You Shouldn't Have to Prove Something Is Hard Before You're Allowed to Make It Easier

Editorial note: The original version of this article was a toolkit: find your community, download some apps, learn about your needs, advocate for yourself. None of that is particularly bad advice. But I've thought about what "advocating for yourself" actually asks of the person who needs something, and I think I was starting the process several steps too late. Before we talk about how people should justify the things that help them function, maybe we should ask why we're requiring so much justification in the first place.

Start With the Friction

I have a significant visual impairment, and I work exclusively from home on a MacBook. I use substantial screen magnification to make text easier to read, even while wearing +7 computer glasses. Magnification solves the obvious accessibility problem, but it creates another one: when everything on the screen is bigger, much less information fits on the screen.

I could have asked my employer for a larger MacBook, but those devices are considerably more expensive, and I understood why that cost might be difficult to justify. Instead, I asked for a screen extender. It clips onto my laptop and adds two additional screens through USB-C, giving me three times the physical screen real estate at the magnification level I need. It was a much less expensive solution to the problem and arguably a better one.

The important part of that story isn't really the screen extender. It's how the problem was defined. My need wasn't a bigger MacBook. My need was enough usable screen space to work effectively while using the magnification that allows me to see what I'm doing. Those aren't the same thing, and understanding the difference gave us more options for solving the actual problem.

"What problem are we trying to solve?" is an incredibly useful question because it opens the door to possibilities. Maybe the first solution someone thinks of is expensive, impractical, unsafe, disruptive, or simply not the best solution available. Understanding the friction lets us work backward from the outcome instead of treating one specific modification as the only possible answer.

That's very different from another question that sounds almost identical: Why do you need that? Sometimes that means, "Help me understand the problem so we can solve it." Sometimes it means, "Prove you're entitled to this." I've become increasingly interested in how often we ask the second question when the first one would have been enough.

Sometimes the Accommodation Doesn't Look Like Work

Several years ago, I started experiencing significant swelling in my lower extremities. My doctor suggested that I work with my feet elevated, so I bought a lap table and started working from the reclining couch in my living room. It worked. My feet were elevated, I could use my laptop, and I could continue doing my job without spending the day making the swelling worse.

I didn't think very much about how the arrangement looked until a colleague made a joking but slightly snide comment during a Zoom meeting about how comfortable I certainly looked working from my couch. I immediately became defensive and explained that this wasn't "comfy couch work." I was working from that position because I needed to keep my feet elevated to prevent painful swelling from venous insufficiency.

He didn't need that information, but I told him because I suddenly understood that he might be looking at my workspace and constructing an entirely different explanation for it. I saw a modification that allowed me to work without unnecessary pain and swelling. He could see someone lounging on the couch while everyone else was properly working at a desk. I didn't want comfortable to become lazy in his understanding of me.

I've refined the setup considerably since then. I now work exclusively from recliners with an adjustable workstation designed to roll backward and forward over the chair. It has a built-in laptop riser and can be positioned for everything from sitting upright to working fully reclined. Technically, I could even use it as a standing desk, although that rather defeats my particular purpose. It's a much better workstation for my body than a conventional desk, and the fact that it also happens to be comfortable shouldn't make it less legitimate.

Why Does Work Have to Look Uncomfortable?

Once I started thinking about that interaction, I realized this particular assumption had been following me around much longer than any disability accommodation. In my early twenties, I worked retail. My feet would ache from standing, and sometimes I would lean against the cashwrap to take some of the pressure off them. My boss used to lecture me about my "Scarlett O'Hara pose."

Before that, I'd worked as a checker at a grocery store. We weren't allowed to have stools or chairs at the registers because sitting would look lazy. Then, years later, ALDI entered my part of the American grocery landscape, and their cashiers were sitting in chairs while scanning groceries. The groceries still got scanned. Customers still checked out. Civilization did not collapse.

There was never anything about operating a cash register that intrinsically required my teenage feet to hurt.

That realization matters because it strips disability out of the question entirely. Sometimes a modification is necessary because someone's body or brain cannot interact with an environment in the way that environment expects. But sometimes something just makes the work easier or more comfortable, and we've constructed a strange moral framework in which that's suspicious.

We often treat visible discomfort as evidence of effort. Standing looks more industrious than sitting. A desk looks more professional than a recliner. If two people produce equivalent work but one looks more comfortable doing it, we can start treating the comfort itself as evidence that the second person isn't working as hard. But if the chair doesn't prevent someone from doing the job, why do we need a medical reason before we're willing to let them sit in it?

What If We Just Trusted People?

This is where my thinking has moved furthest from the original article. In 2023, I wrote that self-advocacy was crucial for Non-Standard Humans. I told people to educate themselves, communicate their needs clearly, and know their rights. That's still useful advice in the world we actually live in, but look at how much responsibility that places on the person encountering the problem.

First, understand yourself. Identify your need. Research the solution. Learn the appropriate language. Communicate it correctly. Know the relevant law. Ask for an exception. If necessary, disclose enough personal information to establish why you deserve one. That's a lot of work before we've even gotten to the thing that would make the original work easier.

What if we started somewhere else? If someone says written instructions help them, and providing written instructions creates no meaningful burden, why do we need to know whether the reason is ADHD, auditory processing, anxiety, memory, language, or simple preference? If someone concentrates better in a quieter workspace and there's a quiet workspace available, what do we gain by investigating whether their difficulty concentrating is sufficiently legitimate? If a cashier would rather sit and the job can be performed sitting, why do we need to establish how much their feet hurt?

I don't think we do. I think we should just trust people.

Trust First Doesn't Mean Never Ask Questions

There are limits to that principle, obviously. Some requests cost substantial money. Some affect coworkers or customers. Some have safety implications. Some fundamentally change what a job requires, and sometimes two people's needs conflict. There are legitimate reasons to discuss those situations rather than treating every requested modification as automatically possible.

My screen extender is a good example. My employer was being asked to buy equipment, so understanding what I was actually trying to accomplish allowed us to find a relatively inexpensive solution that met my needs better than the more obvious expensive one. The useful question wasn't whether I was visually impaired enough to deserve more screen space. It was what problem the equipment needed to solve.

Research from the Job Accommodation Network reinforces how often these solutions are much less dramatic than we imagine. Employer data reported by the U.S. Department of Labor found that nearly half of workplace accommodations carried no cost, while accommodations that did require a one-time expense had a median cost of $300. Employers also reported benefits including retention, productivity, attendance, safety, and morale.

If something is inexpensive, effective, and doesn't interfere with anyone else's ability to work, spending significant institutional energy determining whether someone deserves it starts looking remarkably inefficient.

What If We Made the Exception Normal?

There's already a framework for thinking this way: universal design. The basic idea is to stop building everything around one assumed standard person and then retrofitting exceptions for everyone who can't use what we built. Instead, we can create environments with enough flexibility that more people can simply choose what works for them.

In a workplace, that might mean adjustable furniture, multiple ways of receiving information, flexible work configurations, or technology that can be adapted without requiring someone to initiate a formal disability process every time. That doesn't eliminate the need for individual accommodations. Human beings are far too variable for any supposedly universal environment to anticipate everybody. Some people will always need something specific, and sometimes those needs will require resources, documentation, negotiation, or creative problem-solving.

But imagine the difference between a workplace that starts with "everyone stands unless you prove why you can't" and one that starts with "you can sit or stand; use whichever works better for you." The disabled employee gets a chair. The pregnant employee gets a chair. The employee with aching feet gets a chair. The employee who simply prefers sitting gets a chair. The person who likes standing can keep standing.

Nobody has to audition for the chair. The accommodation has disappeared into choice.

Sometimes Trust Isn't Enough

Unfortunately, there are also times when informal understanding isn't enough, which is one reason formal disability protections and accommodation processes matter. I have chronic insomnia. At one job, I had disclosed this to my boss, but I don't think he really understood what that diagnosis could mean in practice. During especially severe episodes, I can go three or four days without sleeping before my body inevitably crashes.

That happened while I was working there. It was around six in the morning, I hadn't slept in something like 60 hours, and I could feel the crash coming. We had our weekly team meeting at 9 a.m. I knew there was a very real possibility that I would finally fall asleep before the meeting and that, once I did, an alarm wasn't going to wake me.

So I told my boss before it happened. I explained what was going on, reminded him that this was related to a documented medical condition, told him I might miss the meeting if I crashed, and asked that the meeting be recorded so I could catch up afterward. At my next one-on-one, I got a lecture about needing to prioritize being present and on time for team meetings.

I was shook.

What made the experience particularly frustrating was knowing that if I had simply said, "I'm sick," and taken the day off, my absence would have fit neatly into a category everyone already understood. Instead, I tried to be transparent. I identified the problem in advance and proposed a way to mitigate its impact, and somehow we ended up having a conversation about my priorities.

When Proof Actually Matters, the Process Should Work

After that conversation, I scheduled a meeting with HR. I told the representative that I needed to know what documentation they required from me so that I could formally document my condition and protect myself from retaliation for requesting an accommodation related to it. She told me she didn't know and would get back to me.

A month later, I still hadn't received an answer. My position was then eliminated in a layoff. I was also told I couldn't disclose the layoff and was required to sign an NDA in order to receive payment for my remaining vacation time.

I can't tell you what motivated the decision to eliminate my position, and I'm not going to manufacture a causal connection that I can't establish. What I can tell you is what the experience felt like from my side: I disclosed a medical problem, tried to anticipate how it might affect my work, was disciplined after asking for flexibility around it, went to HR specifically asking how to formally document and protect that need, and never received an answer before my employment ended.

That experience is also why I don't think the answer is simply to abolish every formal accommodation process and tell everyone to be nicer. Documentation can protect the person asking for help. Clear procedures can establish expectations on both sides. Formal legal protections matter precisely because trust and goodwill are not always enough. But if an employee asks, "What do I need to provide to document this correctly?", the process should be capable of answering them.

Build the Toolkit Around the Problem, Not the Label

The original version of this article recommended ADHD organizations, disability organizations, mindfulness apps, productivity tools, assistive technologies, educational resources, and support groups. It assumed that building a toolkit started with figuring out what kind of Non-Standard Human you were and then locating the resources intended for people in that category.

I don't think that's how I build my own toolkit anymore. I start with friction. I ask what is difficult, what hurts, what consumes more energy than it needs to, what repeatedly falls apart, what I'm compensating for, and what might make the situation easier. Then I look for tools that address the actual problem rather than worrying too much about which category supposedly owns the solution.

Sometimes the answer comes from medicine. Sometimes it comes from disability accommodation. Sometimes it comes from ADHD content, autism communities, trauma therapy, productivity systems, technology, furniture, another person's weird workaround, or something designed for an entirely different problem that happens to solve mine too. The source matters much less to me than the outcome.

A label can help me find the shelf where useful tools are stored. It doesn't mean I'm only allowed to shop from that shelf.

You Don't Have to Earn Easier

I still believe in self-advocacy. I just don't want to confuse the skill required to survive an unnecessarily difficult system with evidence that the system is working properly. People should understand their needs when they can, and we should communicate with one another about what we need from shared environments. Employers have legitimate constraints, and formal accommodation processes have an important role when individual needs require significant resources, exceptions, or legal protection. None of that requires us to begin from suspicion.

I want the default to move much closer to trust. If something makes a task easier and doesn't meaningfully harm anyone else, I don't think you should have to establish why you deserve to use it. If a modification costs almost nothing and helps someone work better, let them have it. If an environment can easily offer multiple options, offer the options instead of forcing everyone through the same door and constructing an exception process for anyone who can't comfortably squeeze through it.

When something more substantial is required, we can still approach the conversation from that same position of trust. Instead of asking someone to demonstrate that they've suffered enough to earn a particular solution, start by understanding the friction they're experiencing and the outcome they're trying to achieve. That's what happened with my screen extender: the first and most expensive solution wasn't necessarily the best one. Once the actual problem was clear, there was room to find something that worked for both of us. Collaboration and gatekeeping can involve some of the same questions, but they come from very different assumptions about the person answering them.

Most importantly, I don't think every modification needs to be elevated to the level of an accommodation at all. Sometimes you need a change because you're disabled. Sometimes a different tool works better because your brain processes information differently. Sometimes your body is tired, the lighting gives you a headache, you concentrate better with the door closed, sitting is more comfortable than standing, or you've simply discovered a less irritating way to accomplish the same thing. We don't need to turn every preference into a diagnosis before we're willing to take it seriously.

That's probably the biggest thing I would change about the toolkit I offered in 2023. I was still thinking in terms of helping Non-Standard Humans navigate a world designed around a standard, which meant teaching people how to find resources and advocate for exceptions. I still want people to have those skills, because sometimes we absolutely need them. But I'd much rather build a world where fewer harmless differences require an exception in the first place.

You shouldn't have to prove that something is hard before you're allowed to make it easier. If we can remove unnecessary friction without creating meaningful new friction for someone else, I think we should. Sometimes that means a formal disability accommodation. Sometimes it means redesigning a process. And sometimes your feet just fucking hurt, and there's a perfectly good chair sitting right there.

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