Navigating One-off Interactions When Illness and Ability Burn your Bridges

On today's agenda: grovel over literal horse shit.

There's always a risk when trying to navigate the barter of labor with a stranger. Add a disability to the mix, and what might have been an otherwise straightforward situation - say, like picking up a truckload of manure - becomes a minefield. A stranger, by definition, knows little to nothing about you; decisions about disclosure abound from the very start.

Do you want them to know you have limiting factors when you're trying to get something done? Do they need to know at all? What if something flares up and you suddenly can't make it - will having that information make them more understanding, or will you in your role as unwitting ambassador on behalf of anyone with chronic health issues be to give the impression that illness makes people flakes?

This week, I tried to keep quiet. What did it matter to someone with an excess of excrement whether the person taking it off their hands was employable? All I had to do was rent a pickup, show up, shovel (or, in one lucky instance, wait while they loaded the bed with their tractor), and leave. Any breakdowns from overstimulation, dehydration, or overheating could wait until I hit the highway. If I missed a few shovels full or knocked my knees against the truck, best they'd think I was clumsy and worst possibly inept. Medical information was unnecessary if all I had to do was show up.

And then I couldn't.

At first it was a matter of a more understandable finite sort of sick: narrowly grazing heat stroke but running full-force into heat sickness, courtesy of a cascade of changes in routine that left me oblivious to things like length of time in the sun. I put off a pickup until the next morning, then again the next morning until the afternoon. When afternoon came, it felt like a bad idea but I was ready to push through and get it done - until I couldn't find my wallet.

The almost silent breakdown that ensued was enough to tell me that, whether it was from heat or brain fatigue, I should not be pushing through this. Dealing with the customer service counter alone to rent a pickup, with all the competing sounds of a hardware store on a weekend, would have been a tenuous process at best. With brain injury symptoms that sometimes looked similar to being under the influence, who knew whether they'd let me drive a truck off the lot?

So I called it off, apologized profusely, and presumably burned a bridge. When asked about rescheduling the homesteader at the other end of the line gave me a terse "I'm not doing anything tomorrow," which I almost took as an invitation before he clarified - he wasn't doing anything at all. Including loading manure into a rented truck. The soonest he was willing to try again was next weekend, offered with the tone of a "don't call us, we'll call you."

Last weekend, waiting another week wasn't an option for the roughly 150-plus plants outgrowing their second-potting-up cells on the porch.

So I tried again. This time the location wasn't ideal - the pickup point was the farthest point in a triangle of any given truck rental option and the land it needed to go to, meaning the whole process would almost definitely take longer than the amount of time my budget was ready to accommodate. But an extra hour in a rental truck would still be cheaper than getting this amount of manure in bags I could stack in the Civic.

We discussed some possible schedules, and then...I lost track. Of the emails, of which parts of the process I'd already taken care of, of what day I was on. Part of it was sleep deprivation from sheer stress. Part of it was already having pushed myself so far beyond my own limits trying to get things ready that both my brain and my body were saying, "stop," and when I didn't listen, putting me on forcible shutdown. But everyone else was on schedule, and I was so far behind; now was not the time to sit down and catch my breath just to wake up seven hours later in the same spot.

Which is how I ended up heat-sick in the first place.

But this could be different. I'd learned from my mistakes: I was giving myself days of buffer instead of hours. I was trying to take it easy in-between to make sure I'd have energy for this one priority errand. Rather than filling rows from the truck, I was even prepared to dump the manure in a heap on the land just to get it there and sort it out later without the time constraints of a by-the-quarter-hour rental.

The day of, I confirmed my appointment and the directions. I parked at the big box hardware store next to the rental so later I could find my car. And I noticed several dollies sitting in the parking space on the other side of said rental, piled high with bags of stone and stacks of wood.

Maybe it was for the cargo van for rent directly across from the pickup. This was my mantra as I strode to the customer service desk with forced and panicked cheer.

No. It was not.

I emailed with explanation and apologies. I let them know that I'd be looking elsewhere so as not to inconvenience them further than dropping in and out of contact, scheduling and rescheduling, already had. It was the polite and anxious equivalent to "sorry to bother you while I obviously do not have my shit together, please tell me it's alright but also I completely understand that it probably isn't."

And now we're back at point A: groveling via voicemail for literal horse shit with the weekender I put out the first time.

Before recounting this I'd been beating myself up for days. When I'd mentioned calling the first source again my spouse asked, "I thought he was mad at you, too?"

Maybe he was, and maybe that's too personal a feeling to even ascribe to it. At the very least he had to be annoyed; it wouldn't surprise me if he has no interest in ever working with me again. It wouldn't be the first time it's happened.

So there's the rub: would telling these folks about my disability make them any more likely to be flexible? Would it make them less likely to want to coordinate with me from the start if they've decided that someone with disabilities shouldn't BE farming? Would they be confused or think I was lying if I didn't show up in a wheelchair or with significant speech impediments? They're all outcomes that have happened in the past, all a risk I'd be taking by sharing. It's hard to know whether the risk outweighs the benefit, which part of my brain still tells me I wouldn't need to worry about if I could just get it together.

Obviously that's not how brain injury works.

So, here we are trying to appeal to another stranger's sense of forgiveness and patience...and just how badly they want to be rid of piles and piles of manure. I still don't have a good answer on where, or whether, disclosure really fits into the exchange. But if this doesn't work out there's always another opportunity to make that decision with the next one, while a veritable farm waits on our porch.