{"id":4732,"date":"2025-10-01T08:52:34","date_gmt":"2025-10-01T08:52:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/?p=4732"},"modified":"2025-10-01T08:52:34","modified_gmt":"2025-10-01T08:52:34","slug":"a-moment-that-changed-me-i-froze-in-a-job-interview-and-it-made-me-stop-hiding-my-disability-disability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/?p=4732","title":{"rendered":"A moment that changed me: I froze in a job interview \u2013 and it made me stop hiding my disability | Disability"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I<\/span>n the first week of summer 2019, I decided I wanted a job. I was 16, finally old enough to attend festivals and concerts with my friends; all I needed was the money. With no prior work experience, I scraped together a CV that didn\u2019t even fill a page and sent it to every shop and cafe in my little village in Chelmsford, Essex. Miraculously, I was offered a job interview at the local fast food restaurant.<\/p>\n

I remember the nerves I felt on the way there. What would they ask me? Would they like me? In the end, I had nothing to worry about. The interview went well and the hiring manager seemed ready to hand me a contract. But, before I left, he asked me to try out serving a customer. \u201cJust give her the items shown next to her order number on that screen,\u201d he said, pointing to a monitor on the wall behind him.<\/p>\n

To my horror, I couldn\u2019t make out a single word on the display. The customer, a woman with her young daughter, stood impatiently as I froze. I didn\u2019t know what to say. After a few awkward minutes, the hiring manager dismissed me and I received a rejection email the next morning. My dreams of attending Wireless and Reading festivals with my friends disintegrated \u2013 and I had another, more important, revelation: for the first time in my life, I realised that I was disabled.<\/p>\n

I knew I had been born partially sighted due to complications in the womb. As a child, I remember struggling to see the whiteboard in class, even when I was sitting right at the front. I masked this by copying notes from my friends, face bent close to the paper. To this day I struggle with basic maths, having learned most of it second hand.<\/p>\n

<\/svg><\/span>\u2018I\u2019m not just speaking up for me, but for the millions like me\u2019 \u2026 Oreoluwa Adeyoola.<\/span> Photograph: Courtesy of Oreoluwa Adeyoola<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The adults in my life \u2013 at home, school, and at my regular hospital appointments \u2013 talked about my vision in huddled groups, voices hushed, eyebrows furrowed. It never occurred to me that most children didn\u2019t frequently visit an ophthalmologist. As a seven-year-old, I had treated my two-week hospital stay (while doctors tried to work out what was wrong with me) like a holiday, befriending all the other children on the ward and working my way through books from the hospital library \u2013 at that age, I was less self-conscious about how close I had to hold the page in order to see text clearly.<\/p>\n

As I got older, I buried the secret even more. At secondary school, I was the new kid who had moved from Ireland to Essex, and I desperately tried to hide my visual impairment.<\/p>\n

But when I got back from that job interview, I made the first step towards navigating life with a disability: acceptance. It was a slow, agonising progress. At my next ophthalmologist appointment, I started asking more questions. I learned that glasses couldn\u2019t improve my vision and that I would never be allowed to drive. Each new detail felt like a fresh blow.<\/p>\n

For the first time, I looked at the official diagnosis I had received at 12 years old on my certificate of visual impairment: retinal dystrophy. Seeing the words in cold, bold print made something that had seemed so abstract and confusing a reality. To my surprise, I was filled with relief.<\/p>\n

The next step was unlearning the hyper-independence I had developed over the years. I hated asking for help \u2013 so much so that I preferred taking the wrong bus than asking a stranger to read out the route number for me. I would say I wasn\u2019t hungry at restaurants because I was too self-conscious to look closely at the menu. My biggest fear was being vulnerable and, at first, every time I asked for help, I would have a panic attack.<\/p>\n

But as I started reaching out for help, the love and support of my friends overwhelmed me. They built up my confidence so that I no longer felt embarrassed to ask for assistance. As I started asking strangers for help, reading menus at cafes, navigating <\/strong>confusing tube stations or for aid crossing the road, I was surprised at how kind they were.<\/p>\n

Today, I feel very far from the anxiety-ridden 16-year-old I was at that interview. I know that I cannot change my vision, but I treat every new barrier as a challenge. Speaking up when something is inaccessible has taught me that adjustments can usually be made to accommodate my needs, and I am no longer shy to ask for them. If I ever do feel anxious to admit I can\u2019t see something, I remember there are more than 2 million people living with sight loss in the UK. I\u2019m not just speaking up for me, but for the millions like me. And, these days, I make sure I never go hungry in restaurants.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the first week of summer 2019, I decided I wanted a job. I was 16, finally old enough to attend festivals and concerts with my friends; all I needed was the money. With no prior work experience, I scraped together a CV that didn\u2019t even fill a page and sent it to every shop<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4733,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[1149,1154,1150,1153,148,1151,556,1152],"class_list":["post-4732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-interviews","tag-changed","tag-disability","tag-froze","tag-hiding","tag-interview","tag-job","tag-moment","tag-stop"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4732\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}