Have you heard of stair yips? I have them — put simply, I can't go down stairs smoothly. When I descend I have to be very careful and use a lot of nerves. (This is separate from athletic ability — mine is average, and I exercise more than most people.)
The feeling is that I can't grasp distance or rhythm on the way down, and I'm always nervous about missing a step. I've actually missed steps and fallen a few times.
Crowded station stairs are especially cold-sweat territory — I'm the only one going down painfully slowly. I often take the elevator when I can go down a floor.
I don't know if it's a disease, but searching suggests it's probably something in the brain.
Is the impact on daily life fatal? Not quite that far, but it is fairly stressful. And the strength of stair yips changes with that day's condition and fatigue — when stress is high or sleep is short, the sense is even harder to catch. On fully good days I can go down about as fast as anyone else.
Alone it's one thing; with acquaintances only I fall behind, which is a real bother for them. Especially with friends I can frankly say "I'm bad at stairs" it's fine — but once when I was going down with a few coworkers I quietly drifted to the back and went slowly alone. Afterward one colleague said they'd heard from another who knew that I struggle with stairs — "Are you okay?" — and I felt awkward.
Another time, at a salon with steep stairs, after a haircut they walked me to the bottom — huge pressure, awkward. When I said I'm bad at stairs, they seemed to take it as a light joke and went "huh," a bit stuck. Fair enough.
Even at my level it's fairly painful — so for people with physical limitations or disabilities it must be incomparably harder.
Mine isn't congenital; I became aware of it around when I started working. Around the same time I noticed how often the world only has up escalators.
No hard numbers, but down escalators feel rarer, right? Maybe because going up is harder on the body for older people and others.
I don't want to argue we must install more down escalators — rather, there are things you only understand once you're on the side that feels the inconvenience.
That isn't only about stairs — it extends to accessibility as a whole, and to all kinds of topics.
For any problem, the people trying to solve it and the people who benefit don't necessarily match.
What issues exist and what solutions there are — the people executing need to read those needs accurately.
Hearing people out might cover most of it, but good institutional design needs not only exchanging recognition but imagination on both sides beyond that.
And if a problem has even been found, you're lucky — some haven't been imagined yet. One reason is that for people living with them, it's the default.
So what to do? An easy conclusion I personally find undesirable is just "raise your voice." First, if it isn't recognized, you can't raise a voice; second, it piles too much pressure on the solving side so nobody wants to move.
Whether people who feel the problem and people who solve it are the same might be one ideal, but it isn't a requirement.
I don't have better ideas on this for now, so I'll stop here.
What I wanted to raise as a topic is that there's a side of the world you only see once you feel inconvenience. Nobody's simply at fault — and there's meaning in thinking, without blaming anyone, how to solve it well.
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