12. Access Needs / Self Care

12. Access Needs / Self Care

During the prompt about Teacher(s), Instagram user @snakesandcranes made a great point, saying: “being neurodivergent, I guess my best teacher has been me. I have always had to forge my own path to the material”. This insight speaks to two interrelated themes: access needs AND self care. Access needs are the accommodations disabled people need in order to access resources, while self care is how disabled people compensate for the gap between how things are offered, and our access needs: “forging our own path to the material”.

I have many aids for accessing computer work. Wrist wrest, screen stand and trackball mouse are invaluable: I can’t use a computer without them. You might remember this post about how permanent damage in my right wrist has impacted my ability to knit much. I’m working out what accommodations might help and will watch the Knit stars class by Beth Gorishek AKA Adaptive Knitter when I am over the important grief/rage phase, and feel ready.

This month I was identified as Autistic with ADHD (AuDHD).

This is huge, and so positive.

I’m still processing these insights and am especially excited about how I can use them to make a better – and more accessible – working life for myself. Like @snakesandcranes for me, getting the most out of learning experiences has always been a mix of identifying access needs AND practicing self care. My neurodiversity access needs are just like my physical disability needs – except they are invisible.

They include longer deadlines; clear outlines; downtime for processing and recovering from social interaction. Video calls with no time-limit are my kryptonite and can’t be part of my working/learning life, going forward, for example.

Much self care happens in my KNITSONIK Bullet Journal and involves turning information into formats I can process. Lists and bullet points, encouraging messages, visual diagrams that make sense. I spend a lot of time de-muddling information and untangling overwhelm in there.

Universal Design is one of my favourite disability culture concepts; it’s the idea that when we design things to accommodate disabled people, we make a world that is more user-friendly for everyone. I put accessibility at the heart of running The KNITSONIK School, but am also trying to balance this with my own capacity and resources as a disabled person needing to keep my job accessible for me. My two biggest takeaways about accessibility and self care from building the KNITSONIK Bullet Journaling Course have been 1. Closed Captions and transcripts make content accessible to a huge usergroup as well as to Deaf and hard of hearing communities; 2. my methods for making Bullet Journaling more accessible for me seem to make it more accessible (and fun!) for other folks as well. The comments and conversations in that course, in particular, give me such hope for what a beautiful and empathic world we can create when we centre FINDING WHAT WORKS FOR YOU at the heart of education, rather than THIS IS THE CORRECT WAY TO DO X and Y.

One of my favourite things about running that course is discovering the vast diversity of needs around how we each process information, and prefer to have it presented. It’s just beautiful.

What are your access needs, and how do you practice self care around supporting yourself and meeting your own needs in different learning contexts? #knitsonikbacktoschool