Emily: Hi, I’m Emily Ladau.

Kyle: And I’m Kyle Khachadurian.

Emily: And you’re listening to another episode of The Accessible Stall. Kyle’s been waiting all day to tell me a story and I really freaking want to hear it. So, out with it already.

Kyle: Yes, I’m going to tell you a story for the first time ever in life. So, today is Holy Saturday, aka the Saturday before Easter Sunday, which is the day before Easter Sunday. On this day, Armenians make fancy bread that tastes delicious, called choereg. So, we got all the ingredients today and my mom made some, and she was making it all day and she put her heart and soul into it. She got mad because her bread didn’t rise. She was working at this all day and she was very upset, and then she must have tweaked it or something because hours later we were just sitting here watching TV and stuff and she says from the kitchen, “Oh! My bread rose!” And then so I looked at her and I said, “Would you say that the bread is risen?” And she looked at me and she said, “Jesus Christ” as if to be disappointed, but because she said Jesus Christ, I was like, “Yeah, exactly.” Which made her more upset, which made it, well, not upset, but it made her groan harder at my double pun.

Emily: It’s horrible.

Kyle: And so that’s my story.

Emily: Happy Easter.

Kyle: Thank you. You too, except you’re more of a Passover kind of woman.

Emily: That’s me. I am Jewish. Now, what are we going to talk about today, Kyle?

Kyle: I forgot it was my turn. Every once in a while it’s my job to come up with a topic. It’s always weird because the introduction is backwards. So, we’re going to talk about this article that I found on The Mighty, but before I do, Emily has a disclaimer to talk about with The Mighty, go on.

Emily: I feel like it’s important to acknowledge that there are many issues with The Mighty. It is problematic, it has been problematic. But I also think that we need to give credit where it’s due and recognize that they’re trying to be better, and there’s actually some good stuff on there. I don’t know if that’s so much a The Mighty thing as it is, let’s give credit to individual authors. But either way, I just think it’s important that we set aside that particular debate for this episode, and we’re strictly talking about the content of an article here.

Kyle: This article was written by a young woman named Ashley Burnside, and the article is called What Unemployment Taught Me about My Body. The URL slug that they used was, Employment and Chronic Pain With Cerebral Palsy. There are some authors that I follow on The Mighty, but I’ll very occasionally peruse the actual disability categories. When I saw something like that on the cerebral palsy category, it caught my eye because it was something that I’m very familiar with. I read it and it was like this woman was talking about my situation when I was an unemployed bum and I didn’t have a job. It made me realize how much CP takes a toll on my body. And you might say, “Well, how do you not know how much your own disability takes a toll on your body?” And the truth is, I’ve said on the show before that I didn’t know I was in pain until I took a painkiller for the first time in 2014.

But more importantly, when you get into a routine that you just do so habitually, that you barely even think about it, you don’t really pay attention to how it makes you feel, unless it makes you feel some different way than it usually does. For me, I was just used to that level of pain, I knew it was there. But it was just like, I have to go to work. So, when I lost my job, it hit me that I in fact, didn’t have to always deal with this because I didn’t even realize that that level of pain was caused by my going to and from work. Now that I have a job at a different place with a very generous telecommuting policy, I take it as much as I can, not for ADA reasons although it kind of is. They just happen to offer it. It’s just something that helps me and makes me a better employee because the less I’m in pain, the more I can focus on my actual job.

Emily: I think it’s actually a really good point about being a better employee. Because in the article Ashley talks about the burden of her disability and at first, I was like, “What?” but then at the end, really, I think she clarified that she’s talking about the burden of keeping up with a particular employment schedule. And that can be a burden on the body. I think that traditional employment as we know it can be very burdensome on anybody and take a toll, and then when we’re talking about people who are disabled and have chronic pain, keeping up with a traditional work schedule, can be really, really difficult, even with telecommuting.

I don’t have the experience of an extended period of unemployment, but I do have the experience of feeling relief and feeling like I function better when I’ve taken a long enough break that I get rid of some of my upper body pain, because I sit at a desk and I have to type, my wrists hurt, and my shoulders hurt, and my neck hurts, and my back hurts, and everything just hurts. But my option is to get up from the computer and take a break, and then I’m not doing work, which means I’m not getting paid, or to push through it and take an ibuprofen. I don’t think that makes me someone who’s at the top of my game when I’m pushing myself like that.

Kyle: It’s making me realize, one of the smaller benefits of having a salaried job rather than an hourly job. But even so, all those kinds of things are things that as a person with chronic pain, unless you’re very conscious of how exactly that makes a difference, you’re really not. Honestly, if you’re in chronic pain, how much do you think about it if it’s a normal day? You’re probably so used to it that you just don’t, and you’re probably so used to whatever your routine is that you don’t really think about how much your routine adds to it, because that’s the amount that you’re used to, so you just do your routine anyway. Try not doing something major in your routine and you might be surprised at what happens. It might not make any difference, but it might.

Emily: Sometimes I can’t differentiate between pain that’s caused from working and pain that’s just caused from my existence. I know that my sitting at the computer for hours on end exacerbates it, and people always say, get a better ergonomic setup or take breaks. And my setup, yes, I need to work on my setup. My setup sucks. Hold on, I’m going to sneeze. Has that ever happened on the podcast before?

Kyle: That depends. Do you want to keep it in?

Emily: I don’t know.

Kyle: Well, if you do, the answer is no, but if you don’t, the answer is yes.

Emily: Bless me.

Kyle: Bless you. God bless you.

Emily: God blesses everyone. Anyway, just so you got in. The other thing I was going to say is, yes, I know I need to get a better ergonomic set up, but taking breaks is not super practical for me all the time when I have a deadline and I need to get something done. I know there are accommodations and assistive technologies that I can use, but not all of that works for me, dictation doesn’t work very well for me. I don’t think fast enough for it, it’s the truth.

Kyle: I know what you mean.

Emily: I think that there’s got to be some kind of way to balance being a good employee with taking care of yourself.

Kyle: I think taking care of yourself is a pretty good way to start. I know, personally, if I’m in pain, real actual pain, the one that I’m very acutely aware of that isn’t a baseline amount, I’m not doing the best job, and I’m so sure of it. In fact, if it’s really bad, I wonder why I’m even sitting there, because there’s nothing that distracts me more than being in a lot of pain. If I’m in that much pain, I’m not doing my job as well as I could be. There’s just no ifs, ands or buts about it.

Emily: But it’s knowing your body enough to know when it’s just regular old pain and when it’s like, this is so bad, I need to stop.

Kyle: Right and I’m very fortunate to work at a place where if it is that bad, and seriously, God bless him, that Bill just let me take an extra telecommute day. I have two in my schedule, but if I need more those are given to me. That’s something that I recognize that not every person gets. But for me personally, it’s the difference between being able to do my job and not being able to do my job. Because even though I sit at a desk all day, it’s irrelevant when I just feel like my feet are throbbing in pain. It doesn’t matter that I’m not walking around because it still hurts enough where I’m not even thinking about the job I’m supposed to be doing.

Emily: I have two points to make to that. The first being that I’m thinking about it now, and I wasn’t even really working today, but I’m just in residual pain from the week and probably should have taken more of a break from my computer. So that’s just my own yelling at myself, because I know I have the option to not be in front of my computer. I should have taken that option. But speaking of options, my second thing was going to be that I feel like the balance between taking care of yourself as much as you can while still getting the job done, and also companies and bosses recognizing that need for taking care of yourself. And I don’t mean self-care, in the sense of, oh, I’m taking a self-care day so that I can drink Starbucks and get a massage and I just don’t feel like doing work. Although if you want to do that and you can, awesome.

Kyle: I get what you’re saying though, because you decide that. You take a day off and it comes from your personal… You’re talking about employers that recognize what makes employees happy. You can’t control that, that’s up to your company.

Emily: I’m not saying employers should be like, go ahead and take a day to do nothing. Actually, I think they should do that. But I recognize that’s not always how productivity works for a company. What I am saying is that employers should at least be willing to work with their employees to make their work situation take less of a physical toll on them.

Kyle: Right. There are certain jobs that I just can’t do, and so, I don’t do them. But this is a problem. If you’re in a situation, for example, if you work retail, and you have CP and you’re on your feet all day, and that’s your job, to be on your feet all day, we both recognize that that’s not an ideal situation. And so, there is definitely going to be certain jobs and scheduling and all kinds of things that make it so that it doesn’t matter what you do, you’re still going to have a certain level of pain you have to deal with. But, if you find yourself in that situation, I really think it’s prudent that you do as much as you can do within reason for what makes sense to you to alleviate your pain as much as you can. Because yes, a lot of this is a societal problem, but there are definitely steps that you can take to make you feel better. I’m going to talk about [00:13:05 crosstalk]

Emily: I know it’s on you in some ways, and it’s figuring out how much is on you and how much your employer should be making it easier on your body. I’m not saying easier on you. I know work is work, that’s the point of work. But, what can we do to actively take steps to take care of ourselves and relieve some of the pain issues that we have?

Kyle: Well, I’m not an employer in a traditional sense, I suppose, but a company will make so that…

Emily: [00:13:47 inaudible]

Kyle: We pay our transcribers.

Emily: Yes, I though that’s what you were talking about.

Kyle: Seriously…

Emily: Kyle actually sells a lot of things out of black market.

Kyle: Including my organs. Not really. But like, oh, a company’s job is only to make money. Well, yes, but if you have more productive employees, the odds of them making you more money is higher. If their productivity is directly correlated with how well they’re able to do their job and how efficiently they’re able to do their job, and it only costs a small amount to alleviate that, then do it. I’m not saying that personal responsibility isn’t important. I’m all about personal responsibility, but there are definitely things that companies can do, like mine, like I said, has a telecommute policy. It doesn’t cost them anything as long as I do my job. And by the way, I tend to work harder on days when I’m not sitting in front of my office computer, because I know that I don’t have to deal with getting there. So I tend to work later, even though it’s for the same pay as sort of trade-off.

Emily: Also, I think what you’re saying about personal responsibility is important because I know for sure that I’m not good about that. I could take more breaks, I could set things up better for myself. I’m sure that would alleviate some if not all of my pain. Definitely not all of my pain because it’s not all work-related. But you mentioned your fancy socks.

Kyle: Oh yes, I got fancy socks.

Emily: Tell me about your socks, Kyle.

Kyle: I walk a mile every day. No, I don’t, it’s a mile each way, so its two miles. That’s one plus one, from my subway stop to my house. I could take a bus but the bus has become a horrible accident. It used to be great, I kind of wish it still was, but it isn’t. So I have to walk now, and I was just getting blisters on my feet no matter what shoes I wore, even if I wore shoes that I knew to be CP friendly, it just was happening. I was to the point where I literally couldn’t go to work. Even though I can work remote pretty much all the time, if you do it for a whole week, it kind of makes you look bad. So, I would go to work anyway and then I would realize that the one day of recovery that I spent, the day that I came home from work, would be immediately nullified by the next morning because I would have to go to the bus stop.

It was just a cycle of pain. I was losing my mind, I was not in a good place. So I found these really fancy socks on Amazon that swore that it could alleviate this exact problem because apparently it’s not uncommon. They were expensive, they were $10 a pair, so I bought three pairs, and I was like, you know what, it’s a $30 experiment, that’s cheap in the long run, and it’s worth doing. And wouldn’t you know it? They fixed it, it was just the best. I realized that $10 for a pair of socks is kind of absurd. It is, because I only bought three pairs and I definitely work more than three days a week. So I’m not wearing them all the time. But I got to tell you when I have some extra money lying around, that’s exactly what I’m going to do, because it fixed the problem that was prohibiting my ability to do my job. There’s nothing I could have done better, aside from surgery, but nothing as…

Emily: [00:17:19 inaudible]

Kyle: … practical… No, I’m serious. But nothing as practice and as cheap per day than a pair of expensive socks. And that’s where I would say personal responsibility comes in, because like Emily, I can trick out my desk to be as ergonomic as possible. But if I was really going all out with that, that would probably cost several thousand dollars to get a keyboard and mouse and desk and chair and every little thing.

Emily: Well that’s the thing, I don’t really want to do that. I can.

Kyle: Yes, but why would you? Unless you knew it would absolutely, definitely without a shadow of a doubt improve your life.
Emily: Well, that’s the problem.

Kyle: And you don’t until you try it.

Emily: I ordered a special mouse that was supposed to be ergonomic and you hold it almost like a joystick. Instead of in your hand, it’s straight or down.

Kyle: A vertical mouse.

Emily: Yes, a vertical mouse. Thank you, that’s what I was thinking of. So I ordered a vertical mouse, because I was having so much trouble with my wrists. And also, my scrolling finger was actually starting to hurt from the amount of scrolling that I had to do, even with switching off to using my keyboard arrow keys. So I thought maybe a vertical mouse would help me and it would also save my wrist. So I bought myself a wrist rest. That’s hard to say, wrist rest. Wrist rest, wrist rest, wrist rest. Wrist watch. What’s that thing?

Kyle: Irish wrist watch.

EMILY: Irish wrist watch. Yap.

Kyle: You know that no one’s going to know what I’m talking about, right? So we just sound like…

Emily: What is it when you say, Irish…

Kyle: Don’t listen to anything Emily is saying right now. You at home, try to say, Irish wrist watch, ten times, fast, back to back, you won’t be able to do it. Spoiler alert.

Emily: Challenge accepted. Irish wrist watch.

Kyle: She can’t even do one.

Emily: So, wrist rest and my vertical mouse and I bought a wrist pad. The vertical mouse maybe lasted me a week before I got fed up with it because I didn’t like how it felt even though it was supposed to be the most ergonomic mouse ever. I didn’t like how it made my thumb feel, my hand started hurting in different ways. The wrist pad ended up becoming the thing that I now use to prop up my keyboard so that it’s a better angle for me to type instead of the pad that I actually rest my wrist on. The wrist rest for my mouse, my God, this is a mouthful, is something I only use occasionally because I don’t find it comfortable to keep my hand there the whole time. So here I am thinking these are relatively cheap ways that I can help myself, but I feel like all of these, “This is the ergonomic solution you’ve been waiting for”, they don’t work. I guess my point being that I wish I could find a $10 pair of socks that would fix my problem. But a lot of times it comes down to trial and error.

Kyle: Also, ergonomic stuff tends to feel worse before it feels better because your muscles are programmed to do it wrong. Because that’s how you’ve been doing it.

Emily: That’s true.

Kyle: So when you finally hold something the right way… It’s like why slouching feels so good. Even though it’s [00:20:55 Inaudible] I’m doing it right now, still like it. A lot of the things come down to trial and error, and a lot of the things aren’t cheap. So it’s like, how much are you willing to spend to see if something helps you? Some people can’t even do that. But, this article talks about unemployment and the realization that this woman had while unemployed, and I didn’t work for a lot of last year and it was the only good thing about not having a job.

No one likes not working, unless you do, but most people don’t. There’s a lot of stigma about being on some kind of social assistance, and it’s just not a good time for most people, it certainly wasn’t for me. But this article talks about all of that, and then the relief in knowing that her pain or at least some of it was caused by her job. I remember having that realization myself. I honestly like to work, so I really don’t mind the small extra amount of pain that being employed puts me in, especially because both me and my employer try to alleviate it as much as possible, and I realized that I probably wouldn’t be saying that if neither of those things were true. But obviously working has its benefits so it’s good to do that. But I can’t deny that the only good thing about not working was not having to deal with that. And it was a big deal. It was truly a big deal. I had the same sort of epiphany that she did. It was just kind of cool to see that someone else went through that, so to speak.

Emily: But then after you have that epiphany, what can be done about it, is I think where I’m still at with this. We recognize that this is an issue and it’s largely bred by our culture that says that we literally have to bend over backwards to work, but if you hurt, it’s your problem. Then on the other hand, sometimes I feel bad about it because like a construction worker or a mover is obviously going to experience physical pain because what they’re doing is so involved whereas I’m sitting at a desk and I’m still whining about everything hurting.

Kyle: It’s all relative and plus do you hear my voice describe your… Jesus! Plus, they chose that profession. Not that we could, you and I both cannot do construction, but I’m just saying it’s different. I think it’s a little bit different, although still equally valid when it’s a profession that you know is going to hurt and you chose, rather than a profession that if we weren’t born this way, wouldn’t hurt.

Emily: I think some people do end up taking whatever work they can get, like a waitress [00:24:03 inaudible] all the time.

Kyle: Yes. You know what’s another thing that I just realized while talking to you, is that most jobs that are… I hate this and I’m sorry. But most minimum wage jobs are jobs that I can’t do…

Emily: Oh yes.

Kyle: … quite actually, I cannot be a waiter and I can do retail, but I won’t have a good time.

Emily: I’m been paid minimum wage though, for doing stuff that we do.

Kyle: I haven’t yet. Even in college, my job was almost minimum wage. It was a little bit above it because I don’t know why. They really should have paid us minimum wage. I’m glad they didn’t, but I had to call people and solicit money for my school. Yes, I was that guy that you all hate. Don’t worry, I hated me too. I was very fortunate where that was a job where I could sit down, I remember. It’s sort of weird because I can’t do the jobs that everyone’s supposed to be able to. That’s why it’s a minimum wage job, right? Because anyone can do them.

Anybody can do it. Oh, no, I can’t. It’s a privilege to be paid more than a minimum wage, it’s great. But what happens if I lose my job? I have to make money somehow. While I’m looking for a better job, I’m probably going to take something that’s minimum wage, and then what, I’ll be on my feet all day, and I’ll come home exhausted and won’t have the time or the energy to do that. So, that’s a cycle that right now I’m not a part of, and hopefully, I’ll never be a part of it if everything goes well. But it’s a reality that you really have to think about.

Emily: I think that’s true of everybody. These jobs take such a toll on you physically. And you’re right, there are some things that you just can’t do. I don’t think that I would make a good waitress.

Kyle: I don’t know, you could balance food in your lap though. I think you would honestly make a better waitress than I would make a waiter.

Emily: See, it would have to be one of those things where I take the orders, and then somebody else brings out the food. I can [00:26:18 inaudible].

Kyle: They do that in some places, right? Oh yes, she’s the best [00:26:22 inaudible]

Emily: Although, the other thing too, is that a lot of restaurants are just really difficult for me to get around and in my chair because everything is so tightly packed. So I’d have to work at the world’s widest restaurant ever. But that’s all just silliness. The point is that there are a lot of jobs that are very, very impractical for me. And so I think that I gravitated toward a job where it would be computer-based, but now I’m paying for that in other ways.

Kyle: Oh, definitely. I don’t know about you, but I can tell you that that tiny fear that I am not able to do a lot of jobs that everyone is supposed to be able to do sort of motivates me to do the job I do do better. I’m going to be a really good employee because I don’t want to lose this at all.

Emily: I hadn’t thought about that, really. But I think it just points to that we have all of these odds stacked against us when it comes to employment, both because of things that we literally just cannot physically do, and then because of discrimination. I know that we’re talking about pain here.

Kyle: Oh no, forget discrimination. What’s the statistics, there’s 75% of disabled people are in the workforce so 25% of us can’t work and the other 75% can, and out of that 75%, 25% are employed, something like that. It’s something ridiculously low like that.

Emily: You should find the actual stats because it’s terrible.

Kyle: I think we’ve talked about it before, it’s definitely in another episode’s show notes. But my point is, Emily and I, as disabled people who have an income…

Emily: As professional disabled people.

Kyle: You’re a professional disabled person, I just have a regular old office job. No, but really, we are unicorns. We are hard to come by and it’s so unfortunate. And that keeps me going too. Although I actually happen to have a co-worker who is a lawyer who uses a wheelchair, so two unicorns in the same office, at the same company, at the same job. It’s sort of funny, but it shouldn’t be that way. It should be relative to the regular unemployment rate, and it’s not even close.

Emily: It’s sort of, I don’t know if catch 22 is the word. If there were more of us who were employed, I think that employers would be more inclined to do things to take off these physical burdens in any way that they can. However, they consider that to be a burden on them, the employers, and thus don’t employ us, and thus there are less of us to advocate. And thereby there are less of us to accommodate, which means that employers just don’t care. It’s like this cycle of employers… And this is a huge generalization because there are plenty of employers who are great at accommodating, my own included.

Kyle: Yes, look at us, right?

Emily: We’re pretty good examples of that. But I just think that this problem perpetuates itself, we burn ourselves out, we make ourselves miserable, we hurt, we get blisters, we need to buy stock in Icy Hot or at least I do, for my back.

Kyle: That’s a good point, I do that too. I bought Yaktrax so I could walk in the snow. And this is the thing, I do all that I can do to make my ability to walk easier on myself, I think that you should do whatever you can do up to your ability to do it for yourself. It’s a very good investment. You should always invest in yourself as much as you can. You just should, no matter what it is.

Emily: There’s this book that I read when I was younger, I think it was an American Girl branded book, The Care and Keeping of You, maybe I’m making that up.

Kyle: I was thinking of Dr. Seuss. “You’re the only you you’ve got.”

Emily: “No one is you-er than you.”

Kyle: All the places you’ll go, it’s like the most motivating book in the world.

Emily: I love that book. I’m probably going to go take it off my bookshelf after we podcast. But that’s the thing, the Yaktrax are things that make it for the bottom of your shoes.

Kyle: They are snow tires for your shoes.

Emily: Honestly, I feel like I need that for my wheelchair sometimes.

Kyle: Yes, why don’t you have snow tires for your tires?

Emily: I don’t know. Sometimes it’s really, really hard for me to leave the house so telecommuting is definitely [00:31:14 crosstalk].

Kyle: Because you don’t have snow tires.

Emily: Yes, I need an all-terrain…

Kyle: The world’s inaccessible anyway and when you add snow to it, it’s like what’s the point

Emily: I need an all-terrain wheelchair, honestly, would be great. Some of the things that would really make my life easier cost thousands upon thousands of dollars.

Kyle: Oh, well, that’s just the price you pay, literally. It’s infeasible. A good friend of mine who probably will listen to this, maybe, invested in what is technically a mobility aid that she wears for herself for her CP, and it costs her 10 grand. And she had to pay that 10 grand straight out of pocket, and she’s not exactly a wealthy person, but she did a GoFundMe and she got it.

Emily: What was the mobility aid?

Kyle: It was an [00:32:08 inaudible]. It was Katie Fetters. Katie, if you’re listening to this, I love you and we should hang out next time you’re in New York. But it looks like a cast that goes around your leg. It’s pretty cool looking actually, especially if you were black. Kind of looks cyber punky. But, she came here and we were hanging out and I said to her, “$10,000, that’s a lot of money.” And she said something to the effect of like, “But, yeah, but I’m wearing it every day that improves my life in a way that nothing else could.” And I was like, you know what, $10,000 is always a big dollar amount in terms of the number, but if it really improves your life, and it really is something you use every single day, the price per day relative to the improvement in yourself you get for it, makes it relatively cheap if you can afford it. That’s the thing, with anything you’re saying, like equipment for your wheelchair, do you know that that’ll work? Or do you just think that it’ll work?

Emily: It’s one of those things where I have my theories of what would help me, but some of it’s just not readily available. For example, my wheelchair, I have a tilt feature and a reclining type feature where I can put my feet up and take some pressure off my back and my butt and it feels nice and good. But that’s an extra thing and it’s not something that’s just readily available to solve my problem. I have it. What’s my point here? Well, right now my power wheelchair has a hors d’oeuvres pick stuck in the wheel and I’m waiting for people to come give me a new wheel.

Kyle: You don’t need a new wheel. What you need is a pair of pliers and a patch.

Emily: Yes, but a new wheel would be good because I was in DC… This had nothing to do with anything… But I was in DC for an event and I was in the hotel where the event was and there was a cocktail hour and people just thought it was a good idea to throw their giant hors d’oeuvre pics on the floor. So I ran over one and it stuck in my wheel. That has nothing to do with anything.

Kyle: Well, on that note Emily, do you have any final takeaways?

Emily: My final takeaway is a selfish one. I need to be better about taking care of myself and balancing that with my work. And I think maybe that’s not selfish because we should all heed that.

Kyle: There should be a word, I think, for positive selfishness. Because, of course, it’s selfish to take care of yourself, but the word selfish has negative connotations. But that’s the kind of selfishness that’s like, look, I know that if I don’t take care of myself, I can’t do my job as well as I should be able to. It’s irresponsible for me as a dude, it’s also irresponsible for me as an employee of a company to not be my best self, especially when I know how to be my best self. So, when it comes to taking care of yourself, you should just do it to the best of your ability.

Emily: I think this just got a little Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday up in here.

Kyle: What?

Emily: You’re the Oprah.

Kyle: Oh, I’m Oprah?

Emily: You’re Oprah. [00:35:51 inaudible]

Kyle: Awesome. You get a car and you get a car and you get a car and I don’t want to do that more than three times.

Emily: Everybody gets a car!

Kyle: Okay, well she did that. My final takeaway is, this article really spoke to me as somebody who has been unemployed and had the same epiphany that she did. It just made me realize that there are still things that… I don’t want to speak for you, but I’m going to say ‘we’ anyways, that we go through that we don’t even realize we go through them until that part of our life is no longer a thing. There are just certain things that we don’t even realize is happening until we don’t have to do that anymore.

Emily: Absolutely, I agree. You can speak for me on that.

Kyle: It was amazing to realize it. It was also unfortunate because like I’ve said, I like having a job. Well, for one thing, it was nice to find something positive about being unemployed. That’s a very important thing, but that’s a whole different episode.

Emily: Mental health.

Kyle: Is taking care of yourself. Really, though.

Emily: Yes. We could do a whole other episode on that. And for what it’s worth, we’re sitting here talking about physical health, but my goodness, how many of us neglect our mental health for the sake of employment? Raise your hands. I’m raising both of them.

Kyle: We’re going to end this one, but we should probably also do one on mental health and employment. I think that would be a nice back to back deal.

Emily: Two for one, package deal.

Kyle: Yes, why not? We can do it.

Emily: No, seriously, we should because I think this even ties into it and how if you’re not in the best of physical health, and I mean physical health in the sense of chronic pain in this particular instance, it can definitely take a toll on your mental health as it pertains to trying to sustain employment.

Kyle: They definitely feed into each other, and on that note that has been a nice episode of The Accessible Stalls. A nice episode. It was very pleasant.

Emily: A delight.

Kyle: I would say Happy Easter, but by the time you hear this, it will definitely…

Emily: Happy Passover.

Kyle: … not be Easter anymore. So, good spring is what I will say, which is good tidings, for you and… That’s Christmas.

Emily: Be well.

Kyle: Goodnight everybody.

Emily: Bye.

Kyle: Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time. Bye.