days than that

See also - having a child with a disability or mental health problems.

Also bears mentioning that the ADA in its current form does not protect disabled ppl when employers are only too happy to nickel-and-dime accommodations IF they deem your disability “severe” enough

especially if that one day a week happens effectively at random with little to no warning. i can’t just say “sorry about no call no showing today boss I’ve been unconscious for the last 16 hours. see you tomorrow… hopefully!” every time my narcolepsy flares up.

Or even if you can work but not always 200% you're out

Disability insurance doesn't really get it either. Private as well as social security.

Even when it's one day a week you're too sick to work at your workplace but you can do remote work (which you proved again and again you can do) but they'll refuse that and keep making you try bullshit "accommodations" one after another that never work but they're "working with you" so it's fine.

And even if they do allow it, managers tend to be very annoyed that it doesn’t happen on the same day every week so they can plan ahead. Sorry, Diane, I’ll just tell my immune system to be more consistent.

Omg I remember when I was full time working retail at Sears, from 2009 to 2011. if I called in sick, my supervisors would go apeshit & dock my hours. After that happened a few times, I just went to work even when I was sick, & only left if they sent me home for the day. I hated that place.

Not even one full day. Could just be an hour or two each week when your meds are having to work harder than normal. The unreliability of chronic illness is a massive problem for employers. Never knowing when one of your best employees will be incapacitated makes it hard to plan.

The mad thing is there's not even a good business reason to go back to office in most cases, it's just fearful middle managers, C-suite vibes and commercial real estate owner panic

and benefits in all the countries I'm aware of are based on how much you CAN, in theory, work, not whether the flexibility you require in order to be able to work is actually available. if you can work full time but only if you set your own schedule and no jobs will let you do that, too fucking bad.

I think something else worth noting I struggle with is disability can make even remote work impossible at times when you have bad days. I’ve been sick enough I spent days in a pained disassociating state that made even my digital work impossible until I felt better; I can’t fathom holding these jobs

Even part time jobs - if you can’t get there when you are scheduled it doesn’t matter if you’ve had other good days that week. Or month. I was losing one shift a month when I started getting management talks and notes in my file. And that was with paperwork for the health issue.

My work is actually pretty good by corporate standards but the part they don't tell you when you get hired is that while you keep earning sick time, you can only use 10 days a year.

Other one is mental health. Your bipolar or schizophrenia can mostly be under control, most of the time, but one crisis can trigger an attendance policy. Many employers in manufacturing and retail have attendance points systems that are designed to make people with MH diagnoses unemployable.

Even at my unionized job, you get a total of 4 sick days a year, and scheduling is based on seniority. And you have to gwt a doctor's note and fill out a million forms. And intermittent leave is fucking impossible

ngl I see a lot of similarity between disability and focusing on family. some days, parents just have to be with their kid at home. I think a work culture that can accommodate the one well can often do so for the other, too

I can't even explain this shit to my family lol. If we make plans, and on the day I am hurting too much or just too overwhelmed to spend 4 hours in their company, suddenly I'm no longer disabled, I'm just antisocial, my nephew is SO upset not getting to see me, why can't I just come over, etc

MORE MORE MORE FASTER FASTER FASTER. It is never enough, if they could whip faster they would. Our system only cares about shareholders

self-employment is truly the only way for me I couldn’t handle hospital salary job again with long covid I’d be so sick all the time And productivity expectations are complicated when you work and rest in sprints

I work from home for this reason, in a very flexible job.

As a relatively very abled person, after having been sick recently to the level that made it hard to go to work, but not hard to do work. being able to have done even just reduced hours of work from home would have been fantastic. (having proper sick leave would be better but baby steps)

I’m usually able but currently on extended medical leave for an issue that makes me unable to work about 1/3 of the time which was preferable to my employer than going part time. And despite them being very supportive and having generous policies I don’t think they’ll ever see me the same way again.

if those days are on short notice (which of course they usually are) good luck keeping any part time work either

I was fired from a job I loved deeply back in October because of how my chronic illness affected my attendance. Now, it’s been a nightmare trying to find something for myself. It’s late February and I’ve been unemployed for four months despite applying for several jobs, + denied government benefits

And ppl can only qualify for SSDI disability if they have relevant medical bills. Getting PIPs b/c someone w/ autism's 'communication skills' are not 'meeting expectation' and then a year + of interviewers preferring someone who is neurotypical and perky, doesn't count.

This has been an ongoing struggle for my roommate. And the worst part is my mom is so apathetic towards them that she regularly tells me that we shouldn’t be living together. I’m not about to abandon the people I care about when I have the means to help

As someone who had a stroke in 2025... THIS

And what's also bad is that 99% of the time that "one bad day" isn't on the same day and you can't tell until the day it happens. So technically any job where you have an actual schedule is completely off the table because you'll just be too sick to work on random days and nobody will hire you.

One of the managers where I work was overheard saying he didn't believe people needed two days off in a row. The working world is unfriendly to disabled folks, to put it mildly.

Both the UK and US have rolled back disability accommodation laws too.

Exactly. That and how much strain regular stuff such as commuting or being 'on' in an office for a traditional workday can put on disabled people. It's a shame that much of the progress in flexible working is being rolled back.

people just assume disability and chronic illness mean you are the same kind of disabled every day. that couldn't be further from the truth. and we have an employment system designed with very little flexibility in that regard

while it’s nowhere close to other people, just one day of high blood sugar (or a night of low blood sugar) can entirely fuck up my ability to do good work for a whole day. makes me scared sometimes that i’ll lose my job over it

My #traumaticbraininjury made me unemployable at a job but disability kept insisting I could work a factory assembly position with my sensory sensitivities and inability to work at a task over 30 minutes or look at screens

If you can work *at all*, you're deemed unworthy of support. But if you can't work *as much as an abled person* you're deemed unworthy of employment. There's no winning.

I work part time and I am painfully aware that it takes me 2 full months to save up 1 shift worth of sick time.

I walk that edge for sure.

I don't think I qualify as disabled, but as someone with many allergy-related health concerns, I still doubt most jobs would want me. I need 1 week (as a minimum) to recover from illness (usually caused by the weather-related allergies) and the workforce isn't as forgiving as school.

While also being "Fit to work" because the assessors didn't see you literally unable to move out of bed for 3 months straight last summer...you look fine right now so what's the problem? 🫠

It's one of the reasons I stick with the job I have even though it doesn't pay a lot. There are more important things at stake for me than simply the money. Flexibility is huge, and if my technically non-disabled self needs a day to keep it all together, I have more than one available a month.

Especially if they're performance-based, or there are strict sick policies. Like occurrences versus days allotted for sick time. I know exactly how privileged I am as an able-bodied person with several comorbidities who works from home AND can use her 10 sick days in any fashion, even 1 at a time.

I worked for USPS and a lot of people with health issues ended up there because it's hard to get fired even if you call in a lot - if you have a doctor's note/FMLA leave it's supposed to be impossible to get fired for calling in for health reasons but some of the supervisors would try anyway.

Removing disabled people, and the higher risk they invoke for health insurance costs and liability, is something that a lot of private sector employers really want to do. Including pregnant people. And it's behind Trump's RTO order for the federal workforce. We are the canaries in the coal mine.