As I said before, despite the fact that I am disabled, I grew up relatively priviledged. I had a lot of advantages, and those advantages included parents to catch me when I fell and fund my recovery, and some absolutely amazing therapists who helped me find my way when I was in recovery. Because of these advantages, I have been able to support myself and never had to reach out to any government or non-profit agencies for aid.
In addition to this, I have always hung out with people who are fairly intelligent and competent. Intelligence has always been a must in those I have spent time around, as people who can’t keep up with me have always bored me, and as I got more healthy, I cut those people who didn’t have their lives together out of mine because they had the potential to drag me down. So I have had very little visceral experience with having few choices while I have been healthy enough to understand all the implications of what that means.
One thing that I have struggled with over the years is keeping a job. My disabilities make it difficult for me to get to work consistently. Between chronic migraine headaches and an intermittent lack of willpower, I have missed an average of one day of work every week or two. Needless to say, this isn’t the kind of behavior that employers like. I have become very familiar with the Americans with Disabilities Act and Family Medical Leave Act and the legal protections they provide in my attempts to hold onto the jobs I have had, but even with these protections, holding a job has been hit or miss.
Recently, it has been more miss than hit. My last job lasted about two weeks before they found an excuse to fire me. They didn’t say they were getting rid of me due to attendance issues related to my disability, but everyone knows it was. They didn’t have any use for an employee that couldn’t be at his desk when they needed him to be, and I can respect that. Reliability is one of the key functions of the job I was hired to do, and I couldn’t promise them that. Legally they had to find another reason to fire me, and they did. The way it went down sucks, but life is like that sometimes.
The point of all this is that I’m taking this opportunity to do something I’ve never done before, which is apply for disability. There is a process in place for people who can’t work because they have a medical condition that prevents them from doing so. I have known that for years but have never taken advantage of it. Partially because I have worked so hard to be able to work that I didn’t want to, and partially because the process itself is just difficult. Well, now that $0$ is here, a large part of my job is going to be relating to people going through and helping people with this process. If I’ve never done it myself, that’s going to be difficult.
So it’s time for me to do it. If I’m going to relate to people who have no other choices, it’s time to put myself in their shoes. It’s time to put aside my privilege and do the things that others have no choice but to do. If helping others is going to be my job, then I need to understand others. In order to do that as best I can, I need to understand the process they have to go through. The best way to do that is to go through it myself. So that’s what I am going to do. My job now is to learn by doing.
