If your medical situation impacts your life in any way, that’s a disability. Being short sighted is a disability, having chronic diarrhea is a disability. Having a disability and being disabled should be the same thing in common speech, but confusingly, it is not. You are disabled if you experience significant barriers to everyday life because of medical circumstances. If you believe that’s you, then you are free to identify as disabled.

Another confusing wrench is governmental disability designations. The definition changes from region to region based on politics, not medicine. This is only a metric of whether or not you require the services available to you in your region. It is not your identity and does not mean you are not disabled or don’t deal with disabilities, no matter how impactful.

So in short, you get to identify as disabled if you feel the label is helpful, it’s not something doctors use because any medical impediment is a disability. It’s more a societal term than a technical one.