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“Mummy, where are my silky socks and my oversized Roots sweater?” I stir awake to this softly spoken inquiry by my daughter. It’s 7:30 a.m. on a Tuesday, and in no way do I feel prepared to answer this question or to face the day.
“Hi, honey,” I croak, buying myself time to clear the fog of sleep and search my brain for the answer. But the answer isn’t coming to me. Instead, self-loathing and anxious thoughts flood my brain. I feel defeated as I discover that the darkness, exhaustion and executive dysfunction that impacted my ability to finish the laundry yesterday are still present. These are the hallmarks of a depressive episode for me, one of the two extremes in which I exist as a person with bipolar disorder.
Bipolar disorder is a mood disorder characterized by mood cycles that alternate between depressive and manic episodes. As with any disability, bipolar disorder presents and is experienced differently by people who live with it. For me, it is characterized by fluctuating between moods over relatively short periods. My depressive moods include feelings of hopelessness, self-doubt, exhaustion, executive dysfunction and suicidal ideation. During mania – my preferred state of being – I feel a sense of great ambition, hyper productivity, inflated self-belief, and the need to cram in as much life and as many accomplishments as I can before this pseudo “superpower” runs its course and I am back to feeling low.
Things finally click into place, and I remember there’s laundry in the dryer and three baskets of clean laundry that haven’t been folded or put away. I mentally beat myself up for failing to finish. I contemplate responding to my daughter with, “I don’t know where they are. You’ll have to choose something else.” However, my daughter is on the autism spectrum, and starting her day with clothes that align with her sensory needs and other particularities is important to setting her up for success.
“Yet, when it comes to advocating for my own needs, I struggle, particularly when it comes to workplace accommodations.“
I tap my sleeping husband on the shoulder to rouse him awake. He stirs and looks at me, bleary-eyed. I rub my flattened palm on my chest in a circular motion, flick my index forward from my temple, and then bring my index finger to my chest, pointing at myself, a compound of signs common in deaf culture that means “please-for-me.” My husband is a deaf ASL user, and this is the language of our family. I go on to ask him to please get breakfast started while I go scope out the laundry situation. We are a family of people with disabilities. Instinctively and without hesitation, I accommodate their needs. When it comes to accommodating my bipolar disorder, however, I am at a loss.
In addition to living in a household of people with disabilities, I work as an accessibility professional for a consulting firm. Many of my valued colleagues are people with disabilities, whom I regularly engage with in a way that accommodates their needs. My clients frequently rely on me to help them develop effective accommodation policies and processes for their organizations. Both my personal and professional life are predicated on the belief that people with disabilities have unique needs and that accommodating those needs in an often-inaccessible world is important. Yet, when it comes to advocating for my own needs, I struggle, particularly when it comes to workplace accommodations.
I frequently feel unable to perform work to the best of my abilities when in the depths of a depressive episode. Getting out of bed when your brain is spewing threatening messages and your body feels like it’s encased in molasses does not make for a promising start to the work day. But how to accommodate that? It isn’t my employer’s responsibility to get me to work in the morning. It’s mine. And yet, if I don’t feel prepared or equipped to work, it affects my employer.
More than that, it affects me. The looming fear that I will be too unwell to perform my duties at work itself contributes to my low mood and anxiety. I have always been a person for whom achievement – some would say overachievement – and personal integrity means a lot. The idea that my disability not only slows me down at times but threatens to let other people down is distressing.
One of the challenging things about bipolar disorder is that it is disability whose characteristics fluctuate. And those fluctuations exist in opposition. Much as there are days where I question my ability to get out of bed – much less perform work – there are days where I feel exceptionally able such that I overcommit myself. I want to make up for lost time.
I remember that I am someone whose mind is capable of great feats and that people see me as an accomplished and reliable person. In my heightened state, I laugh at the lack of self-belief that plagued me the week before. I reflect on all that I accomplished at home and at work, despite feeling my worst. And I feel excited at how much more I’ll be able to achieve in my manic state. I convince myself that I don’t need any accommodation.
The very fact that I performed my job well while sick, without any formal workplace accommodations, surely means I’m not entitled to them. And what would they look like anyway? A cheering squad counteracting my depressive tendencies? Work-supplied chocolate for a dopamine boost? A workplace wellness program that is somehow supposed to help me overcome what years of family, psychotherapeutic and medication support haven’t been able to? And how would I even convince my employer of the need for accommodation?
In my manic states, I am the best darned employee there ever was. And in my depressive states, I push myself, mask my symptoms and sacrifice my well-being to perform at what I consider an acceptable level. How can I explain my experiences to my employer? And how can I convincingly articulate that my depressive states are just as valid and credible as my manic ones?
Such is the tension of a fluctuating and intermittent disability. The extent and nature to which you will be impacted is unpredictable. And it isn’t practical to live in fear of one state or in hopes of another when carrying out your day-to-day life. Just as I should be empowered to make the most of my manic states, so too should I be given grace during my depressive episodes. At the same time, I don’t want to be always held to the manic standard. Nor do I want to be judged or underestimated when I am dealing with depression. But what does this mean from an accommodation standpoint? I have yet to reconcile this.
And so, I retrieve the silky socks from the dryer, and I dig out the oversized sweater from the clean laundry basket and hand them to my daughter. I sign “I love you” to my husband and daughter as they head out the door for school drop off. And I trudge down the hall to my home office, my hair unwashed but undetectable on the monitor as I sign in to my first meeting of the day. “Hi! Good morning! Nice to see you!” I say when my client logs on, praying my mask doesn’t slip.
