theunitofcaring:

I think there are a lot of people who have a mental concept of, and can be accommodating of, disability-related “I cannot do this” but don’t have a concept of, and are terrible at accommodating, disability-related “the cost of doing that is much higher for me than for most people”. 

That’s probably for a lot of reasons. The cost of doing something is mostly invisible to other people, while not being able to do something at all is really visible. Disabled people often themselves don’t have the concept “doing this is much harder for me than for other people” and think “other people work harder than me” or “I suck” or “I hate doing that but don’t know why”. It’s much easier to evaluate and verify ‘impossible’ than ‘really costly and awful’. 

And if something is easy for you, it can be really hard to imagine what it being costly would be like. I bet most people who can drive have an easier time imagining “you can’t drive”, which they can imagine like “you don’t have access to a car”, than “you can drive, but drives of more than ten minutes will usually (but not always) give you a headache and a buzzing sensation that lasts on-and-off for the next few hours, and drives of more than half an hour are so exhausting you had better be able to nap for hours when you reach your destination, and turning the radio on keeps you awake but makes you spatial awareness worse”. 

This is terrible because far more disability things manifest as “the cost of doing that is much higher” than as “doing that is impossible”.