I’m Ree: a systems-thinker, adaptive problem-solver, music-loving hippy, disabled maker, and reluctant expert in navigating systems that were not designed with people like me in mind.

I am autistic and ADHD, with hyperlexia, alexithymia, and an L4/L5 spinal cord injury. I use different mobility tools depending on the task, terrain, pain, energy, and environment. My capacity fluctuates, which means the systems around me matter.

I do not experience disability as a simple problem inside my body or brain.

I experience it as a systems design issue.

When the environment, communication format, timing, tools, support, and physical setup work properly, I can do far more. When those systems fail, participation becomes unnecessarily expensive.

That is the core of this site.

I use a communication style I call ReeSpeak.

ReeSpeak is associative, relational, pattern-based, and often explained through examples, metaphors, systems, stories, and practical context rather than neat linear summaries.

This is not confusion. It is a translation difference.

I often understand the pattern before I can compress it into the language someone else expects. Apparent tangents are usually connected nodes in the same map.

For more detail, please see the More About Me page, where I explain ReeSpeak and my communication access needs more fully.

I build adaptive systems.

Some are physical: kitchen workarounds, gardening adaptations, mobility setups, food systems, tools on wheels, visible storage, and environmental cues.

Some are cognitive: checklists, scripts, appointment notes, AI-supported translation, memory scaffolds, and executive function systems.

Some are regulatory: music playlists, food protocols, sensory supports, recovery sequences, and low-friction routines.

Some are theoretical: frameworks that explain why these systems work and how other people might build their own versions.

The two main frameworks on this site are 🧠ReeOS🧭 and Distributed Capability Architecture.

🧠ReeOS🧭 is my personal operating system.

It is the collection of strategies, tools, scripts, routines, adaptations, and translation supports that help me function in a body, brain, home, and wider world that do not always speak the same language.

🧠ReeOS🧭 is not about becoming “normal.”

It is about reducing friction, preserving autonomy, and making life work with my actual operating system instead of constantly punishing it for not being factory standard.

It includes things like:

• • calibration systems

  • food infrastructure

  • music regulation

  • AI-supported executive function

  • adaptive gardening

  • communication translation

  • mobility and environmental adaptations

  • scripts for appointments, paperwork, and difficult conversations

🧠ReeOS🧭 is personal, but the principles are transferable.

🏗️Distributed Capability Architecture, or 🏗️DCA, is the wider framework that grew out of these systems.

The basic idea is simple:

Capability does not live only inside a person.

Capability is distributed across the body, tools, environment, community, and time.

A person’s ability to participate depends on the whole system around them. A wheelchair, a soup portion in the freezer, a visible fruit bowl, a playlist, a clear script, a friend with a car, a pressure cooker button that says RICE, or an AI assistant that can translate brain soup into a clear email can all become part of capability.

That is not “cheating.”

That is architecture.

🏗️DCA reframes accessibility, independence, productivity, and participation as design problems rather than personal failures.

This work exists because I had to build systems to survive repeated failures in the systems around me.

I have spent years navigating inaccessible housing, delayed adaptations, benefit problems, medical communication barriers, institutional fragmentation, physical pain, fluctuating capacity, and the exhausting expectation that disabled people must explain everything perfectly while already overloaded.

I needed ways to keep participating in life without relying on perfect memory, perfect energy, perfect speech, perfect mobility, or perfect executive function.

So I started building systems.

Not glamorous systems.

Useful systems.

Systems that make food easier. Systems that make appointments clearer. Systems that help me explain what I mean. Systems that reduce carrying, bending, remembering, searching, switching, and avoidable pain. Systems that let Past Ree leave useful loot drops for Future Ree.

Over time, those systems became something bigger than a pile of workarounds.

They became a design philosophy.

🚇Calibration

Calibration is about recognising my current state before choosing a task or strategy.

Instead of asking, “What should I be able to do?” the better question is, “What is available today?”

Energy, pain, sensory load, executive function, digestion, mood, sleep, and environment all affect what is realistic. Calibration helps me choose the right version of a task before I crash into the wrong one.

🎵Music regulation

Music is one of my strongest regulation tools.

I use playlists as state-based infrastructure, not just entertainment. Different sequences help with activation, focus, recovery, transition, emotional processing, and nervous system regulation.

The key is not genre.

The key is whether the music moves my system from where it is to where it needs to be.

🍜Food infrastructure

Food is not just nutrition.

Food affects regulation, cognition, pain, focus, digestion, mood, and basic survival.

My food systems are designed around fluctuating capacity. They include bridge foods, freezer portions, visible “eat me” areas, flavour boosters, batch-cooked components, low-energy meals, and sensory-safe routines.

The goal is not perfect eating.

The goal is staying fed enough to remain functional and recognisably myself.

🤖AI Executive Function Exosuit

I use AI as an executive function, communication, and planning scaffold.

It helps me prepare for appointments, turn messy thoughts into usable writing, create scripts, organise evidence, break tasks into steps, translate ReeSpeak for different audiences, and reduce the cognitive load of complex admin.

It does not replace my judgement.

It helps me keep hold of the map.

🌱Dopamine Sensory Garden

It is part food system, part sensory toolkit, part wildlife corridor, part ADHD dopamine trap, and part outdoor recovery room.

I grow crops that are useful, edible, colourful, fragrant, interesting, or ridiculous enough to make me go outside and check on them. The garden is designed for fluctuating capacity, which means it has to work with pain, fatigue, executive dysfunction, mobility barriers, sensory load, and weather that occasionally behaves like a soup dragon.

This project explores gardening as infrastructure: mixed seating, visible tasks, low-friction harvesting, sensory-safe spaces, wildlife-friendly planting, dopamine-boosting crops, and small jobs that help rebuild momentum.

The goal is not neatness.

The goal is a living system that feeds me, regulates me, supports wildlife, and makes outside feel possible.

👨‍⚕️Longitudinal Assessment

The Longitudinal Assessment project explores why one-off assessments often fail neurodivergent and disabled people.

Many systems assess a person based on how they appear in a single appointment, form, or interaction. That misses fluctuating capacity, masking, delayed processing, recovery cost, environmental barriers, and the difference between doing something once and doing it reliably.

This project argues for assessment models that look at patterns over time, not snapshots taken under artificial conditions.

I am building this work while also living inside the systems I am trying to explain.

That creates a practical problem.

The same barriers that make this work necessary also make it difficult to complete, organise, evidence, publish, and protect.

I need support with:

• • legal review

  • professional review

  • evidence organisation

  • accessibility review

  • housing and adaptation issues

  • safeguarding and institutional accountability

  • editing and publication

  • technical development

  • practical help with documentation

  • people who can understand the systems-level issue, not just the surface story

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This site is not a polished institution with a team behind it.

It is one disabled person building a public map from inside the maze.

Donate

If you are able to contribute financially, my GoFundMe helps cover the costs of professional support, documentation, accessibility work, legal review, and the practical costs of continuing this project.

Use the Manus referral

There is a Manus referral link on the site. Using it may help me access additional credits for project development and analysis.

Contact my MP or relevant representatives

If you understand the housing, accessibility, benefits, or institutional issues described here, one useful form of support is helping ensure they are seen by people with the power to act.

Polite, clear, evidence-based contact is more useful than outrage alone.

Offer professional support

I would especially welcome help from people with relevant expertise in:

• • disability rights

  • housing law

  • social care

  • occupational therapy

  • accessibility

  • safeguarding

  • neurodivergent communication

  • research

  • editing

  • public policy

  • systems design

  • web development

  • evidence review

Share carefully

If something here helps you understand disability, neurodivergence, communication, food systems, adaptive design, or institutional failure differently, please share it.

The aim is not for people to copy my life.

The aim is for people to understand the design principles well enough to build systems that work for their own lives.

This work began when peers from ADHD Babes asked me how I adapted specific strategies for my own life. Answering that question required reverse-engineering the whole system.

This site is not about inspiration.

It is not about overcoming disability through determination.

It is about showing that many so-called personal failures are actually design failures.

When the right supports, tools, environments, communication formats, and timing are in place, capability changes.

Participation becomes possible.

The system is the unit of capability.

That is what I am building here.