8:00pm June 4, 2014

A concrete example

feliscorvus:

Of a thing I did that I am pretty sure was made possible at least in part by disability: putting myself through college. As in, my parents didn’t pay for it, and I didn’t have scholarships, or student loans, or financial aid of any kind. I graduated with zero debt (zero money too, but still).

I know a big part of this was due to the fact that as a California resident I had access to in-state tuition fees and only attended community colleges and a public university. But I still hardly knew anyone else who had NO loans, etc.

I could probably write this as some kind of libertarian American Dream story, but that would be dishonest, because frankly I could have used loans and financial aid. That might have spared me ending up having free packets of saltines and squeeze-packets of honey for lunch on numerous occasions. But the forms for both of those things…I couldn’t make sense of them. They were cognitively inaccessible. And I lacked the communication skills to ask for help. So I went without. I gave up sleep, proper food, and even sometimes proper textbooks as a result (doing homework problems from Xerox copies of pages). I also lacked automobile expenses because I couldn’t (and still can’t) drive. Etc.

Anyhow, though, basically I decided that I needed to graduate more than I needed anything else. Without that, I could see nothing but a black hole of existential terror where my future was supposed to be.

(I now know some people who have fallen into that hole, clawed their way out, and built lives for themselves. Lives that I am relieved to see are possible at all. And I also now know that if I hadn’t had the luck I did in managing to graduate I would have ultimately figured things out. But the way things went for me, I graduated, even if it meant doing it in improbable and convoluted ways.)

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