Thank you so much those of you who made charitable comments.
I do know that a lot of the news site comments are infested with trolls and I do try to let it roll off my back, but now and then I still need to vent a little.
If I could sum up my earlier adult life, I see things I should have done differently. Hindsight is always 20-20. But when I look at the available options and remember my own mental states at the time, I wonder if, given the chance to do it over, I would have had the guts to choose the more anxiety-provoking yet more sensible options. It’s so hard to tell.
One thing that many people don’t get is that the majority of people on assistance are on it short-term. People who have fallen on hard times might still look a lot better off. Take my own situation - I’m young and come from an upper middle class family. I’ve had some pretty serious mental health issues that flared up in the middle of graduate school, and my mother’s harassment makes them enough worse that going home was never an option.
But what does it look like if I walk into an assistance office? I’m young and appear physically healthy (despite actually being somewhat underweight from stress). I may be wearing designer jeans and a nice top that my family bought me 3 years back - or the sturdy designer skirt I found at Goodwill for $10 and repaired. I’ve got my smartphone from the same source - I can’t be without a cell because rental places no longer come with landlines, and it’s not economical to downgrade due to contracts.
Of course I got turned down because (1) I’m really trying to stay in school, which apparently made me ineligible despite not being able to manage more than a few hours a week out of the house, (2) my family kept saying they would help out but then never did, (3) I wanted to be able to keep enough money in the bank to be able to pack up and move if I needed to, but that put me over the asset limit, and (4) I couldn’t afford the medical documentation they wanted. In a way, my whole impression of the system around here was that it was designed to keep people dependent, blocking off both education and savings for anyone receiving aid.
Our stories are so alike, as I said in another thread. One reason I didn’t want to apply back in my early 30s was that most people I knew who were on disability for psychiatric issues . . . how to put it delicately . . . did not present well. For a brief time when I was extremely depressed, a person I knew talked me into going to a community drop-in center. It was an okay place for those who comprised the majority of the clientele, namely those who had been released when state mental hospitals closed. Many of these were of subnormal intelligence, or had psychotic disorders (and the side effects of those strong meds they had to be on, which killed a cousin of mine by destroying her kidneys).
When I was at rock bottom I felt like, “Maybe I really do belong here.”
But there was another part of me that thought “Surely this is not where I belong - and I feel really bad for those who don’t have much more to look forward to, but if they’re happy here, more power to them.” It was a dilemma; I didn’t want to be snobbish or disloyal but I also was floundering. The question was finally resolved when one of the other clients acted abusively and I realized I needed to cut the ties with that place - and immediately felt better.
But anyway, that was my stereotype image for “people on disability for mental issues.” So I soldiered on with the anxiety and agoraphobia, and the (as yet undiagnosed) ADD and other things - all of which contradicted one another, so that if I found a job that accommodated one, the others would crop up like a Whack-A-Mole game. It’s good that I did, in the end, because I paid enough into the system to get on SSDI instead of SSI which is ridiculously impoverishing and a dead end.
BTW, some people with serious mental disorders who use street drugs, alcohol, or tobacco are attempting to self-medicate. Just sayin’.
