I didn’t grow up being told I’d have a smaller life.
Quite the opposite, actually.
My parents did what good parents do — they pushed normality hard. School. Exams. Uni. The whole deal. I was told I could do anything, so I believed it. I worked for it. I did everything my generation was told to do if they wanted a future.
And I delivered.
Good grades.
University.
A first-class degree in computer science.
A lot of fucking good that did.
Doing Everything Right and Ending Up Nowhere
This is the bit people don’t like hearing.
Living alone with a disability isn’t automatically empowering. Sometimes it’s just the final stop after the world quietly decides it’s done with you.
I don’t have a career.
I don’t have momentum.
I have benefits and time and a flat that never changes.
The degree sits there like evidence from a past life. Proof that I wasn’t lazy. Proof that I didn’t opt out. Proof that I played the game exactly as instructed.
And still ended up here.
When people talk about living alone with a disability, they like neat narratives — resilience, independence, inspiration. What they don’t talk about is what it feels like when you’ve done everything right and the system still shrugs.
The Flat Is Not Freedom
The flat is adapted. Of course it is.
Wide doors. Lowered surfaces. Everything measured and approved and signed off by someone who’s never had to spend twelve straight hours in it with their own thoughts.
It’s not prison.
It’s not freedom either.
It’s containment.
Every day looks roughly the same. Wheelchair. Screens. Silence broken only by noise I choose because silence left alone gets loud in the wrong way.
Living alone with a disability means learning how to stretch time. How to kill hours without calling it wasting them. How to convince yourself you’re choosing this when really, there’s just nowhere else to go.
Independence With Nowhere to Aim It
People assume independence automatically equals progress.
It doesn’t.
You can be completely independent and utterly stuck.
I don’t need help getting through the day. I need a reason to care about it. That’s the part nobody prepares you for — the point where competence stops being enough.
I’m not waiting for rescue.
I’m not secretly hopeful.
I’m tired.
Not physically — existentially.
Living alone with a disability strips life down to function. And when there’s nothing left to build towards, function becomes a loop.
Wake up.
Get through it.
Repeat.
Existing Is Not the Same as Living
This is important, so I’ll say it plainly.
I wasn’t living.
I was existing.
There’s a difference, and disabled people know it instinctively even if we don’t always say it out loud. Existing is survival with the volume turned down. Living has friction, mess, risk — things you’re slowly taught to avoid when the world already sees you as a liability.
By the time Sarah arrived, I had more or less accepted that this was it. That my life had already peaked somewhere between a graduation photo and a rejection email no one bothered to personalise.
The quiet didn’t hurt anymore.
That’s how I knew something was wrong.
When the Quiet Shifted
When Sarah turned up, it didn’t feel hopeful.
It felt disruptive.
The flat sounded different. The silence didn’t disappear — it moved. Made space. Became less heavy without anyone announcing it had changed.
She didn’t arrive as a saviour or a solution or a love interest.
She arrived as something happening.
And when you’ve been stuck long enough, that alone is enough to unsettle everything.
That’s where this moment ends.
Before romance.
Before recovery.
Before the story people prefer.
Just a man living alone with a disability, having done everything right, having run out of places to go — and noticing, for the first time in a long while, that the quiet no longer sounds the same.
If this hit close to home
If you’ve ever done what you were told and still ended up stuck, share this with someone who gets it — or someone who needs to.
You can find more writing from this world, including Love on Wheels, over at Cmeewrites
Not every story starts with hope.
Some start with honesty.