The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) defines a disability as a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities.
I’m not kidding about pursuing “Cognitive Impairment Associated with Aging” as a specifically named member of the disabilities covered under the ADA. Include us with our younger brothers and sisters with intellectual disabilities, learning disabilities, neurological conditions, mental health disorders, autism spectrum disorders, and others. Regardless of our specific impairment, life’s challenges test us all, and helping ourselves and our loved ones is a goal. Formal action will presumably take a while. In the meantime, we can make our lives easier, and broaden awareness by researching and adopting techniques ourselves that have worked for others.
There is no good way to rank or equate disabilities. It’s not a competition. Accept that it is hard for me and many of my peers to not feel disadvantaged when things that used to come so easily (to hand, to mind, or to the tongue) can now be so hard to find, and previously simple tasks can be so hard to complete.
Like physical challenges failing memory also requires creative and practical “assistive technology”. On dark days I sometimes envision my future self (with apologies) as a physically-able Stephen Hawking, words frozen on my tongue, communicating, as I am now, through a laptop. Cut us both a break! We rightly form our opinion of that great physicist by looking at what comes out of his computer. Maybe judge me less by the fluency of my speech and more by the clarity of my writing. The written word is the white cane of memory loss, the hearing aid of hearing loss, the big print of vision loss.
For some of us you should “Listen less to how I speak. Read what I write!“