I went to a new GP last week. I barely made it to the appointment at all. I was having a particularly bad day with sensory sensitivity, and I could feel my nervous system slipping toward autistic meltdown.
I did all the right things. I had my fidget. I had my noise-cancelling headphones. I sat in the quietest corner of the waiting room. I closed my eyes to block out the light. All the things I've learnt to do to hack my environment because it's not set up in a way that suits my brain. The things I have to take responsibility for because I know the spaces that I enter won't.
After trying and failing to regulate, I stood and walked up to the front desk. I quietly asked if they had a sensory space. A look of confusion. "A quiet space?" "No, we don't have anything like that." At this point, the receptionist at the other end of the desk said, "There's the isolation room. We could use that."
The isolation room.
I'm not going to name the practice publicly because they are far from the only business that has never thought about this before. And the worst part wasn't even that they didn't have a space for me. It was the jarring impact of hearing it described that way. The reminder of all the times I was bullied or ignored at school. It was every time I'd been excluded at work because what I needed wasn't “the way we do things around here". It was all the times that I made myself small and didn't even ask because the anticipation of rejection was just as real as the rejection itself.
When disabled people aren't able to access the support that they need, they are isolated, be it physically, socially, economically or politically. Asking for help is *big* when you're used to the answer being no.
I want to acknowledge every disabled person who, despite everything, keeps on asking. Because every time you do, you make it a little bit easier for the next disabled person. Every ask resists the system built to keep us out.