As a disabled person living in a society that wasn’t built for him, my life is a series of unreasonable choices if seen from an able bodied lens.

“Oh you’re still continuing to mask even though covid is over?” I need it because even a regular cold or cough will severely impact my asthma and covid is much more likely to be fatal for me. Separately my asthma is much better with all the dust and grime of the city blocked out.

“But it’s so uncomfortable and unreasonable?” Yes, to you. Congrats on being abled.

I need to wash my hands everytime I want to take off my earplugs, which is to talk. So a minute before a meeting I will pause my work, go wash hands, take off earplugs, put on the headphones and get ready for the call. “It’s unreasonable to wash your hands everytime you need move your earplugs, why are you even wearing them anyway?” Yes, to you. Congrats on being abled.

Without the earplugs the noise from car horns and people moving themselves and cutlery would be too loud to let me focus. Being ripped from focus is painful and I know I will be reprimanded at work if I repeatedly spend 20-30 minutes in a shutdown after being clobbered with pain from noises.

If I don’t take them off before talking a lot, the sound of my own voice in my head will be so loud it will give me a headache.

“Why do you have two sets of sunglasses? And why are you wearing them at night”
One set is for reducing the pain of fast moving headlights that cars keep on even in the day the other is for being able to stay longer in flourescent lighting at night. If you’ll just didn’t have blinding lights in cars and warm lighting in buildings I wouldn’t need either of them.

“Why do you have a 35k Dyson, 17k AQI monitor and 3k CO2 monitor? That seems very unreasonable”
The dyson cleans the air when people suddenly burn garbage outside and alerts me when the AQI goes bad before it reaches me in the hall.

The dyson is also large and not terribly portable, so if I want to know if the smoke is cleared out of another room I leave the AQI monitor there to check. The AQI monitor also logs CO2 which is important to know when you have all the windows closed to block sound or smoke.

The last CO2 monitor is important because the levels can be very different from room to room and often I’ll need to know it in the hall and the bedroom and if I just carry the AQI device to the other room I’ll forget it there because of my executive dysfunction and will run into pollution and CO2 dizzyness without realising it.

“Dunno man seems like an unreasonable expense to me”
Yeah to you, congrats on being abled.

But it would be an unreasonable accomodation to ask society to make changes that don’t matter to them wouldn’t it? It would be far better to call everything I need to do “unreasonable” as I attempt to explain that yes it takes an unreasonable amount of effort for me to live. Many disabled people see that and end it. I still choose to be unreasonable.

What are you going to do about it?