Emily Ladau:
Kyle. Can I ask you a question?
Kyle Khachadurian:
Sure, Emily. What’s up?
Emily Ladau:
Have you thought that it’s kind of weird that we call ourselves The Accessible Stall, but we don’t really talk a lot about bathroom stuff?
Kyle Khachadurian:
You know what? That is weird. I mean we did do that episode once about inaccessible bathrooms, but that doesn’t seem like nearly enough, does it?
Emily Ladau:
Especially considering that there’s so much to talk about when it comes to bathroom accessibility, which actually brings me to today’s sponsor, Aeroflow Urology. They’re a leading provider of catheters through insurance, and they’re in-network with Medicaid, Medicare, and most commercial plans.
Kyle Khachadurian:
They carry top brands, including Coloplast, Bard, Cure, Hollister, and more. Because they don’t make catheters, they’re not there to pressure you to buy one over the other. In fact, they’re continence care specialists. They’ll work with you to find the right products to fit your needs, and they’ll even work with your insurance. They’re not just a supplier. They’re changing the conversation around urinary health through meaningful partnerships, philanthropy, and education, and they even have a 97% customer satisfaction rating.
Emily Ladau:
I cannot argue with that number. So if you’re in search of a catheter provider, you can check your eligibility or request product samples at aeroflowurology.com/tasp. That’s T-A-S-P. or call 888-682-4714.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Thank you, Aeroflow Urology, for sponsoring this episode.
Emily Ladau:
Hi, I’m Emily Ladau.
Kyle Khachadurian:
And I’m Kyle Khachadurian.
Emily Ladau:
And you are listening to the first episode of The Accessible Stall in 2022. What?
Kyle Khachadurian:
What are we going to talk about today, Emily?
Emily Ladau:
So of course, we’re going to dive right into the deep end and talk about all the messy parts of disabled existence.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Before we do that though, we are trying something new in The Accessible Stall this year, where we talk about news, like news you can use. Emily is right here to tell you about some news you can use in this episode.
Emily Ladau:
A really cool resource that we learned about recently from The Asian Americans with Disabilities Initiative or AADI is the first of its kind accessible resource guide to combat ableism within the Asian American community. I think that is a fantastic, long overdue, and much-needed resource.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Love it. We will put details about them in the show notes.
Emily Ladau:
And you can access it at www.aadinitiative.org/resources.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Could not be happier.
Emily Ladau:
Also, do us a favor and reach out if you’ve got resources that you want us to share. We’re going to try to keep this news and resources you can use thing going.
Kyle Khachadurian:
That sounds great, Emily. Back to the episode.
Emily Ladau:
Okay. I think it’s time that we talk about the fact that existing in a disabled body can be kind of a hot mess.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Sometime ago, we did that episode where we talked about how having a disability sucks sometimes, and it does sometimes. But this isn’t that. That was more of a solidarity to all the disabled listeners out there listening to that episode. This is more of a look at the ways that existing in a disabled body can be interesting on the best day.
Emily Ladau:
Yeah. To kick us off, I’ve been thinking lately about the sheer number of times that I have needed assistance going to the bathroom or assistance in the bathroom or just assistance with something where there’s definitely nothing on my butt.
Kyle Khachadurian:
I mean just the concept of pee math alone is something that I don’t know about only disabled people know, but it’s a rare thing to know.
Emily Ladau:
Oh yeah. For people who are like, “What the heck is pee math?” It’s basically when you are getting ready to go somewhere, you do the math to figure out how many hours you have between accessible bathrooms, and you hydrate and/or dehydrate accordingly.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Yeah.
Emily Ladau:
Also, the reason that I was talking about bathrooms specifically to start off, I was thinking about the time, and we did an episode about this, but remember when I was falling in the shower?
Kyle Khachadurian:
Yeah.
Emily Ladau:
You needed to come get me. I had nothing on my butt, y’all. It’s how it is.
Kyle Khachadurian:
She was naked as the day she was born. But I feel like that experience somehow brought us closer together.
Emily Ladau:
It’s a beautiful thing. But the point is that sometimes being disabled is just swallowing all your pride. Believe me, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with needing help, and I’m definitely not saying that there’s anything wrong with being interdependent. I’m more just saying that disabled bodies are kind of a mess sometimes.
Kyle Khachadurian:
They just don’t always work how you expect or want them to.
Emily Ladau:
Yeah. So I think we need to talk about why you should not be ashamed of all of the messiness that comes with a disability because I know that I have so much internalized ableism around it. I’m constantly like, “Oh, it’s so gross that I need help with this.” Or I can’t clip my own toenails, for example. I can’t reach my own feet. So I was asking my boyfriend the other day, like, “Hey, when we live together, will you clip my toenails for me?” He was like, “Yeah, of course.” But it’s just such an awkward thing to have to ask somebody for that level of personal assistance, but-
Kyle Khachadurian:
It’s very intimate-
Emily Ladau:
Yeah.
Kyle Khachadurian:
… in a very strange, but in a way that a lot of disabled people I know you understand if you’re listening to this right now.
Emily Ladau:
Okay, burning question. Can you clip your own toenails?
Kyle Khachadurian:
I can.
Emily Ladau:
What is that like?
Kyle Khachadurian:
But my feet are super sensitive. If I look at them the wrong way, I’ll have a … It’s not really a spasm, but I’ll feel the muscles in my feet tighten up. I hate it. I wish I didn’t have feet, not really. But it really would make some of my life easier, I swear. But my feet are super sensitive. So when I do that, it’s like a whole thing. It’s like an event. So yes, I can do it. But there needs to be a time and a place and people around me need to know what’s going on because I need to be left alone.
Kyle Khachadurian:
No, I’m serious. It’s funny. It is objectively funny. If any of you saw me clip my toenails, if you didn’t laugh, I’d be offended. But it’s just a thing. It is a thing that I don’t think able-bodied people have to deal with or non-disabled people I have to deal with.
Emily Ladau:
Yeah. Also, I’m just kind of spit balling here. But another thing I think about is, yeah, things are more of an event when you’re disabled. The care and keeping of your body is such an event. Me shaving my legs is I mean block out my afternoon. Hold my calls.
Kyle Khachadurian:
I don’t shave my legs, but I shave my face and I have to be very careful not to cut myself, not because I don’t know how to do it. It’s because I psych myself out. And then I make one wrong move, and I cut myself. So in order to-
Emily Ladau:
Do you have spasticity that makes it harder?
Kyle Khachadurian:
No. Well, I think technically I do. I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I think if you were to look at an MRI, you’d be like, “Yeah, that’s technically a spasticity.” But it doesn’t look nor feel like anything that I would describe as a spasm, if that makes any sense.
Emily Ladau:
No, I get it. But also that’s your normal.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Exactly. It’s more psychological. It’s like if I don’t do this perfectly, I’ll just cut my face.
Emily Ladau:
Yeah. But for me, everything is a process. Putting my pants on is such a process.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Putting my pants on is a process that I’ve gotten very good at. I am so envious of people who can put on pants standing up, I mean genuinely. There is not many things that I wish that I could do that I can’t do, but that one I do. I do. I would trade my soul for that. That’s a good one.
Emily Ladau:
People who just step into their pants and they’re walking around, stepping into them, and then they step into their shoes. What is that?
Kyle Khachadurian:
Stepping into your shoes, too, that’s the other thing. Oh my God, if only. It would save me minutes across my lifetime.
Emily Ladau:
Don’t you sit down to put your shoes on?
Kyle Khachadurian:
Yeah.
Emily Ladau:
On the floor? Am I making this up?
Kyle Khachadurian:
Nope. That’s exactly what I do.
Emily Ladau:
Yeah.
Kyle Khachadurian:
I mean if I’m in someone’s house, I know how to be a person. I’ll sit on a chair and do it. But the floor is the way. If I can do the floor, I’ll do the floor.
Emily Ladau:
See, but for me, the thought of getting up off the floor sounds terrible.
Kyle Khachadurian:
I’m very good at that. That’s not something that people with cerebral palsy and even the “mild version” that I have, people with my level of CP, a lot of them can’t get off the floor either. So it’s certainly a privilege, a gift, whatever you want to call it. It’s not something that everyone can do, so I know how lucky it is to be able to do that. I don’t really have a point. It’s just that, yes, you are. It’s not terrifying to me, but I understand why it is to you.
Emily Ladau:
Speaking of floors, I just need to tell you all something. So if you’ve been with us a while, I think I talked about my fall, right? Did I?
Kyle Khachadurian:
You did.
Emily Ladau:
Yeah, yeah. Well, let me tell you something, friend-
Kyle Khachadurian:
Oh God, no.
Emily Ladau:
… of The Accessible Stall. We’re about to record, and we do it on video. What does Kyle hold up? But the exact same water bottle in the same size and the same color as the one that I dropped when I fell to my near death, and by near death, I just mean breaking my leg. But the point is, how does that happen?
Kyle Khachadurian:
To be clear, I did not know about which water bottle specifically did this to her.
Emily Ladau:
Right, I buried the lead here.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Isn’t that funny?
Emily Ladau:
I’m feeling a little stressed by this water bottle. I think that was part of what inspired me to just talk about bodies and how sometimes they suck and how sometimes they’re messy and difficult and everything is a freaking process.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Oh my God. You just reminded me of when I was a kid. I woke up one morning. I went upstairs to see my grandma, to wait for the school bus. I need to use the bathroom, and I had tripped midstream. And then I tripped over a rug. And then I tripped over her scale. And then I went face first into the bathtub. I was six years old. I still got on the school bus somehow, but it was a mess. I’ve never forgotten that, not because it hurt, even though it very much did, but because I was embarrassed that my grandma had to see that. Even though I was a small child, I had that. That’s what we’re talking about. We’re just talking about stuff like that.
Emily Ladau:
Yeah. The embarrassment of being in your own body when it doesn’t really work the way that you want it to. We’re the ones who impose that on ourselves, right?
Kyle Khachadurian:
Yes. My mom and dad never told me, “Son, you should be ashamed of yourself.” No, really though. It’s funny, but it bears saying that I was a tiny little child and I grew up around disabled people in a school full of disabled people. I had the most ideal set of circumstances that one could have and not to sound like a broken record for the internalized ableism episode, but if I had that thought, then I can’t imagine how other people in disabled bodies speak to themselves. It starts from a very young age.
Emily Ladau:
Yeah. I really don’t necessarily think that it’s always because of things that people are saying to us actively. It’s just messages that we’re internalizing about, okay, this is what normal looks like, and your body doesn’t look normal. This is how normal moves, and your body is not moving normally.
Kyle Khachadurian:
You see the difference? You see how this is how you do it and how you really cannot do that.
Emily Ladau:
(singing)
Kyle Khachadurian:
Yeah. I don’t want to get into too many specifics, but there is definitely something to be said about just being born this way. My God. I actually feel for people-
Emily Ladau:
All right, Lady Gaga.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Right. You remember for three, four years after that song came out, that was like the disability community anthem.
Emily Ladau:
I mean yeah.
Kyle Khachadurian:
As if it’s still not.
Emily Ladau:
I was born this way. I’m proud of it.
Kyle Khachadurian:
I realized in saying that, that I actually kind of feel more for people who have acquired their disabilities because we didn’t have to learn anything. This is what we grew up doing. I mean this is what we adapted our bodies to. But people who have acquired the disabilities used to know how to do it the “normal way,” and maybe now they have a disability where they can’t. That’s a process that I feel lucky to not have gone through. But I wonder if the incidents that we’re talking about happen more to those folks.
Emily Ladau:
I mean I think I’ve had somewhat of that experience just in the sense of when I did get my injury last year because I was “more disabled.” But I’m back to my normal. I’m back to my own normal now. So everything was not permanently upended for me. But yeah. I mean the fact that we make all of the messy and difficult parts of disability kind of taboo, I think, is what makes it harder for us to accept it and especially for people who acquire disabilities to accept it because we totally do not normalize talking about bathroom stuff.
Emily Ladau:
We totally do not normalize talking about needing help with certain bodily tasks and function. We don’t normalize talking about when our bodies are fallible, and I think we should talk about this stuff.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Do you think that that taboo stems from the fact that bathroom stuff in general is considered taboo? Or do you think it’s more from an ableist perspective? I’m genuinely curious to hear what you have to think about that because you’re right about the other things. But that one in particular, I agree with you, but I’m curious what’s worse.
Emily Ladau:
You know what? It’s probably a little bit of both. But in my house, bathroom stuff is not taboo. We talk about it all the time, but-
Kyle Khachadurian:
Not in this one either.
Emily Ladau:
But externally, yeah, I guess it’s not appropriate to have these conversations with people. But I have no shame in my bathroom game. I feel like maybe that’s actually because I’m disabled.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Yeah, probably. I think so. I was just thinking about how there’s some sort of camaraderie. I know that I can text a friend who has similar CP to me and ask them a very otherwise personal question about this exact thing, and they’ll just answer it. There’s some disability solidarity there, for sure. They won’t even ask why. They’ll just answer.
Emily Ladau:
Yeah, for sure. Like, “Does your body do this thing, too? Does your body not cooperate in this way, too?” Like, “Oh, yeah, totally.” I just get it, and I feel that. Yeah. So maybe disability has removed a lot of the taboos around things for me that I otherwise would not be comfortable talking about. But that’s just maybe a feature of my personality, too, because I’m sure there are plenty of more private people than me.
Kyle Khachadurian:
I mean I do think it takes two special kinds of people that openly broadcast about this stuff to the internet. But I don’t know any other way. The way that I learned to adapt and sort of cope when necessary is by asking other disabled people that I knew how to do things and if this was normal for them or if this was typical or can you also not do this? I didn’t even do it for the sense of camaraderie, although that came with it. It was more just, “Hey, does your body do this, too?” Is this-
Emily Ladau:
I have a friend who has CP who told me she didn’t know that the startle reflex was a cerebral palsy thing until I told her that I have a ton of friends with cerebral palsy who also have a startle reflex.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Oh, well, then in that case, this is a perfect opportunity for a teachable moment. Babies are born with a reflex that I don’t know the reason behind it, but it makes them startle more. The threshold for startling is much lower. As a able-bodied baby grows up, that startle reflex goes away. By the time they’re adults, it doesn’t exist anymore and they’ll only get startled if they’re properly scared. With us, with people with CP, it just never turns off. So you can clap your hands in front of me loudly and tell me exactly when it’s going to come and I will startle. it’s very annoying.
Emily Ladau:
Now, I do not have cerebral palsy, but I have not only a startle reflex, but a full-on fear of loud noises. So I don’t know how I also got that gem implanted into me, but lucky me.
Kyle Khachadurian:
I don’t know if CP has the market cornered on startle reflexes not turning off, but it is a feature of all of us, I think. I’ve never met a single person with CP without it. If you are one, please email us.
Emily Ladau:
I used to be embarrassed by that, too, speaking of ways that my body doesn’t cooperate with me. I used to be so embarrassed at how I would jump at everything.
Kyle Khachadurian:
I hate fire alarms, and I hate them now that I live in an apartment on the fifth floor because, first of all, I startle. And then I’m disoriented. And then I have to run down the stairs behind other people. If there’s a real fire, everyone behind me is not going to make it. I don’t mean to be morbid, but really, and I’m not going to either. I hate it because all I want to do is be like, “Hey, sorry.” No one cares. I know no one cares. They just want to get out. But I care. It’s so annoying. I hate them.
Emily Ladau:
Oh yeah. When fire alarms would go off in my college dorm and wake me up, none of my muscles would work. I would be like, “How to put on clothing,” because I’d be in bed or whatever. I was just so confused by … Yeah. So I hate that. I hate fireworks. I hate loud movies. I startle really, really easily. It used to be so embarrassing to me. Also, the purest form of torture was that I used to be in band in middle school, and I sat right in front of the drums. I played the clarinet specifically right in front of the kid who played the cymbals. There is no purer torture.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Do you hate yourself or did someone put you there?
Emily Ladau:
That was where I was. That was the most accessible seat to me was on the end.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Yeah, no. I hate that just thinking about it.
Emily Ladau:
So anyway, in conclusion, I quit band and joined chorus.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Did you really?
Emily Ladau:
Oh, I really did.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Oh my God. I thought that that part was a joke. No, that’s-
Emily Ladau:
That’s not a joke, no. The punchline is not a joke.
Kyle Khachadurian:
You see what you had to do. I mean I’m sure you had a good time in chorus, but wouldn’t you have liked to play the clarinet more? Maybe not. I don’t know. But like-
Emily Ladau:
Oh, def not. I was so bad at it because, speaking of-
Kyle Khachadurian:
Never mind. That defeats my point.
Emily Ladau:
No. But your point stands. But the reason that I really quit was because I, a disabled human woman, did not have the breath support or lung capacity or abdominal strength to play a wind instrument.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Yeah, that’s valid.
Emily Ladau:
Despite people on the internet probably thinking I’m just a bag of hot air, yeah, wind instruments were not for me.
Kyle Khachadurian:
That’s a good one.
Emily Ladau:
So yeah. Bodies, man. Sometimes they just don’t cooperate.
Kyle Khachadurian:
I used to be really down on myself those days. It’s like sometimes if I have a bad pain day, I still get down on myself. But I’m at the point in my life where it’s almost humorous, almost. If I’m not out doing something and because of the state of the world, I’m usually not, it’s funny. If it happens to me in my house, it’s funny.
Emily Ladau:
I mean I want to ask for an exclusive, behind-the-scenes, all-access pass to your relationship as two disabled people, but-
Kyle Khachadurian:
I’ve never fallen in the shower. I had one fall in 2021, and I don’t even count it because I was kind of tipsy and I didn’t see the curb cut. That’s not a CP fall. It counts because it was a fall, but it’s not a CP fall. I never fall in the shower, ever. It’s like my CP superpower. The reason I’m bringing this up is because I do occasionally almost fall in the shower, and I haven’t yet. I just want you to know that in those moments, I am terrified beyond belief not because I can’t get up. Obviously, it’s not that. But it’s more that I know myself and I know that I would be so disoriented and so confused and so like, “What the heck just happened?”
Kyle Khachadurian:
And then she would come running in and not be able to help me at all because she’s 50 pounds lighter than me and can’t see what’s going on. So yeah. It’s just something that I think about not all the time, but it comes up.
Emily Ladau:
It makes me think about when I used to date a gentleman, wheelchair user, many moons ago. I do not now. We have long since broken up. But on an early date of ours, I was having so much trouble transferring into his car from my wheelchair and we were holding up valet parking. So he, a fellow wheelchair user, had to figure out how to hoist me, a wheelchair user with no strength, into his car in front of a whole bunch of angry people trying to get out of the parking lot of the restaurant. Man, what a mess.
Kyle Khachadurian:
I can’t imagine anyone seeing the two of you would have actually been angry. I wish I was there.
Emily Ladau:
I mean maybe they weren’t angry. It was probably just all in my head, but I was mortified.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Actually, something that’s not gross, but we had a robot vacuum tug on a cord, which took out a vase made of glass and hit the floor. I had to clean it up because she can’t see, but I had to be on my hands and knees, and that’s not good for anybody. It’s really not good for someone like me. Luckily, the glass was blue. That’s the only good part of that story.
Emily Ladau:
Hashtag blessed.
Kyle Khachadurian:
It was right before Christmas vacation, too. That’s the best part. That’s the day before we go to Christmas vacation. It’s the one last hurrah.
Emily Ladau:
Oh my gosh. This reminds me of last month. I had gone pumpkin picking, and so we had pumpkins left. There was a pumpkin that was sitting on the floor of my living room, and my dad was going to be having carpal tunnel surgery. So we were like, “Probably you should pick up the pumpkin and throw it out before you have carpal tunnel surgery.” But then we all forgot about it. And then the day after his surgery, the pumpkin was rotten. So he tried to pick it up, and the whole pumpkin just exploded in half and got everywhere.
Emily Ladau:
So then you have my dad who’s recovering from hand surgery. You have me and my mom who are wheelchair users trying to cram ourselves into the corner of the living room to clean up rotten pumpkin everywhere. It’s just like, man, I don’t know who lets disabled people live on their own. Don’t come for me. I’m just kidding.
Kyle Khachadurian:
No. When I really think about it, the reason we purchased that vacuum is because neither of us like to sweep because I mean it’s not hard for me to sweep, but it’s harder for me to sweep than an able-bodied person, and she can’t see the dust. There was something about the irony of the thing that we bought just for the purpose of not having to do this and, all of a sudden, I need to do this. It was almost like an access need that I justified to myself had betrayed me. It’s like I’ve worked so hard to avoid this very specific situation, and here I am.
Emily Ladau:
Honestly, that’s so real. I mean I feel like there is so many times where I’m like, “This is going to make my life better and easier.” Nope. No, it’s not.
Kyle Khachadurian:
For the most part, it has, but it’s important to remember that sometimes life will just do it to you.
Emily Ladau:
Yeah, yeah. I mean we have all of these great cleaning supplies and reaching tools and whatever, trying to make it a little bit easier for us to clean. But when one person’s recovering from surgery and two people are in wheelchairs trying to clean up rotten pumpkin, it’s just …
Kyle Khachadurian:
Can I ask you a question?
Emily Ladau:
Yes.
Kyle Khachadurian:
If you drop your grabber, do you have, on your person, a smaller grabber to reach the grabber you dropped?
Emily Ladau:
Let me tell you how much this comes up for me, probably once a day where I drop the thing that I’m probably using to pick up the thing that I dropped. Also, the other thing, I need to figure out how to keep a grabber on me at all times because when I’m in my power wheelchair, my arms don’t extend far enough for me to reach to pick stuff up off the floor. So I’ll just drop something and then sit there helplessly until somebody comes to pick it up for me. I just do that looking around like, “Hello, anybody, anybody. Please help. Please help.” I hate that, but …
Kyle Khachadurian:
They should just make grabbers with holes in them that you can put a piece of rope through or something. And then you can just-
Emily Ladau:
No, they have that. But it’s another thing that I have to drag around with me. Honestly, and I’ve said this before, I want Inspector Gadget arms. So when I drop something, I can just be like, “Go, go gadget, arms,” and then pick it up.
Kyle Khachadurian:
See, most people want go gadget arms because they think it’s cool. No, for us, this is a necessity. It’s not just-
Emily Ladau:
Also, then I wouldn’t have to get up every time I wanted something, which is hard. Moving is hard.
Kyle Khachadurian:
That’s also why we have an A-L-E-X-A. I don’t know why I’m not saying Alexa. You’re listening to this in earphones, aren’t you? But-
Emily Ladau:
Or we just set her off. Apologies.
Kyle Khachadurian:
We have one to turn on lights that are hard to reach. It’s great. Then sometimes it doesn’t work. Now, that doesn’t cause a mess. Actually, I’m sorry. Of course, 30 minutes in, I have a perfect story for this.
Emily Ladau:
That’s always how long it takes to warm up in the bullpen. You’re fine.
Kyle Khachadurian:
I apologize to our audience and to you. But okay. So we have metal posters on the wall that are made of metal. It’s very important that you internalize this fact. We have Glade PlugIns. There’s an outlet underneath the metal poster. Glade PlugIns, they’re top heavy, so they tilt forward. So there was exposed plug, but still plugged in, so hot wire. Okay? Not good. The freaking poster falls down, touches the hot wire, sparks. The breaker shorted. No fire, no nothing, no injury. But we had to deal with that. I had to convince Courtney, who called her dad to make sure, that, no, it was fine to flip the breaker.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Then we had to clean the thing. It was a whole thing, and being disabled made it worse because it knocked out all the lights, so she couldn’t see. Bending over and inspecting an outlet isn’t exactly easy for me to do. It was a situation made hard by having disabilities.
Emily Ladau:
Exactly. Exactly. Not that the situation would have been ideal anyway, but it’s just way harder. I think of, oh my God, all the times that my mom or I have spilled or dropped something in its entirety-
Kyle Khachadurian:
Yes. Exactly.
Emily Ladau:
We cannot easily clean it up.
Kyle Khachadurian:
I had a friend in high school who would put paper towels on the floor, get as accurately she could and then run over them with her power wheelchair and just kind of mop.
Emily Ladau:
Yeah. My mom called it foot mopping. She does it with her foot while she’s sitting in her chair.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Really?
Emily Ladau:
Yeah.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Oh, cool.
Emily Ladau:
But everything is difficult. Sorry. This is a whiny episode, and we don’t mean it to be. But it makes me think of how in college when I was rolling around campus on a rainy day or a snowy day, my wheels would get really dirty. And then I would have to figure out how to clean them off when I got back into my room. Finally, I had to get a scrub brush because there would be dead worms in my wheels. So I would have to get out of my power chair into my manual chair, grab a scrub brush, clean dead worms off my wheelchair, and then use a paper towel to get the dead worms off the floor.
Emily Ladau:
So it was all this bending and all this transferring and all this maneuvering because I don’t want dead worms all over my place of living. So, man, I don’t even know how we got on this rant anymore. But wow.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Well, no, it’s just something that wouldn’t happen to someone able-bodied. It just wouldn’t. If it did, it would not take them that much time because they wouldn’t have to think about … I mean depending on the severity of the situation, they might have to deal with how to solve it. But if that were me and I stepped in some dirt with a dead worm in it, all I would have to do is take off my shoe, walk into my apartment, turn her over, and wipe it off because I do not have the same physical limitations that you do. For me, that’s easy. But for you, it’s a nightmare.
Emily Ladau:
Right. For me, all the lights shutting off wouldn’t be a problem.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Right.
Emily Ladau:
So you know what? What even is our point anymore?
Kyle Khachadurian:
Being disabled-
Emily Ladau:
Being disabled is hard.
Kyle Khachadurian:
… is very annoying. That’s my final takeaway. Very seldom do I have hard days, truly. I mean I used to. But I like this. I know what I can and can’t do. The list of things I can do far outperforms the list of things I can’t. It’s fine. I’m okay with that. But God, it’s so annoying sometimes. Sometimes you just want to put on pants and go out the door, but I can’t do that. I have to sit on the floor.
Emily Ladau:
Yeah. No, it takes way more effort to just do simple things. Of course, 30 minutes into the episode, we’re dropping all our hot truths. But I don’t want people to feel bad if you’re non-disabled and you’re like, “Man, your life is so hard.” I just want you to be aware of some of the effort that goes into existing. That’s all. You don’t need to pity me.
Kyle Khachadurian:
I wish the people would stop saying that your life is harder. If they’re going to say something like that, I really wish they would just go with harder because it’s not hard, but it definitely is harder. Yeah. Never mind. But it’s so annoying. It’s so annoying sometimes.
Emily Ladau:
Do we have final takeaways here?
Kyle Khachadurian:
I would say I’m actually curious to hear what our listeners, if they have similar stories, and it’s not really a final takeaway. My final takeaway is that living with a disability is there are things that you can never anticipate. We just adapt to them like we always do to everything.
Emily Ladau:
It’s always an adventure. Because you were mentioning solidarity before, I totally want to hear people’s stories.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Yeah. In fact, I need to. I require it.
Emily Ladau:
Not that we wish all of this nonsense on you, but I’m quite sure we’re not the only ones who have gotten into assorted and sundry messes.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Yeah. Yeah. This has been it. This is another episode of The Accessible Stall. I’m Kyle.
Emily Ladau:
I’m Emily.
Kyle Khachadurian:
And if you feel like supporting the show, you can do so at patreon.com/theaccessiblestall. Just $1 a month keeps The Accessible Stall what?
Emily Ladau:
Accessible.
Kyle Khachadurian:
That’s right.
Emily Ladau:
Because we provide transcripts.
Kyle Khachadurian:
That’s right.
Emily Ladau:
That part of the transcript that you’re going to help us fund, it’ll say crosstalk. Anyway, might we say …
Kyle Khachadurian:
You look so freaking good today.
Emily Ladau:
Congratulations on making it to 2022. I mean if you’re here, if you’re listening, we could have started off with a really motivational episode, but we’re just keeping it real this year. That’s what we’re going to do.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Watch Don’t Look Up on Netflix.
Emily Ladau:
Oh, I started that movie. Haven’t finished it yet, but what a metaphor.
Kyle Khachadurian:
Yeah.
Emily Ladau:
Anyway, thanks so much for listening.
Kyle Khachadurian:
See you next time.
Emily Ladau:
Bye.