The burden of explaining
that invisible difficulty carried at every encounter
You meet a teacher, a doctor, a colleague, a neighbor. You explain the disability once more. You choose your words, you weigh what you say, you hope to be understood. Then you start over with the next person.
This invisible, daily, exhausting work has a name. It's called the burden of explaining.
What the burden of explaining is
The explanation burden is having to tell each new person, often from scratch, what the disability is and what the person needs. It is not a one-off event, it is a permanent state: every school year, every new caregiver, every new adult who meets the child, every new team at work.
Some call it explanatory fatigue, others explanatory repetition. These words describe the same experience. For disability, it is the counterpart of what is more broadly known as mental load: invisible work an adult carries without anyone seeing or measuring it.
This burden is even heavier when the disability is invisible (autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, epilepsy, hypersensitivity, selective mutism), because you have to both make its existence known and convince others it is real.
To go further: our in-depth article on the explanation burden.
Three situations that sound familiar
Three situations. If one of them sounds familiar, you're already carrying the burden of explaining.
The new school year.
You meet one or two new adults around your child. You mentally rehearse what you're going to say, in what order, with which words, so as not to put them on the defensive.
The new colleague.
You're an adult with ADHD or autism. A colleague joins the open space. You hesitate: say something or stay quiet? If you say something, how? You've made this decision a hundred times already, and it costs you just as much every time.
The unexpected.
Your elderly parent, your child, yourself: a paramedic, a driver, a server who doesn't understand what's going on. You have neither the time nor the energy to explain it in the moment.
What already exists to ease it
The explanation burden is not new. Families and the people concerned have always invented solutions to avoid starting from zero at every encounter:
Each of these tools eases part of the burden. None handles all of it. We've put together an inventory of the 6 tools already used every day: how they combine, where each one stops.
Where myHandiQR fits in
myHandiQR extends what families already do by hand. A profile, a QR code, a sheet the person concerned or their parent writes once and updates whenever they want. Anyone who scans it reads the exact same sheet. They can then click on each disability to get an explanation suited to their age and role, without you having to give it yourself.
myHandiQR doesn't replace conversation. It sets the basic context. The conversation can then start exactly where it matters most.
Take back control of the story
3 months free trial, then €2/month per profile billed once a year. No commitment. Profile kept even if you pause your subscription.