Getting My Rant On
Okay, I will start by confessing that I have a cold and feel generally miserable and sorry for myself and tired today. Plus, having a cold means that my hands ache even more than usual, to go along with all the other body aches associated with the virus.
But even if I didn't have a virus, today would already be completely fired.
I just spent a completely emotionally wretched two hours talking to the people at disability services. For the first hour I was meeting with one of the "time management and study strategies" consultants, a very nice woman who was sympathetic and a good listener and has promised me that she will try and come up with some new ways for me to manage my writing process such that I can hurt less and produce more. Meeting with her was wretched only because it meant that I had to dredge up all of my explanations about the things that I cannot do without pain all of the stories about what I have tried over the last year, and at least some of the scary psychological frustrations that have accompanied this process. That would've been exhausting enough, but then I had to go meet with the head of Disability Resources to talk about my request to have somebody work as a transcriptionist for me. Basically what she said was that the request was without precedent and that getting help from the university was going to require writing a detailed petition for my request which would still probably get turned down because that kind of accommodation is not considered standard or reasonable. "Maybe you need to be more adaptive' she said, "maybe you need to be more okay with being less of a perfectionist, with expected less from yourself." Lady, I have spent a year struggling with this disability. I have tried different medical strategies, different adaptive technology strategies, different process strategies, different everything. I have gone from being somebody who could produced 10 pages of reasonable looking draft in a day to somebody who is happy if she writes a paragraph.I have ceased setting daily work goals for myself, because I know that I still don't have a real sense of what I can actually accomplish in the day, and I have learned to be okay with that. My current draft is a mess, the argument is completely all over the map, and I'm just ignoring it and moving on because I know that the most important thing is just to keep producing and have faith that I'll figure out how to clean it up later. There was absolutely no sense from her that we could think outside the box about how to help me complete my dissertation, no spirit of "we are here to help you," just a laundry list of reasons the university wasn't going to do anything for me.
I explained to her that the university has already spent close to $200,000 on my education, if you think about the cost of my tuition and the stipends they have given me over the years. I explained to her that the graduate school is pushing the humanities departments hard to get their students finished in a more timely fashion. I asked her why we couldn't use these facts to leverage some more aid for me. She said those were excellent questions, but she didn't have an answer for me at all.
Initially, I wanted to hide this post under a filter because I feel so raw and vulnerable when I talk about this. But I believe in what I said to her, that disabilities are a public issue and that they need to be publicly addressed. I am blessed in having a loving and supporting partner, a generous and creative community of friends and family, and having enough material resources to cover my very expensive medical costs. I truly believe that it is time for the larger community to help me out, to help me move towards being the most productive citizen I can be, and that it is the responsibility of the larger community to be compassionate towards and creative with the limitations some of us face. I am angry about how hard this processes, and about the fact that even though there is a resource at my university supposedly dedicated towards these issues I am really going to have to do almost all of this work myself. I want my anger about this to be public, I want to go on record with these statements.
But even if I didn't have a virus, today would already be completely fired.
I just spent a completely emotionally wretched two hours talking to the people at disability services. For the first hour I was meeting with one of the "time management and study strategies" consultants, a very nice woman who was sympathetic and a good listener and has promised me that she will try and come up with some new ways for me to manage my writing process such that I can hurt less and produce more. Meeting with her was wretched only because it meant that I had to dredge up all of my explanations about the things that I cannot do without pain all of the stories about what I have tried over the last year, and at least some of the scary psychological frustrations that have accompanied this process. That would've been exhausting enough, but then I had to go meet with the head of Disability Resources to talk about my request to have somebody work as a transcriptionist for me. Basically what she said was that the request was without precedent and that getting help from the university was going to require writing a detailed petition for my request which would still probably get turned down because that kind of accommodation is not considered standard or reasonable. "Maybe you need to be more adaptive' she said, "maybe you need to be more okay with being less of a perfectionist, with expected less from yourself." Lady, I have spent a year struggling with this disability. I have tried different medical strategies, different adaptive technology strategies, different process strategies, different everything. I have gone from being somebody who could produced 10 pages of reasonable looking draft in a day to somebody who is happy if she writes a paragraph.I have ceased setting daily work goals for myself, because I know that I still don't have a real sense of what I can actually accomplish in the day, and I have learned to be okay with that. My current draft is a mess, the argument is completely all over the map, and I'm just ignoring it and moving on because I know that the most important thing is just to keep producing and have faith that I'll figure out how to clean it up later. There was absolutely no sense from her that we could think outside the box about how to help me complete my dissertation, no spirit of "we are here to help you," just a laundry list of reasons the university wasn't going to do anything for me.
I explained to her that the university has already spent close to $200,000 on my education, if you think about the cost of my tuition and the stipends they have given me over the years. I explained to her that the graduate school is pushing the humanities departments hard to get their students finished in a more timely fashion. I asked her why we couldn't use these facts to leverage some more aid for me. She said those were excellent questions, but she didn't have an answer for me at all.
Initially, I wanted to hide this post under a filter because I feel so raw and vulnerable when I talk about this. But I believe in what I said to her, that disabilities are a public issue and that they need to be publicly addressed. I am blessed in having a loving and supporting partner, a generous and creative community of friends and family, and having enough material resources to cover my very expensive medical costs. I truly believe that it is time for the larger community to help me out, to help me move towards being the most productive citizen I can be, and that it is the responsibility of the larger community to be compassionate towards and creative with the limitations some of us face. I am angry about how hard this processes, and about the fact that even though there is a resource at my university supposedly dedicated towards these issues I am really going to have to do almost all of this work myself. I want my anger about this to be public, I want to go on record with these statements.