Identity crisis

I am job hunting now, which is not great on the confidence anyway.

It is a little worse now because I have been out of the regular work force for so long, and what I have been doing instead has had so many emotional layers and so much of a downward trajectory that there is no way it wasn't going to be rough. Am I still even good at anything? Would I still want this type of work if I could get it? I could be doing much worse, but then something really threw me.

I saw diabetes on the list of disabilities.

If you haven't been job hunting for a while, the first thing you should know is to plan on over an hour for every unique site. They will upload your resume and use it to automatically fill out their forms, but that data pull never works quite right. You get to then go through and correct it. I cannot see any way in which this is efficient, but no one has asked me. (Therefore, if there are multiple jobs that you can apply for through a single site, that is awesome.)

After you get done with your education, experience, and certifications, there are some standard questions that have to do with anti-discrimination laws and tax credits and things like that. They ask about your race, veteran status, and if you have a disability. You can choose not to answer, but I have always gone through and answered without thinking about it much. I am white, and not a veteran, and I always put that I didn't have a disability until I noticed diabetes on the list.

There is a level at which I have known. In Twitter discussions about disabilities, I have known that I have a chronic condition, and that is a factor for some of the other participants. I didn't really feel like I grasped a lot of what they were saying until I was a caregiver, because of the exhaustion that comes with that. My diabetes has not been a big deal.

Technically it could. I do need to be able to address it if my blood sugar drops. In a desk job with regular breaks, that has never been a problem. If I were going for an assembly line job, or a fab tech, it might.

I also remember when I had that one really bad leg infection, which was associated with the diabetes. For a while after I needed to elevate my leg. I just balanced it on boxes and waste baskets, which did not work great. I probably could have asked for something better, but it never occurred to me to do so.

Also, as things were sliding down during that last two months of care-giving, I was not taking good care of myself and my blood sugar was not doing well. I guess that is a job and disability interaction.

Perhaps it has more of an impact than I thought.

I find that in declaring my disability, I do not trust employers not to discriminate. With the "yes" check, they wouldn't even know what they were discriminating against. Theoretically the whole point of them asking is to prevent discrimination, but it seems like for that the question should come after hiring. "Do you have any disabilities we need to accommodate?" Wouldn't that be nice?

Previously, when I would not declare myself as disabled on Twitter, it was more from a sense that it wouldn't be fair; the conditions that the others had affected their lives so much more, it felt like it would be gross to say "Oh, me too; I totally get it." Now, finding out that my condition is a matter of federal law, I don't even know how to process that. I still don't have it as bad as many other people that I look to and admire, and I still do not want to have to worry about jobs holding it against me.

Clearly, I am impossible to satisfy.

The first application where I noticed it, I marked "yes". It didn't feel right, but having seen that it would be a lie, I couldn't do my automatic "no" anymore. Today I chose a "prefer not to answer". That also doesn't feel great. What am I hiding? Why am I hiding it? What will they think of me? Will they hold it against me?

(The last time I was doing hiring, I just looked at resumes to decide if I wanted an interview, and then interviewed. It worked great.)

In reality, I don't know that it will change that much. There are bigger problems, for sure.

I have been thinking about identity a lot, and self-knowledge and integrity, so this seemed to fit in. It did shake me, even if it shouldn't have.

And it is still an issue where many others deal with it more, and could tell you more about it.

I already know that when there are accommodations we can make to allow more people to participate, we should do that.