Accommodations

Recently I had two very different experiences around accommodations and imposter syndrome.

 In the first one, I was in a zoom training. I tend to have a really hard time keeping focused in zoom trainings. I have found that having the transcript going helps a lot. When the speaker is going too slow and I get bored and my brain wanders off, I can read back in the transcript and catch myself up. Zoom automatically has this available unless you turn it off, so it doesn't add any work for the people running the training. I went looking to turn the transcript on, and I didn't have access to do so, which means that they had turned this feature off. I asked if they could allow access to it. 

    This led to 10 minutes of waiting while they tried to figure out whether they could turn it on from inside zoom (it's normally a feature linked to the account) or how to deal with this. Well before this was over, I both felt bad for wasting everyone's time and was also angry with them for having ACTIVELY TURNED OFF a basic accessibility feature. Hopefully this led them to fix it in the future, but after all that, I never got my transcript. While I did feel bad about wasting people's time, I had no real doubts that I was in the right, and it was the organizers' failure for not allowing the transcripts. 

In the second experience, it was basically the opposite. I was recently at a conference in Pittsburgh. Flying back, I was waiting for almost two hours at the Pittsburgh airport, as one often is when flying. While walking towards my gate, I saw signs for a sensory room, and decided to check it out. 

What they called a sensory room was a full on suite. There were several rooms in different sizes, each with a variety of different furniture. It was quiet, and the lights could be dimmed or turned off. There were tunnels that you could crawl into that were totally dark inside. There were water filled tubes that you could push a button and cause lights and bubbles. There was also a little mock-up of a plane where families could help kids see what a plane might look like and get used to the seats and seatbelts before getting on a flight. 

I went into one of the private rooms, dimmed the lights, and curled up in a squishy rocking chair thing. I sat in quiet, read my book and relaxed. It was a very pleasant place to be, and certainly unlike any other airport experience I had ever had. No blaring speakers, no glaring screens, no crowds of people. In the last few minutes, a family with a young child came in and I could hear them in one of the outer rooms, but until then, I was the only person in the space.

Despite the fact that I clearly wasn't taking this space from anyone else (it's not like it was crowded) and the fact that it made the normally unpleasant experience of waiting in an airport actually pretty nice, I still felt vaguely like I wasn't supposed to be there. I could handle the airport. I'm not a wound up kid. I'm not autistic. Despite the fact that the high distractions in an airport usually make it pretty hard to really do anything, clearly, since I could have done without it, it wasn't really for me.

Now, I know that's ridiculous. It helped me, I appreciated it, and I wasn't taking it away from anyone. There's absolutely no reason that it wasn't for me. But oddly, the fact that it was just there and available and I didn't have to fight for it or prove anything sparked my imposter syndrome. When I had to fight for the transcript, I felt bad that other people had to wait, but I never doubted that it was a reasonable accommodation. I had no imposter syndrome around asking. When the room was just there for me to use, and all I had to do was dial a button and wait for someone to buzz me in, I had imposter syndrome. The easier it is to get something, the harder it is for me to believe that I should have it. 

Anyway, if you're ever in the Pittsburgh airport and would benefit from a quiet space to hide from the everything, I highly recommend the sensory room! I looked it up, and it looks like SeaTac and Boston Logan also have them, although I don't know if they're this good. I may well check them out in the future!