Disability is way more complicated than it may seem. I’m generally capable, but I go through major ups and downs of sleep depravation that make me professionally incompetent. I have extensive spinal damage. I must maintain a physical therapy routine to limit my ups and downs, but every month or two, some little anomaly will cause me injury and take a week or two before I can recover to 4-6 hours of sleep. Like I can’t turn my head very far left. If I try, there is a high probability of injury near the limit of how far I can rotate. Most of my damage is in the thoracic (ribs) region. This is super rare and unlike any other types of back problems that people usually associate with back problems.

I can’t take sleeping aids or my problems are much worse. I flop around like crazy every 5-10 minutes even when I’m sleeping. It is hard to communicate pain tolerances and quantify what is a lot of pain. As an indicator, I’ve raced bicycles, ridden over 200 miles in a day for fun, crashed multiple times breaking bones, including ribs, and still rode home tens of miles when I could have made a phone call for a ride easily. Even when such an injury could cause me harm in theory because of my chronic issues, the pain is irrelevant to me. I’m the Black Knight of cyclists as far as I’m concerned. It took two SUV’s at the same time to substantially injure me and neither of them recovered from the fight and got crushed, kidding… but…

I’ve run my own business with employees twice and managed for someone else. I would not hire me.