The Gap Nobody's Building For

I’ve been sitting with something for months. Today I’m finally ready to talk about it.

I tried college five times. Each attempt ended the same way: a health crisis, a withdrawal, and the quiet message that I wasn’t built for this. Not because I couldn’t learn. I can learn. I learn constantly. I learned to build an NVDA add-on in two days. I learned to write well enough that 15,520 people visited my website last month. I learned to advocate for myself in a nursing home, in a disability system, in a family that was falling apart.

The problem was never my ability to learn. It was that the system I was trying to learn in was never designed for someone like me.

I’m multiply disabled. Blind, autistic, living with 30-plus chronic conditions, non-24 sleep-wake disorder, cognitive fatigue, executive dysfunction, and a body that can stop cooperating at any moment. Traditional education is built for one disability at a time, layered onto an otherwise typical learner. When disabilities stack, the system doesn’t bend. It breaks.

Participation grading punished me for being sick. Timed assessments measured my processing speed, not my understanding. Discussion boards functioned as mandatory attendance, and financial aid was tied to enrollment intensity I couldn’t safely maintain. Every accommodation was something I had to request, justify, and fight for, bolted onto a structure that was never designed to include me.

I’m not the only one. I run support groups for people with multiple disabilities. Almost 50 members on Facebook. A Discord server. A GroupMe group. A mailing list. And in those groups, I see the same thing over and over: people who want to learn, want to help, want to contribute, and say: “I don’t know how.”

That silence isn’t apathy. It’s the sound of people who have been taught, over and over, that they can’t. That learning looks like note-taking and timed quizzes and discussion posts. That if they can’t do it that way, they can’t do it at all. That if they can’t maintain a full-time course load, they don’t deserve education.

I believed that for years. I thought learning required taking notes, even though I struggle with notes and never got much out of them. Nobody ever showed me another way. I just assumed the problem was me.

It wasn’t.

I have a vision for something different. I’m not calling it a school yet. I’m not calling it an organization. I’m calling it a conversation, and I’m starting it here.

The idea is this: what if we built a learning program designed around multiply disabled bodies and brains from the start? Not accommodations bolted onto a system that was never made for us, but a system built for us as the default case. Not the edge case. The baseline.

What if learning were self-paced but still structured? What if there were no participation grades, no timed exams, no mandatory discussion posts? What if you could demonstrate understanding through choices, not just essays? What if you could pause when your body demanded it and return without shame, without starting over, without apologizing?

What if access was built in, not earned? Captions, transcripts, screen-reader-friendly materials, flexible formats, all by default. No requirement to disclose your disability to receive basic access. No proof needed. No begging.

What if financial support wasn’t tied to enrollment intensity? What if reduced, intermittent, or nonlinear participation was treated as real learning, not as a deficit?

What if the goal wasn’t to produce credentials, but to restore something many of us lost before we even knew we had it: the belief that we can learn, that we have something to give, that our minds matter even when our bodies are unreliable?

I don’t have this built yet. I don’t have funding, a board, a curriculum, or a building. What I have is a vision I’ve been sitting with since May, a set of principles I wrote to protect it from becoming the thing it was created to replace, and a community of people who keep telling me, in their silence, that they need it.

I also have something I didn’t have in May: 15,520 people reading my words in a month. A platform. A voice that’s getting louder. And the beginning of the belief that maybe I’m the person to start this, not because I’m the most qualified, but because I’m the one who keeps showing up.

I don’t know what MultAbilities becomes yet. I know it starts with this: naming the gap, and asking if anyone else sees it too.

If you see it, I want to hear from you. You don’t have to write a polished response. You don’t have to commit to anything. A single sentence is enough. A reaction is enough. Silence is okay too. But if something in this resonates, if you’ve ever said “I don’t know how” when what you meant was “nobody ever showed me,” then you’re exactly who I’m talking to.

This isn’t a launch. It’s a ramp.

Ramps say: here is a way in that doesn’t assume you can climb.