Becoming a blackjack dealer was not the plot twist I had expected.
So there I was at 1 a.m., punching out from my shift, and an hour later freshly showered to get the smoke off me because obviously I have to. I live off one lung.
I sat on my coffee table and thought about the past year.
I had been unemployed. I had lost a cybersecurity job after asking for an ADA accommodation. And that night at the casino, someone had nearly kept me from becoming a blackjack dealer because of my disability.
But somehow, sitting there after a terrific first night dealing blackjack, I knew I was going to get my cybersecurity job back.
That certainty came almost instantly, but getting there had taken years. I had spent so much time questioning myself while trying to prove that my disability didn’t make me less capable. I had worked for years to get into cybersecurity, excelled once I got there and then found myself fighting through workplace harassment, an ADA accommodation process and eventually unemployment.
I had to muscle my way back into a career I worked for, enjoyed and was good at. What I know now is how much disabled people are often expected to endure, and how hard we have to fight, just for the chance to work.
The goal post kept moving
My dream was always to live independently, have a career and be like pretty much everyone else, a proud working member of society.
After I graduated college in 2015, I would go into interviews and people would ask what was wrong with my voice. My vocal cord is paralyzed, the result of a breathing tube used when I had a heart transplant when I was younger. My voice became one of the first things some employers noticed about me, and more often than not, I would end up disclosing my disability.
I am from Tampa, Florida, where it was already hard to find work. The jobs I could get paid $12 or $13 an hour, and I couldn’t afford to live on my own.
A family member suggested I get tech skills so maybe employers wouldn’t discriminate against me as much and I could show my value that way.
So I went back to school for cybersecurity and found that I really enjoyed it. I had always been drawn to investigations and figuring out how things worked.
Then I finished my certificate program, went out to interview and heard something new: Employers couldn’t hire me because I didn’t have experience.
I was devastated.
The goal post had moved again.
This time it wasn’t my voice. It was that I didn’t have experience.
I reached out to a disability advocate who told me about an organization that mentors disabled graduates. I got into the program, and by the fall of 2019, four long years after I had started trying to build a career, my dream came true.
I got my first cybersecurity job at a bank in Pittsburgh.
My first two years were great. Despite the COVID pandemic, I was able to explore the city, make friends and, most importantly, excel in my work. I felt proud of everything I had accomplished. I even started mentoring other disabled and low-income students.
I really thought my luck had changed.
When work became another fight
Then my manager left and the environment changed with new leadership. I started hearing constant criticism about my work. I raised concerns with people inside the company, but things only became worse. Responsibilities I had handled successfully were taken away, and I was told there was no path forward for me on the team.
So I started job hunting.
That is not a small thing when you are disabled. It had taken me four years to land my first career job.
After six months, I found another cybersecurity role. It paid about $20,000 more and was remote. I decided to stay in Pittsburgh because I had built a life here and loved the city.
Then my health started going wrong.
Because of my heart transplant and other health complications, I have medical needs that go beyond my paralyzed voice. Not long after I started the new job, repeated illnesses and painful symptoms led my transplant team to begin testing me for a serious post-transplant complication.
I needed an ADA accommodation to manage the testing and my symptoms. I asked HR and waited four months for an answer.
Two weeks after I submitted that request, a new manager began questioning my performance. I had seen this before: excelling at my work and then suddenly being told under new leadership that I didn’t know what I was doing. This time, I documented everything. I am a trained cyber threat analyst. When things weren’t adding up, I started taking photos of my manager deleting data from my workload.
My accommodation was approved. One week later, I was placed on a performance improvement plan. Sixty days after that, I was fired.
Suddenly I wasn’t only dealing with losing a job. I had lost my health insurance while I was still dealing with a serious medical issue. I was scrambling to get testing done, make sure I had my medications and buy expensive coverage on the marketplace.
Then I had to find a lawyer.
My dream had started to unravel into a nightmare.
I was unemployed. My savings were running out fast. And after everything I had gone through to build a career, I started asking myself questions that are hard to admit now.
Was I really that bad at my job?
Was it because I had a disability?
It was never me
As I tried to figure out what came next, I saw that Rivers Casino was hiring. I had initially been looking for office work, but I got hired to train as a blackjack dealer.
You study the game for several weeks and then you have to audition to show that you can deal.
When it was my turn, I was the only person in my class who failed. It wasn’t because I had made a mistake. The person evaluating me said I wasn’t loud enough.
I explained that my voice was paralyzed.
That is when I realized it wasn’t me.
It was never me.
There were people who had looked at my disability and decided what I could or could not do. They were imposing their limits onto me.
The next day, my instructor advocated for me to audition again. Even then, there were complaints about my voice. But I passed.
And I had an excellent first night.
That night, I decided I was going to muscle my way back into cybersecurity.
I knew my exit from the field was not because I was bad at my job. I knew how good I was. I also knew that people had struggled to understand how someone with my disabilities could be multifaceted and succeed in a demanding industry.
Within days, I received an email asking me to interview for another cybersecurity job.
I got it.
Within a year, I was presenting my work at conferences and receiving great feedback. I became a creator on LinkedIn, writing about cybersecurity and disability employment advocacy. I created Access Granted, where I coach people on cybersecurity and help disabled people navigate their careers.
Resilience should not be the requirement
The legal case over my previous employment continued for two years. It was exhausting and expensive, and eventually I settled rather than continue litigating for years more.
That process did not give me back everything I had lost.
But I gained something else.
For me to have reparative experiences, I had to put in the effort. I had to keep going. I had to believe in myself when I had very good reasons not to.
But someone else also had to be brave enough to do the right thing.
My blackjack instructor did that when she advocated for me after I failed my first audition. My current manager does that when they advocate for me now.
That matters.
We talk a lot about resilience in the disabled community, and yes, disabled people can be incredibly resilient. But we should also ask why we are required to be so resilient just to get the opportunity to work, support ourselves and use the skills we fought so hard to build.
If you are in a position of power, doing the right thing for someone can change the course of their life.
I know because people doing the wrong thing changed mine.
Thankfully, a few people doing the right thing did, too.
Zarin Hamid is a cybersecurity specialist and disability employment advocate. When she’s not protecting organizations from cyber threats, she’s running Access Granted, a coaching program for disabled professionals navigating career growth, and a consultancy helping corporate employers build workplaces that actually work for disabled employees. You can reach her at accessgrantedzh@gmail.com.
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