There is something deceptively ordinary about the changing of seasons. The calendar advances, temperatures fluctuate, trees relinquish their leaves and eventually produce them again, days become longer or shorter, clothing changes, school and workplace schedules shift, and holidays appear and disappear with an almost rehearsed regularity. Landscapes that seemed permanent reveal themselves to have been temporary all along. Because these transformations occur cyclically, they are often treated as insignificant features of ordinary life, absorbed into the background of existence rather than examined as experiences in their own right. Yet predictability is not synonymous with ease. For many disabled and neurodivergent people, seasonal transition can possess a phenomenology considerably more complicated than the calendar suggests, because changes in weather and daylight can simultaneously alter sensory environments, routines, transportation, clothing, sleep patterns, social expectations, energy levels, and access to familiar spaces.
The issue, therefore, is not whether seasonal change is inherently positive or negative, but what occurs when the world changes faster than a person can comfortably reorganize their relationship with it. This question extends beyond disability because human beings are creatures of pattern, expectation, memory, and adaptation. We construct routines because routines reduce uncertainty; we develop rituals because rituals give time a recognizable structure; and we return to familiar places because familiarity can transform an otherwise complicated environment into something intelligible. Change disrupts that architecture. Although change is frequently presented as an unavoidable and even desirable component of life, the manner in which society discusses adaptation deserves closer examination. We praise flexibility without always asking who has the capacity to be flexible, celebrate resilience without examining what conditions made resilience necessary, and describe people as “adjusting” without asking whether the environment itself could have been designed to make adjustment less burdensome.
For disabled people, these questions are not peripheral to the experience of seasonal change. They are embedded within it. A season may be meteorological in origin, but its consequences are social, psychological, sensory, economic, and environmental. What appears to one person as a pleasant alteration in temperature may register to another as an accumulation of variables requiring continual recalibration. What feels like an ordinary change in routine to one individual may represent a significant disruption for another. Consequently, the changing seasons provide an unexpectedly useful framework through which to examine disability, neurodivergence, accessibility, and the cultural assumptions surrounding adaptation.
A season is meteorological, but our experience of it is social. Winter, for example, is not merely a reduction in temperature. It can mean altered transportation, dangerous walking conditions, fewer hours of daylight, different clothing, changes in social activity, and an increased reliance upon indoor environments. Summer is not merely warmth; it can involve intense sunlight, humidity, crowds, altered schedules, unfamiliar smells, increased activity, and environments that become physically or sensorily difficult to navigate. Autumn may introduce changes in school or workplace routines, holiday expectations, fluctuating temperatures, and increasingly visible transformations in landscapes that had previously remained familiar. Even spring, which cultural narratives frequently associate with renewal and rejuvenation, can involve environmental unpredictability, sensory changes, and the disruption of routines that winter had established.
None of these experiences is universally disabling, and that qualification matters. Disability is not produced by a season in isolation. Rather, disability emerges through the interaction between bodies and minds and the environments in which those bodies and minds are expected to function. The same temperature, sound, light level, or schedule may be inconsequential to one individual while being profoundly disruptive to another. This is one reason a phenomenological approach is valuable. Instead of asking merely what happens during winter, autumn, spring, or summer, we can ask what those seasons feel like from inside a particular life. Such a question moves the discussion away from generalized assumptions and toward lived experience, acknowledging that the world does not arrive identically for everyone even when everyone occupies the same physical environment.
The season itself, therefore, remains only one component of a much larger system. Weather interacts with infrastructure, infrastructure interacts with mobility, mobility interacts with employment, employment interacts with financial stability, and financial stability interacts with housing and access to resources. What appears externally to be “a change in weather” can consequently have consequences extending far beyond the weather itself. For someone whose transportation becomes less reliable during extreme conditions, a seasonal change may affect employment. For someone whose sensory environment becomes significantly more demanding, it may affect social participation. For someone whose routine is disrupted by changes in daylight or institutional scheduling, it may affect emotional regulation and daily functioning. The season has not changed merely one variable; it has entered a network of relationships.
Modern culture places considerable value upon adaptability. People are expected to adjust to new workplaces, technologies, schedules, social expectations, economic conditions, and environments, while flexibility is frequently treated as evidence of maturity and competence. There is nothing inherently objectionable about adaptability; indeed, the capacity to respond to changing circumstances can be valuable. The difficulty emerges when adaptability becomes a moral standard through which people are evaluated. The person who adjusts quickly is considered capable, while the person who requires additional time may be perceived as resistant. Someone who needs repetition may be labeled inflexible, while someone who experiences distress when routines change may be characterized as immature, difficult, or unwilling to cooperate.
Here, the hegemony of adaptability becomes visible. A particular way of responding to change becomes so culturally dominant that it begins to appear universal, while alternative responses are treated as deviations requiring explanation. This dynamic resembles the broader problem of disability codification, in which complex human experiences are translated into simplified behavioral categories. My earlier writing explored how people can become reduced to recognizable characteristics, “the autistic person,” “the dependent person,” “the difficult person”, until the category begins to eclipse the individual. Seasonal change can activate the same interpretive mechanism when difficulty adapting is automatically regarded as a personal deficiency rather than a possible interaction between an individual and an environment.
This distinction is especially important because disabled people are not necessarily incapable of adaptation. Many become exceptionally practiced at adapting precisely because environments continually require them to do so. They learn how to anticipate inaccessible circumstances, prepare for changes in routine, develop compensatory strategies, communicate their needs, and negotiate institutions that were not designed with their experiences in mind. The problem, then, is not that disabled people lack adaptability. It is that adaptation is often demanded asymmetrically. Disabled people are expected to adjust to inaccessible environments, while inaccessible environments are rarely expected to adjust to disabled people. Once that imbalance becomes normalized, resilience can cease to be a personal strength and become a social requirement.
One of the less visible dimensions of seasonal change concerns time itself. Society operates according to numerous temporal assumptions concerning when people should wake, work, study, socialize, travel, eat, sleep, celebrate, and rest. These expectations are so deeply embedded within ordinary life that they can appear natural rather than constructed. Yet what feels like an obvious rhythm to one person may be difficult for another to maintain. Neurotypical norms frequently influence assumptions concerning how quickly people should process information, transition between activities, tolerate unpredictability, regulate emotions, communicate, and recover from disruption.
Seasonal change participates in this architecture because each transition carries cultural expectations about what people are supposed to do and, sometimes, how they are supposed to feel. The beginning of autumn is expected to signify one thing, winter holidays another, spring another, and summer another. Yet what happens when an individual’s phenomenology does not correspond with those cultural scripts? One person may experience winter as calming rather than depressing; another may find it isolating. Someone may find autumn grounding because its routines are familiar, while another may experience the same period as destabilizing because multiple routines change simultaneously. There is no inherent contradiction in these experiences. They simply demonstrate that the same calendar can contain different psychological realities.
The difficulty arises when one of those realities becomes the normative experience against which the others are measured. A person who does not enjoy the cultural rituals associated with a season may be interpreted as antisocial. Someone who requires preparation before a transition may be considered inflexible. Someone who experiences sensory discomfort within environments that others find festive may be perceived as difficult. In each case, the individual risks becoming the object of interpretation rather than a participant in defining their own experience. As the earlier essay argues in another context, recognizing a behavior does not necessarily mean understanding the experience that produced it.
For disabled people, transition itself can sometimes be more significant than the destination. The difference between summer and autumn may not be difficult because autumn is intrinsically problematic; the difficulty may exist within the interstices between them. Temperature changes, daylight changes, clothing changes, schedules change, environments change, and social expectations change. None of these alterations necessarily constitutes a crisis individually, yet their cumulative effect can become substantial when they occur simultaneously.
This is important because conventional narratives often isolate disability into discrete categories: mobility, cognition, communication, sensory processing, mental health, or physical health. Actual human experience is considerably less orderly. A change in weather can affect transportation; transportation can affect punctuality; punctuality can affect employment; employment can affect financial stability; financial stability can affect housing; housing can affect sensory regulation; and sensory regulation can affect social participation. What appeared initially to be an isolated environmental alteration therefore becomes part of a much larger network of consequences. Disability cannot always be understood through isolated variables because the experience of disability is frequently relational.
This relational quality is particularly relevant to seasonal transitions because the burden of adjustment is rarely distributed equally. A person with substantial sensory needs may have to prepare for environmental changes that another person can simply ignore. Someone with mobility limitations may have to consider conditions that others encounter only as an inconvenience. A person whose regulation depends heavily upon predictable routines may need considerably more preparation before an institutional
schedule changes. These differences should not be interpreted automatically as evidence that one person is less capable than another. They may instead demonstrate that different people encounter different levels of environmental demand.
There is an uncomfortable contradiction within contemporary discussions of disability: society frequently praises disabled people for resilience while simultaneously creating conditions that require extraordinary resilience in the first place. The language sounds affirming, but admiration can become a substitute for structural change. If someone navigates an inaccessible environment, we may describe them as resilient; if they persist through an exhausting bureaucratic process, we may call them determined; and if they continue working despite inadequate accommodations, we may admire their perseverance. Yet these descriptions can obscure the more consequential question of why such extraordinary coping was necessary.
Seasonal transitions provide another opportunity to examine this contradiction. If a disabled person struggles during winter because transportation systems become less accessible, the appropriate response is not necessarily to demand greater resilience. The transportation system itself may require reconsideration. If someone experiences sensory distress because public environments become increasingly crowded during seasonal celebrations, the answer may not be to demand greater tolerance. Quieter alternatives, advance communication, and collective access may be more appropriate responses. If a person requires additional preparation before a major change in routine, that preparation should not automatically be regarded as an indulgence or weakness.
Sometimes preparation is itself an accessibility measure.
This distinction allows resilience to be understood without romanticizing it. Personal resilience can be meaningful, but it should not become the condition upon which social participation depends. A society that repeatedly creates barriers and then praises individuals for surviving those barriers risks confusing endurance with justice. The disabled person becomes celebrated for navigating the obstacle rather than the obstacle becoming subject to scrutiny.
Seasonal change also exposes the limitations of the mythology surrounding independence. The idealized individual is frequently imagined as self-sufficient: capable of managing schedules, transportation, employment, household responsibilities, finances, communication, and emotional regulation without assistance. Yet very few human beings actually live according to such a model. People depend upon infrastructure, technology, transportation, family, friends, colleagues, institutions, and communities, although some forms of dependence remain culturally invisible because they are so thoroughly normalized.
Disability makes interdependence more visible, but it does not create it. Children depend upon adults, adults depend upon transportation systems and workplaces, families depend upon schools and healthcare institutions, and communities depend upon networks of labor and infrastructure. Aging, illness, parenthood, grief, and numerous other experiences make human dependence visible at different moments of life. As explored in the earlier essay, the distinction is therefore not between people who depend upon others and people who do not, but between forms of dependence that society has normalized and forms of dependence that it has stigmatized.
This distinction becomes particularly important during periods of transition. Sometimes independence means completing something without assistance; at other times, autonomy means recognizing when assistance is necessary and having the ability to request it. These are not contradictory concepts. They represent a more mature understanding of agency, one in which support does not automatically diminish the person receiving it. Interdependence is not the opposite of autonomy; it is often one of the conditions through which autonomy becomes possible.
If seasonal change affects individuals differently, accessibility cannot remain exclusively an individual responsibility. The conventional accommodation paradigm begins with the individual: a person identifies a need, an institution determines whether the request is reasonable, and an accommodation is provided. While accommodations remain indispensable, this framework can inadvertently place much of the burden of accessibility upon the person who already encounters the greatest barriers. The individual must identify the problem, articulate it, justify it, request assistance, and sometimes repeatedly demonstrate that the need is legitimate.
Collective access proposes a different paradigm. Rather than asking only what an individual needs to participate, collective access asks why an environment was designed without anticipating such forms of human variation in the first place. This principle extends beyond ramps and elevators to include sensory accessibility, communication access, transportation, housing, employment, education, healthcare, emergency preparedness, and public policy. An emergency plan that assumes everyone can hear an announcement, process instructions immediately, move quickly, and travel independently has not been designed for a genuinely universal population; it has been designed around a particular conception of the human body and mind.
Seasonal change makes this principle particularly visible because environments frequently transform themselves in ways that are treated as inevitable. Public spaces become crowded, decorations alter sensory environments, transportation conditions change, workplaces modify schedules, and community events introduce new expectations. Accessibility, therefore, cannot be understood simply as the capacity to enter an environment. It must also concern whether a person can meaningfully participate once inside it. As the earlier essay argues, a person can be physically present without being socially included, and visibility, participation, and belonging are distinct conditions.
There is also a deeply personal dimension to seasonal transition that statistics, policy, and institutional analysis cannot entirely capture. A season carries memory. Particular temperatures can recall particular years; certain smells can retrieve moments that seemed forgotten; familiar landscapes can change sufficiently to make the passage of time suddenly visible. The season outside can therefore activate seasons within the mind. What appears externally to be environmental transformation can become, internally, an encounter with memory, identity, expectation, and the passage of time.
My own engagement with seasonal change is therefore not exclusively theoretical. I recognize that transitions can produce competing responses: anticipation can exist alongside apprehension, enjoyment alongside overstimulation, and familiarity alongside disruption. A person can appreciate autumn while finding its transition difficult. Someone can enjoy winter while struggling with its logistical consequences. A person can look forward to summer while simultaneously recognizing that increased
activity, heat, or sensory stimulation may require additional preparation. The coexistence of these experiences is not inconsistency; it is complexity.
That complexity is particularly important within disability discourse because disability is too often treated as an explanatory endpoint. Once a behavior has been associated with a diagnosis, there can be a tendency to assume that the diagnosis has explained the person. Yet a diagnosis does not eliminate context, personality, history, preference, culture, or agency. It provides one framework for interpretation, not a complete account of human experience. The earlier essay similarly argues that disability should not be reduced to a checklist of behaviors because external observation cannot fully communicate what an experience feels like from within.
Every season possesses a cultural narrative. Spring is associated with renewal, summer with freedom, autumn with reflection, and winter with stillness. These metaphors can be aesthetically meaningful, but they become restrictive when transformed into emotional instructions. What if spring does not feel renewing? What if summer does not feel liberating? What if autumn produces anxiety rather than reflection? What if winter provides relief rather than isolation? The problem is not necessarily the metaphor itself; it emerges when the metaphor becomes an expectation against which actual human experience is judged.
Disabled and neurodivergent people encounter similar expectations elsewhere. There is an expected way to communicate, an expected way to socialize, an expected way to work, an expected way to grieve, and an expected way to demonstrate independence.
When those expectations become sufficiently entrenched, they cease to appear ideological and instead become “common sense.” This is precisely where ableist hegemony becomes difficult to identify. The earlier essay examines how assumptions about eye contact, speech, emotional expression, productivity, independence, and conformity can become normalized until they appear to describe human nature itself.
Seasonal experience can become codified in much the same way. The “right” season becomes the season one is expected to enjoy, while the “wrong” reaction becomes something requiring explanation. Yet there is no universal emotional climate. Human beings experience the same physical world through different histories, bodies, neurological systems, relationships, memories, and material circumstances. To acknowledge that variability is not to deny commonality; it is to resist the assumption that commonality requires uniformity.
Perhaps this is where the language of the original title requires the greatest reconsideration. I am increasingly skeptical of the language of “overcoming,” not because perseverance is meaningless, but because the rhetoric of overcoming can imply that the ultimate objective of disability is to defeat difference itself. When overcoming becomes the dominant narrative, disability risks being constructed as an obstacle whose successful resolution requires the individual to approximate an imagined norm.
A more useful paradigm may be adaptation without erasure. The objective is not to become unaffected by change, nor is it to eliminate the needs that distinguish one person from another. Instead, the objective is to develop ways of living within change without requiring the disappearance of one’s identity, dignity, or legitimate support needs. A disabled person should not have to prove that they have become sufficiently adaptable before their accessibility needs are taken seriously, just as requesting assistance should not automatically be interpreted as evidence that adaptation has failed.
Sometimes adaptation means changing one’s routine. Sometimes it means asking for assistance, using an accommodation, withdrawing from an overwhelming environment, or returning after a period of recovery. Sometimes it means acknowledging that something is too much and communicating that reality before reaching a point of crisis. None of these responses should automatically be interpreted as failure. If autonomy is understood as meaningful agency rather than absolute self-sufficiency, then choosing how, when, and with whom to navigate change can itself constitute an expression of autonomy.
The changing seasons offer a useful philosophical metaphor because they do not “overcome” one another. Winter does not defeat autumn, spring does not defeat winter, and summer does not permanently conquer spring. Each exists temporarily and eventually gives way to something else. The cycle is not a contest in which one season emerges victorious; it is a process through which difference and continuity coexist.
Human beings are not entirely different. We move through periods of stability and disruption, confidence and uncertainty, connection and solitude, independence and dependence. Disability may make some transitions more visible, but transition itself is universal. What changes is the amount and form of support required to move through it. That observation offers a different philosophy of disability, one that asks not how closely a person can approximate an imagined norm but whether the environment provides sufficient flexibility for human variation to exist without punishment.
Such a paradigm requires a movement away from ableist assumptions that equate competence with effortless adaptation. It requires recognition that needing support does not negate autonomy, that unconventional communication does not make an experience less legitimate, and that accommodations should not be treated as extraordinary concessions when they are necessary for meaningful participation. Most importantly, it requires a willingness to reconsider the boundaries between independence and dependence, accommodation and belonging, visibility and participation.
The seasons will continue changing whether we are prepared for them or not. Preparation, however, can be reimagined. Perhaps we do not need to become people who withstand every transition without difficulty. Perhaps we need communities in which difficulty does not become a source of shame, where asking for assistance is not treated as an indictment of competence, and where accessibility is understood as a collective responsibility rather than a private negotiation between an individual and an institution. Perhaps the objective is not to emerge from every season victorious, but to emerge from it still recognizably ourselves—with our differences intact, our dignity undiminished, and our relationships with others strengthened rather than treated as evidence of deficiency.
The seasons remind us of something modern life often encourages us to forget: stability is temporary. The landscape changes, the weather changes, our routines change, our relationships change, our bodies change, and our understanding of ourselves changes.
The temptation is to regard change as an opponent and adaptation as a victory over it, yet such a framework may be unnecessarily narrow. Perhaps the more important task is learning how to inhabit transition without assuming that difficulty represents personal inadequacy.
For disabled people, that requires more than individual resilience. It requires accessible environments, flexible institutions, supportive relationships, meaningful self-advocacy, and communities willing to recognize that human beings do not experience change according to a universal timetable. It requires a movement away from ableist assumptions that equate competence with effortless adaptation and toward an understanding of interdependence as an ordinary feature of human existence. It requires recognizing that accessibility is not merely an accommodation added to an otherwise complete environment but an ongoing question about who was imagined when that environment was designed.
Perhaps, then, the most valuable lesson contained within the changing seasons is not that everything must eventually be overcome. It is that transformation and continuity can coexist. A tree does not cease to be itself because its leaves disappear. A landscape does not lose its identity because its appearance changes. Likewise, a person does not become less autonomous, less capable, or less worthy because the conditions under which they function have changed. What matters is whether they are given the opportunity to move through those conditions without being forced to surrender the parts of themselves that society finds inconvenient.
The season changes, and we change with it. But change does not have to mean disappearance. Sometimes becoming is simply another way of remaining.
This essay has been shaped by the experiences, observations, scholarship, and advocacy of disabled people, neurodivergent people, self-advocates, families, caregivers, professionals, allies, and community members whose work continues to challenge conventional assumptions about disability, autonomy, accessibility, and belonging.
I am particularly grateful to those who have demonstrated that disability cannot be adequately understood through diagnosis alone. Lived experience, environmental context, communication, culture, relationships, and individual agency all contribute to the phenomenology of disability, and each deserves to remain part of the conversation. Their insistence upon self-determination has reinforced my own understanding that disabled people should participate meaningfully in defining the circumstances that affect their lives.
I also extend my appreciation to those who continue to question the assumptions embedded within seemingly ordinary concepts such as independence, resilience, adaptability, productivity, and normality. Their work demonstrates that advocacy is not merely the pursuit of accommodation; it is also an examination of the paradigms through which human worth and participation are defined. It is through that examination that more equitable forms of interdependence and collective access become possible.
Finally, I offer my thanks to readers willing to approach seasonal change, disability, and neurodivergence with intellectual curiosity rather than predetermined conclusions.
This essay does not attempt to prescribe a universal experience of the seasons, nor does it speak for an entire community. Instead, it seeks to create space for a more expansive understanding of how people encounter change and how communities might respond when those experiences do not conform to conventional expectations.
The seasons will continue to change. Our responsibility is to ensure that the people moving through them are not required to become less themselves in order to belong.
Ian Allan
Self-Advocate for The Arc of Northern Virginia
Ian Allan is a disability self-advocate whose work is grounded in the belief that lived experience is a form of expertise and a catalyst for systemic change. Engaging with policy and service structures through both critical inquiry and personal insight, he works not only to navigate these systems but to challenge and refine them. Through his work with The Arc of Northern Virginia, he amplifies the voices of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities, advancing efforts that position them not as passive recipients of services but as active participants in shaping more accountable, inclusive, and equitable systems.
For those interested in exploring Ian’s work, advocacy, and professional contributions in greater depth, or in connecting with him directly, please visit his LinkedIn profile here.
As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, The Arc of Northern Virginia relies on private support from individuals, corporations, organizations, and foundations to fund our efforts. Your generous donations help make it possible for us to provide programs, services, and advocacy so that people with IDD can live “A Life Like Yours.”
Stay Informed with the Latest News and Updates
