Advocacy

When you can’t write the code and you can’t find the tool you need, AI is the only way the thing could exist at all.

The wave metaphor for fatigue was true but incomplete. The wave is the crash. Underneath it there is a tide that never leaves, and an undertow that grabs without warning. This is the fuller picture.

For thirty-four years I was told my body was lying. Then the labs came back and said it had been telling the truth the whole time.

The anti-AI crowd keeps saying AI users aren’t using their brains. For multiply disabled people, AI is the accommodation that makes thinking possible.

Without a written standing order, every meal becomes a negotiation, and I am the one who loses every time.

Most writing about disabled life focuses on what’s hard. This is what two days where things actually worked looked like for me.

AI isn’t a writing assistant for me. It’s infrastructure. It’s the difference between thoughts trapped in my head and thoughts that become articles, code, advocacy, and community. And watermarking that can’t tell the difference between replacement and enablement threatens all of it.

I was valedictorian at the Texas School for the Blind with the highest test scores in my grade and four scholarships. Two weeks before graduation, I had to go home. They stripped everything. I got my diploma in the mail.

The gap between what I know I’m capable of and what my brain will let me do. About executive dysfunction, initiation, and the feeling that your own mind is working against you.

Fatigue from chronic illness doesn’t respond to rest. I picture it as a wave coming toward me. Caffeine, music, a splash of water on my face are my surfboard. Sometimes they hold. Sometimes the wave flings me off anyway.