Unseating Cool: Invisible Disability as a Jewish Professional

by Sybil Sanchez

When my boss said it was time to hire someone younger and cheaper to do my job, I felt so much shame that I blocked out the conversation. I know it happened because I made a point of immediately telling family and friends before I forgot. Nonetheless, even today, if my boss challenged my recollection, I would fold. (They apologized two years later, but that’s another story.)

In any event, I didn’t fight for that job because I knew they were right. If I were them, I wouldn’t have hired me in the first place. It’s not that I performed poorly, rather I was overqualified. I was there because I needed less stressful work. Even though I would have been a competitive candidate for my boss’ job itself, I didn’t apply for that level because I wasn’t up to it.

Even before I got to that point, I knew I was paying a significant motherhood tax. Since being laid off as the director of a Jewish organization when my daughter was an infant, I never regained my ground. But several years later, when I lost that particular job for being overqualified, the writing on the wall got bolder. Despite being far from retirement, my age and health were factors I could no longer deny.

The shame that my boss unknowingly touched upon was my invisible disability. I didn’t know this until, yet another person informed me of it. A new doctor commented on how I had been managing my disability for a very long time. It was the first time anyone described my lifelong, complex health challenges that way, and it rocked my world.

Given that it was me he was describing, why didn’t I know this already? Of course, I was well-acquainted with my own struggles. But I hadn’t looked beyond my own experience to see how disabling they were. I was so narrowly focused on what was wrong with me personally and how I couldn’t get or stay ahead, that I was myopic. 

By framing my challenges as something that was disabling me, my doctor consequently helped me connect with others and be more compassionate toward myself. Until his kind and yet labeling remark, I was bootstrapping it alone, treading water backward.

During a class I took on Jewish feminism, I asked Ariella Barker, Senior Counsel at New York City Law Department and disability rights activist, about how to engage the Jewish community on invisible disability. Being both visibly disabled from birth and having acquired invisible disabilities along the way, she described how chronic illness bears the distinct loneliness of not being seen. 

She said there’s an assumption that if you need something from the community, you will show up and participate. Yet, the barriers to social inclusion are high when dealing with mental health or mobility issues. Asking to be seen not only requires bravery but also places a burden of self-worth on someone who is struggling to recognize their own value through pain and physical difficulty.

Until someone identifies as being disabled, they are much more likely to remain isolated from the full range of care and support that they need. Yet, self-identifying is a Catch-22. You’re afraid of being a fraud, that you’re either not sick enough or don’t have a valid enough diagnosis to ask for help. You feel like you need too much but that you don’t deserve it. 

It’s easier to blame yourself for being deficient than it is to focus on the lack of support, which feels beyond your control. Systemic ableism is so embedded that many who are invisibly disabled either don’t know what they need or are afraid to ask for it. Often, it’s both.

That’s how it was for me. I spent much of my career in the Jewish community noticing my failings as compared to others in a way that constantly damaged my wellbeing. At the time, I thought it was because I was jealous and immature. 

When unemployment took away much of that self-afflicting noise, I discovered that I was reenacting a deep trauma response to childhood bullying nearly everywhere I went. Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) affects your relationships. I was recreating my trauma all the time, in every committee meeting and conversation, and in every job in every sector I ever worked. While community-based advocacy was something I liked and that I was good at, it constantly triggered me in a hidden, crippling way.

One instance that still hurts was when a dynamic Jewish leader who was a competitor or “frenemy”, strutted about, super well-rested, encouraging me that I too should take a sabbatical to rejuvenate myself and be better for it. The likelihood of my having that kind of benefit was inherently dim, and they both knew that, and they knew that I was aware that they knew. Sometime thereafter, I got laid off due to funding issues. I thought – sour grapes – oh, frenemy got their sabbatical, while unemployment is what I got for a rest instead. The popular, wealthier kid had prevailed, while I sat back at the loser’s table, less than last-picked again.

It's easy enough to hear stories like that and think, oh the frenemy was a jerk, or I was oversensitive and self-pitying, or both, but the political is in the personal. Their better status was likely merited, but my lack of vacation was not, nor was their bragging. Our relationship was drenched in systemic bad blood (aka “politics”), much of which had little to do with me personally but which I still bore the brunt of. 

Most trauma survivors are deeply affected by these kinds of power dynamics because our ability to sniff out injustice is an elevated survival mechanism. It’s especially painful when coming from within your own community, which you seek to serve. Kinship and affiliation are supposed to be at the root of this shared mission, yet instead, networking is transactional. Professional friends are a type of currency in which people engage for mutual benefit.

I’m sure that many other Jewish professionals have similarly painful frenemy stories and that, like me, they wait to leave their jobs before processing or sharing them. We need to make our community a kinder and more authentic place in which to serve, both in deed as well as in word if we want it to function better.

Awareness of invisible disabilities is an important piece of that puzzle, especially given the numbers. In 2018, the CDC reported that 50% of all adults have one chronic illness, while 25% have at least two. Post-pandemic, those numbers are on the rise, especially around mental health.

February marks Jewish Disability Awareness and Inclusion Month. I wish we could greet it conclusively by listing ten things to do year-round and that those things would be easy enough to do. Unfortunately, such lists are band-aids for a tectonic rift. 

Unpacking internalized ableism and being trauma-informed require cultural shifts, starting with a more transparent understanding of where our centers of power lie and what assumptions we have around them. It’s not enough to make the “cool” kids sit with the “loser” ones, we ultimately need to unseat the thrones and turn over the tables. We must embrace what it means to be functional in all senses of the word, whether it’s physical, mental, or even organizational, health.

Sybil Sanchez Kessler is a functional medicine health coach and marketing consultant for startups, small businesses, solopreneurs, and others. Sybil lives in Mexico City with her spouse, daughter, and two dogs. You can find her on instagram and Linkedin.