Annie in wonderland

When the Digital World Goes Quiet Modern society has quietly built a world where connection is assumed. The internet is assumed. Mobile phones are assumed. Online services are assumed. Digital communication is assumed. For most people, losing internet access or mobile service is frustrating. It might mean a missed message, a delayed payment, a few hours without entertainment, or the inconvenience of waiting for a service to return. But for many people living with disability, the failure of technology can mean something much bigger. It can mean the loss of independence. The loss of communication. The loss of routine. The loss of access to work. The loss of safety systems that most people never realise exist. The recent Telstra outage highlighted a reality that modern society is still learning to address: when communication networks fail, the impact is not evenly distributed. A person who can simply wait for a service to return experiences an inconvenience. A person whose daily independe...

This is a deeply personal post, and I want to start by saying thank you. To my friends, my family, my support team—you’ve shown up for me with grace and dignity, and I don’t take that lightly. Whether it’s through practical help, quiet encouragement, or just being a consistent presence, your support has helped me face something hard: the reality that I’m not functioning as highly as I once believed. Now, don’t get me wrong—I’m still high-functioning in a lot of ways. But one of my conditions, Sjögren’s syndrome , is progressing. And that’s hard. It’s a quiet, relentless reminder that I do live with disability and chronic illness, and that pretending otherwise doesn’t help me anymore. I’m working with all the right professionals—my doctors , pharmacist , and now a dietitian , too. (Pharmacists, by the way, are wildly underrated. They’ve helped me make sense of side effects and medication changes in ways that actually make sense in day-to-day life.) But even with all this support, ther...

This was unbelievable to me that I had to have these conversations around what is a disability and a chronic illness, what made this situation so unbelievable was the fact that the person involved was a younger support worker and it shows me that we need to have a serious push for education around disability and what disability support is and that it does involve a large amount of care.   I am finding it harder and harder to deal with the lack of general education of the support workers and their unwillingness to see that because I am high functioning doesn’t mean that I am not disabled, and we see that people need to be aware of this and we see that many disability advocates are working both online and offline that are willing to come and work with people to learn about “hidden disabilities” so these being disabilities that aren’t obvious to people at first glance and we see that people are becoming more aware of this and this is great but there isn’t a great deal of informal su...