On a sunny summer day in Napa, our wine production crew gathered poolside to kick off the harvest season with a proper party. Vibes were high, and I was eager to get acquainted with my new coworkers. Then everyone started shotgunning beer; everyone but me.
Only a week before, I’d had a violent grand mal seizure. I still had a grisly gash on my arm from the incident, and lingered in a brain fog that obscured the world around me like a smokescreen. After 35 years of living with epilepsy, I knew that alcohol is a trigger for seizures. Skipping this rite of passage was a logical decision, but an awkward one. My abstinence seemed to mark me as different—even weak.
In the production cellar, weakness can feel like a career ender. Harvest season requires long hours and arduous physical labor. In our male-dominated industry, “bro” culture prevails, and the typical cellar is fast-paced and competitive in a way that can be both highly invigorating and highly toxic. Workers who move slowly or out of sync may signal an unwillingness to shoulder their fair share of the workload.
Unfortunately, this assumption fails to account for the rising number of people, like me and so many colleagues, who live and work with an invisible disability.
What is an Invisible Disability?
Legally recognized by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and civil rights organizations worldwide, an invisible disability is “a physical, mental, or neurological condition that is not visible from the outside, yet can limit or challenge a person’s movements, senses, or activities,” according to the Invisible Disabilities Association. They go on to state: “Unfortunately, the very fact that these symptoms are invisible can lead to misunderstandings, false perceptions, and judgments.”
In the United States alone, an estimated 25 percent of people live with a disability and an estimated 20 percent with an invisible disability. The number of workers with disabilities is alarmingly on the rise, partly due to ongoing effects of long COVID. Since the start of the pandemic in 2020, about 900,000 more American workers have reported a disability, according to recent research published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Invisible disabilities range from visual and hearing impairments, to cognitive and learning differences, to others that defy clear categorization. Autism, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, blindness or low vision, and depression are just a few examples. Epilepsy, which caused my grand mal seizure, and which winery worker Joshua Pehle describes below, is also an invisible disability.
Working in the winery with an invisible disability
Over the course of my career, which spans several industries, I’ve never felt the burden of my invisible disability as heavily as in winery settings, where I worked for more than a decade.
As that harvest season ramped up, so did my anxiety. My grand mal seizures subsided, but I was still plagued by nagging psychomotor seizures that tended to strike during my morning cellar shifts. For safety purposes, I disclosed my epilepsy to my managers, and we agreed that I would not climb high ladders or drive the forklift. We also agreed that I would work a half-time shift, partly because my nervous system could not handle the standard 12- or 14-hour stints. Lack of sleep induces seizures as reliably as beer.
Despite these accommodations, I felt myself slipping mentally and physically, forgetting things and botching enology data. I cannot stress enough that my managers were as kind and reasonable as any in my whole career. Yet they couldn’t protect me from my teammates, who knew I received special consideration, but didn’t understand why. As much as I wanted to explain my struggle, disclosing disability is complex. Their discouragement with me was plain, and I became demoralized. Weeks before the end of the season, I quit.
Even the most supportive manager cannot compensate for a broken winery workplace culture—one that moves at such an unapologetically lightning pace that it fails to consider the potential contributions of those who work differently.
As ashamed as I felt about bailing, I was not alone. One in 10 working adults with disabilities reported experiencing some kind of workplace discrimination within five years of the passage of the ADA, according to recent research. Strikingly, a third of those respondents permanently exited the workforce. How many workers, then, has the wine industry lost to disability discrimination?
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