Advocacy

People have spent a lot of my life assuming words are easy for me.

I was the kid who read early, read constantly, and used words in ways adults noticed. I was trying to talk before I was six months old. My first word was really a first sentence: “Hi there mama.” I read everything I could get my hands on, including a medical dictionary when I was six.

From the outside, that looked like language strength. Maybe it was. I also suspect I may have been hyperlexic as a small child, though I can’t prove that now. What I can say is that early reading made adults notice my language before they noticed my friction with language. Reading words, recognizing patterns, and collecting vocabulary are not the same as being able to explain yourself easily, answer quickly, or turn internal experience into speech on demand.

There’s no community that accepts my whole stack. Every space I enter runs me through a filter. Sometimes I get bounced on the disability check. Sometimes on the faith. Sometimes on the AI. I built Hermes Agent because I had nowhere else to go.

The Disclosure Trap #

I never know whether I should lead with my disability profile. The social cost is high regardless.

Sourcing Note: The examples in this article are not hypotheticals. They come from my own captured daily logs, technical sessions, and lived experiences. For a plain-language breakdown of the physical mechanics behind my diagnoses, see my Human Terms summary.

The Comfortable Lie of the Sum #

There’s a model of disability that feels mathematically tidy and is almost entirely wrong.

It goes like this: a person has Disability A and Disability B. Their overall difficulty is therefore $A + B$. If we build an accommodation for A, we’ve reduced the total load to just $B$. Progress has been made. The spreadsheet balances. Everyone goes home feeling useful.

Content Note: This narrative discusses medical trauma and institutional harm.

Preface #

This is a personal narrative about my experience as a blind, multiply disabled student in a residential school setting. It reflects my lived experience and my understanding as an adult, informed by later medical and psychological evaluations.

This account isn’t intended as an attack on individual staff members. It’s an account of systemic failure, medical misattribution, and institutional decision-making, and of the long-term impact those failures have had on my health, functioning, and sense of safety.