Megaconference Special #4 of 6: PAs, Social Skills, and Community

by Dora Raymaker

categories: community inclusion, daily living

Published June 28, 2009 @ 11:00AM PT

In the afternoon on the day of Kunc's keynote, after delivering my own presentation along with my co-presenter Elesia (I'll get back to that a little perhaps), I attended a panel session about hiring and maintaining a personal assistant. Both the panel, and the audience, consisted primarily of people with physical disabilities, and, in the audience, a few parents of younger children.

On one side of things, the issues surrounding personal assistants are pretty universal: How do I find someone I can trust? How do I protect myself from abuse? How do I find someone who is able to work well with me? How do we maintain good employer / employee boundaries? How do I fire someone without a mess?

On the other side of things, how these issues are resolved is pretty individual. Relying on one's interview skills to initially determine if someone is trustworthy is only a good idea if one has excellent interview skills. Understanding when one is being taken advantage of requires a certain amount of skill as well--and just because a person doesn't realize they are being abused or taken advantage of does not mean the abuse isn't happening.

I often look to the broader disability community, especially to people who have been successfully living a high quality of life for many years, for ideas and information. There is a lot of wisdom out there to draw from, and one should not discard knowledge just because it does not come from "within the autism community" (whatever that means). I have a professor who says, "a systems scientist is a person who looks at birds flocking and fish schooling and realizes they are both the same." There are many repeat patterns like this between the Autistic community and other disability communities.

And yet--there is also significant divergence in strategies that work for people whose differences fall in a physical rather than mental and/or social realm. We may need different strategies for learning how to hire, who to hire, how to protect ourselves. We may need a panel and audience that is populated more by people who have social or mental differences so that we can learn strategies for hiring and maintaining a personal assistant that work with our specific strengths and around our specific weaknesses. I didn't end up getting as much out of the personal assistant panel as I hoped for this reason.

However, I do have to say that of all the presentations I attended, I found that panel and that audience the most inclusive, welcoming, and accommodating of any in the whole three days. They made sure my questions were voiced and answered, they gave me time to communicate at my own slow pace, and they took the extra time to make sure we were all understanding.

Sometimes the most valuable thing that I get from cross-disability interactions isn't the shared information but the shared sense of, yes for real, belonging to a community. And that is, for any human being, an essential and valuable thing.