I’ve Seen Disability From Three Sides

Last week I wrote about the first year of Restorative Healing Haven as an LLC.

That post was about diagnoses, disruption, and the reality of becoming disabled in ways I did not expect.

While writing it, something else became clear.

There has been a thread running through my life for much longer than the past year.

I have seen disability from three different perspectives.

As a caregiver.
As a designer.
And now as a disabled person.

Those perspectives didn’t replace each other.

They built on each other.

The First Perspective: Caregiving

I started working as a CNA when I was sixteen.

That job teaches you quickly that the human body is far more complex than most people assume.

You learn how much effort it takes for someone to sit up in bed when their muscles are weak.

You learn the mechanics of transferring someone safely from a bed to a wheelchair.

You learn how balance, flooring, hand placement, and timing all affect whether a movement works or fails.

Standing up can be difficult.

Turning can be difficult.

Walking across a room can be exhausting.

You begin noticing the environment in ways most people never think about.

Where chairs are placed.

How slippery a floor might be.

How far someone has to travel before they can rest.

Caregiving teaches you that bodies and environments are constantly interacting.

That understanding stayed with me long after I left long-term care.

The Second Perspective: Design

Years later, I entered the design profession.

Accessibility and universal design were part of that world.

Clearances. Turning radii. Door widths. Ramp slopes.

Codes exist for a reason.

But when I advocated for accessibility as a designer, it wasn’t abstract.

I had already watched people struggle to move through spaces that technically worked on paper.

I had seen how fatigue changes the way someone navigates a room.

How balance changes how someone approaches a threshold.

How small design decisions can either support movement or quietly make it harder.

Because of my caregiving experience, accessibility never felt like a box to check.

It felt like a real human issue.

Bodies are not diagrams.

And environments either help those bodies move or work against them.

The Third Perspective: Living It

The third perspective arrived in my thirties.

It came through my own health.

Over the past year my body has changed in ways I did not expect.

Fatigue became systemic rather than situational.

Pain became persistent.

My heart rate began behaving in ways that could not simply be pushed through.

Some conditions now have names.

Others are still being treated or evaluated as doctors work to understand the full picture.

Physical therapy and occupational therapy became part of life.

Specialist appointments multiplied.

At one point, I began borrowing a wheelchair while navigating insurance for a properly fitted mobility device.

That experience changes how you move through space.

Distances feel longer.

Standing becomes work.

You begin noticing every place where an environment assumes the people using it will have unlimited stamina, balance, and stability.

Many spaces quietly rely on those assumptions.

Living inside a disabled body makes those assumptions visible.

The Thread That Connects Them

Looking back, the connection between these experiences is clear.

Caregiving showed me how much effort movement can require.

Design taught me how environments shape what bodies are able to do.

Living with disability shows me the consequences of those design decisions every day.

Those are not separate identities.

They are three perspectives on the same reality.

Bodies exist inside environments.

And the environments we build either support those bodies or quietly work against them.

Why This Matters

Accessibility is often discussed as a regulation.

A checklist.

A code requirement.

But accessibility is really about something simpler.

Can someone move through a space safely?

Can they rest when they need to?

Can they participate without exhausting themselves before they even begin?

Those questions become clearer when you have seen disability from multiple angles.

As a caregiver.
As a designer.
And now as someone living inside a body with limits.

Looking Forward

Restorative Healing Haven began as a trauma-informed wellness practice.

But the longer I do this work, the more obvious it becomes that healing is not only about what happens inside the body.

It is also about the environments we move through every day.

Spaces affect nervous systems.

Spaces affect energy.

Spaces affect whether people feel capable or defeated before they even start.

That connection between bodies and environments is something I plan to explore more in future posts.

Because accessibility is not just a design conversation.

It is a human one.