Reflections on Disability Support Work
Photo by Josh Appel on Unsplash
January 27 2020
The moment I started doing disability support work, I knew I had to write about it. I wasn’t entirely sure how I was going to write about, but a writer must do what a writer (or at least an aspiring one) must do.
It is not easy to write about the subject of disability when you are not disabled: physically, mentally, or — as it seems necessary to flag early as a white cis male — in other more subtle ways by the structures of society. And so I had to work out how to do it. In a constructive and informative way. Respectfully, without any conscious or unconscious condescension.
And, also: how to do it so it wasn’t just one nauseating humblebrag to let everyone know that I was a disability support worker. The work itself brings constant unwarranted ego boosts: “OMG you do disability support work? Good on you. That’s so great!” Well, yes it is, but not for the reasons you are probably thinking.
To knock that one on the head first: I can’t claim any moral credit for this work, given I never really chose to be a disability support worker. I really had no other choice.
I had recently moved to a new town, and wanted to start fresh in my career. Away from my previous life as an academic, and get entirely out of my comfort zone. It meant biting the bullet and finding work that I was, in the academic sense, vastly over-qualified for; work that, in a practical life sense, I was vastly under-qualified for.
There were two jobs that came across my path that appeared to have a defined career path but that didn’t need any preexisting qualifications: working with teenagers as a boarding school supervisor, and working with people with disabilities. I took both, because I needed to eat and pay rent and take the obvious opportunities that had been put in front of me.
I was certainly out of my comfort zone: I’m not sure what details it is appropriate to give away to provide adequate context to my discomfort, while letting readers fill in the gaps themselves. Why, after my first ever shift, with an autistic teenager, I got home I couldn’t do anything except lie on my bed for 30 minutes because of how shook I was. Why, when doing a simple training video, I started crying for no obvious reason.
This is a side of the human experience, of life, I had barely been exposed to before. It was a shock to realise just how sheltered I had been.
My most immediate reflection was that there seemed no way I could do this job full time, or even for an extended period of time. To deal with the daily intense questioning of the nature of humanity that this work (or, for parents, siblings, family: their very lives) brings with it.
And so within the first week of this work, I had found my first thing to write about: the deep and profound humility that this work had brought about in me.
As I progressed, and once I got over myself, some of the broader aspects of this work started to dawn on me.
That there are no qualifications needed to be a disability support worker says something profound about our society, although I’m not quite sure what.
In one sense, it seems strange and a little bit lax. I sent no resume, had no job interview, save for an informal meeting with my agency coordinator to talk about life. Needless to say, all the necessary background checks were still required, as are ongoing training courses. You might say, with the supply to demand ratio that exists for support workers, they can’t really be choosy, and that is probably correct.
But then, when you experience the nature of the work itself, it makes more sense. Your job is essentially to just be a virtuous human being, to an extent greater than any job I can think of: patience, compassion, respect — and, again, humility. Until we have degrees on being virtuous (one day, hopefully), then really what is the point of a qualification for this work.
On my second shift, I was getting paid to sit with someone in a viewing platform over a lake and talk about things I hadn’t really talked about with anyone else — the complex morality of drug use, the profoundly misleading nature of our perceived reality, the incredible architecture of the bird nest above our heads. If I’d known I could, I’d have done this for free.
The more that I do this work, and the more I reflect on it, the more I see it as something gloriously subversive to the normative way our current economic and social systems operate.
I am an introvert by nature, and — if I had it my way — would spend most of my time at my computer going down rabbit holes. But this work was forcing me out — interacting, making friends, just being visible in the community — while, yes, getting paid to do it. Getting paid to swim in the pool for two hours, to go to the movies, to drink nonalcoholic beer at an open mic night — to simply undertake the pleasures of life we inherently take for granted, but to do it with someone else who might otherwise be denied those opportunities.
I felt bad about it at first, like I should be doing more to earn my hourly rate (not that — full disclosure — it is overly high). But I know now that this is because of how we are conditioned to feel. Now, I am more inclined to feel like I am giving a big Fuck You to the entire economic system that has progressively squeezed the life, the soul, out of Western humanity.
Because it does feel like somewhat of a miracle that this type of large scale Government funded social program has snuck through the cracks of Neoliberalism (Australia may be somewhat of an exception here, where a progressive left Government was able to squeeze through legalisation for a National Disability Insurance Scheme in 2013). It gives hope that these cracks are getting wider by the day, and that they are already being filled by more humane social structures.
In this way, jobs such as disability support work force a re-think of what we understand to be work, of what we understand to be a meaningful way to spend our time. They are the opposite of ‘Bullshit Jobs’. With all the whinging we hear about how the Government spends our money, everyone of us should be proud that an increasing amount of it is going to something so entirely worthy and fundamentally human.
Then the real purpose of this story crystallised: how to write it so I was doing justice to, and advocating for, the job that disability support workers do. Come join the revolution — just check your ego in at the door.