This is me, 27 years ago. I was on the family computer in the dining room, logged in to GeoCities, making my website. What did an 11-year-old in 1999 need a website for? Nothing. It has links to random web rings, dancing baby gifs and was perpetually “under construction” with the flame gif to prove it. It was crude and messy, a child’s drawing brought alive by HTML code.
I killed that computer downloading a Backstreet Boys album (virus) from KaZaA.
There was always a new computer to be had, though. My mother saw the direction technology was going in and always made sure that we had what we needed to be successful, within her means. I grew up in a fairly small town and didn’t have a van for my wheelchair. My life experiences were limited to how far I could walk or how far my wheelchair would get me on a single charge. I knew exactly what street sign I could get to and still have just enough charge to get up the ramp and die in the house. The world put up boundaries, invisible walls I could touch the very edge of, but if I want to get back home before I hit 0% charge I had to turn around.
My chair could no longer move, but I still had to sit somewhere. I could sit in the living room and watch TV with my dad who was watching golf or the evening news, or I could go get on the computer and figure something out. It started how it always does: games. Silly flash games. Silly flash videos. The internet is boundless when you aren’t.
Then I was curious… How do these get made? What is a website? So, I searched. I learned. I asked questions in IRC chats I had no business being in. I taught myself HTML from a brand-new site called W3 schools. If you have the time, there are infinite possibilities of things you can learn from people online. But what if time isn’t your limit, and your body is?
Computers remained an important part of my life. It was my connection to knowledge, to art, to people. A glowing escape from the invisible walls. I spent my days after school learning how to make tiled hot pink backgrounds with black stars for people’s MySpace profiles with a copy of Adobe Photoshop that I also stole (thanks again, KaZaA.)
Something I’ve noticed in myself, and in many disabled people, is that we get very good at communicating exactly what we need. You have to. If you need something from the third shelf up and have to ask a stranger for help, the best way to do that is to ask for exactly what you need. Not just a jar of spaghetti sauce, but the spaghetti sauce on the third row, with the blue label and green lid. Thanks so much. The kindness matters. There is no room for having a bad day when you can’t reach something.
All of this built on top of itself, and I became good at explaining technology. I managed to leverage that into my career, and it is something I truly enjoy. But that little 11-year-old is still in my brain, still chasing the joy of making something. Never quiet. Always there.
Last year, I found myself enamored with 3D character modeling and sculpting in general. Clay had found its way across the real world to my digital world, and I wanted all in. I dove head first, practicing hours a day. I started getting decent, getting fast as the basics so I could start focusing on the detail work. After an hour of tablet work, my arms and shoulders ache. My brain wanted to go go go, but my body couldn’t. I was absorbing information and learning faster than I could physically output. I found something I loved, but the better I got, the more precision required and I couldn’t keep up.
So I stopped. I only get this body, and I have to give it a fighting chance. My hands were cramping 15 minutes into a session. When you’re disabled, you get used to accepting loss. It comes as a slow, gentle wave. School field trips to places you can’t get into. Birthday parties you don’t attend. Family events in homes you can’t access. If you don’t learn to live with that gentle wave, it takes you. I knew I had to step away before I let my passion spill into a basket I couldn’t carry.
Me, Claude, and the Choices We Make
I have a theory I like to call the disabled tax. It boils down to, I can do most of the things that other people can do, but I must make considerations and exceptions to do them. I must pay a tax, be that a mental tax of having to call before and ask if there are bathrooms I can use, or if I can get in the front door. Sometimes it’s a financial tax. You can go, but the hotel where your friends are staying doesn’t have a wheelchair accessible shower. They only have bathtub showers. So, you stay at a more expensive hotel on the other side of town.
Tools to be successful are just another tax. A $5 subscription here, a $10 tool there, a $1200 dictation tool. I’ve been paying taxes for so long, it’s just a drop in a bucket now. Unless they are also mass-produced for senior citizens because they can get Medicaid coverage, accessibility tools are incredibly expensive and incredibly niche.
I was an early adopter of ChatGPT. I instantly saw its use for the gruntwork. I meticulously trained prompts so I could type bullet points and get emails that sounded like I wrote them, but also weren’t generic. You reached out to me, you deserve my attention. I just organized my thoughts in a way that my tools can extrapolate upon and give me (almost) polished results. I was getting the same quality output as my peers, and tax-free.
My grammar issues in emails vanished. My typos vanished. I got more responses to messages because my messages were clear, concise, and gave exactly what information I needed back in actionable steps. I got more work done, and I got it done faster. This was also a pivotal shift in AI tooling, where you either understood you were the subject matter expert and AI was a path to help you express it, or you put blind faith in pattern recognition and lost. AI was just another tool. A hammer doesn’t get to decide what nail it hammers. You do.
Those tools have changed and grown dramatically in the past 4 years, in positive and negative ways. I’ve had it make up completely incorrect Microsoft documentation that would have caused actual harm had I not read it and just handed it off to somebody. I’ve used it to build out complex, multi-year budget spreadsheets and not a penny was out of place.
I needed a website for a friend. A few buttons, a picture, 500 lines of code and 3 files. Maybe a half day of work or so. 90 seconds. It took ChatGPT 90 seconds to build the simple shell. I tossed in pictures and copy, and she was up and running in less than an hour from asking me. In that moment everything changed for me. My tool can code. My tool can build tools. Tools are just code. There are no taxes on things I make for myself.
It started simply. I figured out Claude Code. I built a wifi toggle because some software I stole for 3D modeling wouldn’t start if you were online (RIP KaZaA.) Then I built a tool in python to help me import textures for 3D modeling into painting software. I turned a manual job of assigning 150 image files into a five second script, and without 40 minutes of repetitive micromovements.
Then I got daring. How hard can an app be? Turns out, pretty hard, even with AI. Do you know what a durable record is? I didn’t. You probably don’t either, and that’s okay. When you’re building an application and you want the things to save after you close it though, you kind of need to know that. I found out the hard way. I learned the hard way. This was just another, small loss in the wave. I learned from it.
I’m nearing the end stages of a month long, 6pm to midnight 6 days a week project. Two weeks of this project were spent meticulously planning every page, every button press, and the way the slider should have incremental haptics that get more forceful and longer as the image gets larger. I may not know how to hang drywall, but I know what a house is. I know how you should flow through it, and what furniture should go in what rooms, and why you would not put a sofa in front of the doorway. I trusted Claude to hang the drywall.
I also ran into real struggles. I knew how to explain how to build a bathroom, but I didn’t know enough to tell AI it shouldn’t connect the bathtub drain to a garden hose and have it empty in the basement. That was just the path of least resistance, so that’s what it did. Another learning moment. I had to rip out the drywall and learn how plumbing works. I didn’t have to learn how to install plumbing, I just had to learn how it worked so I could explain how I wanted the pipes to go together.
I have a fully built CRM, personal to my friends’ workflow, and it’s never something I’m going to release, it’s just for us. I solved a problem a real person had running her business. I’m connected via my server to five different services to pull information and create a leads pipeline at the touch of a button. I’m a registered Meta developer. You can just click a few buttons on a website and you’re allowed to call yourself that.
16,344 lines of code in a week. Patched. Shipped. Running on a real iPad I can hold in my hands. I took a concept and turned it into a reality. I type 40 words a minute, and I can’t look at the screen while I type. I dictated almost all the directions for my application to Claude using its built-in dictation tools, which functions better than Dragon Naturally Speaking, the previously mentioned twelve-hundred-dollar dictation tool.
I used AI to lift a burden work puts on my hands, my wrists, my shoulders. I tell myself it is worth it because I can do more. I can finally go as fast as my brain can. But that is not the same thing as escaping the cost. It just means I moved it somewhere else.
Large data centers can use up to 5 million gallons of water a day, about what a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people uses. They are often placed in low-income communities, where the noise, pollution, and strain are easier for everyone else to ignore. When you have spent your whole life paying extra just to keep up, it gets very easy to call a cost acceptable when it is no longer yours.
The walls I tear down build a new wall for someone else. Do I keep going or do I stop and wait until the invisible wall is built in front of me again? I hope I have enough charge to get home this time.
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