Blog

My family built a vocabulary for what it’s actually like to live in my body. Systems have their own vocabulary, and none of it has room for mucus-y days, whooshy nights, or the dog who saw the version of me that was actually there.

Multiple disabilities don’t add up to twice the difficulty. They compound. And the hidden cost of producing “acceptable” output from a system with no reserve capacity is one that no assessment, no checklist, and no institution has ever known how to count.

I went from a fragmented Franken-System of incompatible tools to a cognitive prosthetic I couldn’t afford to one AI that knows me, doesn’t break my budget, and meets me where my brain actually is. This is the story of building a digital nervous system because the physical world’s infrastructure doesn’t work for mine.

Eleven years ago, a tiny stray puppy walked into the room where I was curled up in pain and decided I was his person. Now I’m in a nursing home and he’s with my mom, and the distance between us is the shape of everything disability has cost me.

How I separated college Bible coursework from daily time with God, simplified my routine for low-energy days, and learned that prayer doesn’t have to be spoken out loud.

A personal update on why I am moving away from the backend developer path, what Boot.dev did teach me, and what I want to build next with accessibility and sustainability in mind.

A personal reflection on why emotional expression can be physically expensive when you are chronically ill, and why quiet does not mean okay.

I’m grieving the realization that the independent future people imagined for me wasn’t based on my actual support needs. It was based on what they could see, what they wanted to believe, and what systems are willing to recognize.

I entered nursing home care because I needed to get out of an unsafe situation quickly. But the crisis also forced me to face a bigger truth: I may need full-time long-term care, even if a nursing home isn’t the right setting forever.

Why I moved my Linux workflow from a Raspberry Pi to openSUSE on WSL, and why reliability, reachability, and lower cognitive load matter more than theoretical elegance.

A practical breakdown of the VoIP and messaging options I tried as a blind, desktop-first user with coordination, fatigue, and cognitive disabilities, and why I ultimately chose Google Voice with a second number.

Being seen as highly verbal and good at writing made people assume language was easy for me. It wasn’t. This piece is about the hidden labor behind producing words, the harm that assumption caused, and why AI can be language access rather than thought replacement.