Well ****
Alright, here's how my brain is doing right now: There is a difference between being 58 and having the injuries and problems some people now have, and being 20 and realizing that you never got to be a person because you haven't been able to properly walk for the past 3 years, and now suddenly can't at all, and all of that with depression that has been keeping me from getting a leg up on all this since I was 9. I'm looking at the problems I have, when I should be going to college, getting my own job, moving out of my mother's house, you know, having my own life, and realizing that if I ever did move out, I would die, and then trying to picture myself in 10 years, 20 years, and imagining that nothing's changed. I'm still here, broken, living like something that can't contribute to the world anymore. And now I'm 50. All the things a person should do in that time period, I never got to do. I've probably been entirely alone, except for close family, but who says they'll still be around. My mother'll be 70, by the time I'm 50, my grandparents will be either 90 or dead. And my grandpa's already almost 70, so he'll be... 100? Yeah. I'm going to be all alone, and when my mother starts having physical problems, she's only going to have me. This pathetic, helpless, depressed, THING that will never be able to help her when she really needs me. There is nothing about me that redeems the fact that I'm alive, except that if I wasn't, nobody would understand my mother's jokes. In fact, she told me this the other day. "This is why I need you around, Meg. If you didn't work with me, nobody would have a clue what I was talking about." meanwhile, I'm sitting in the office the entire day, answering phonecalls and basically saving the day, and my brain says, "Hey, if you weren't here, nobody would mind. They wouldn't even notice. Why do you even bother coming in, all you do is make people unhappy with the fact that you're sitting in the office, and I mean, you can't help out on the floor now can you, and they're out there working their asses off." How do you argue with that? "Well," I say, "If I wasn't here, people would have to get the phones themselves, and nobody would be able to get anything done,"... god what a weak excuse. That's like saying that if sunglasses didn't exist, people would walk around blinded. Yeah, I help... but would they really not be totally fine if I never existed in the first place? If I hadn't been there, they would have never known the sun was in their eyes, and that there was an alternative.
Replies
hmm.
1. admin is vital. I used to have a lovely young man on the floor who was Aspergers. He simply couldn't do certain tasks. He felt low, he felt unusable, he felt like we pitied him and he wasn't worth his pay. He was on minimum wage. He couldn't sort fruit, he couldn't pack fruit fast enough. His brain would go into a whir. We would find other roles for him to perform but he felt low, and ashamed.
Well. He was a bucket boy at this time. His job at that time was to pick the buckets out of the bins and give them to the cherry sorters who were all up on stands. Wheel away the bins, bring out new bins. Take away empty buckets.
Sorters would take barcodes off the buckets that the pickers had put there, and put them on their sheets to show how many buckets they'd sorted. Some buckets would come in with 2 labels on them. If a sorter saw this, she might take both labels and put both on her sheet, showing as 2 buckets sorted instead of 1.
I remember asking him to pick off spare labels when there were 2.
Because of his Asbergers he said 'but what do I do with the label I pick off?'
Because he had Asbergers and I knew he would need a destination, I said 'stick them on the back of the run sheet' (sheet we used to tell us what fruit were being sorted, what price, what grades, &c.)
He did this.
Because of his 'disability' he saved us heaps of money. Our runs were coming out perfect, saving me time.
Because of his 'disability' we had the barcodes of the pickers who were doubling up on labels and we could track them down and make them stop. If he hadn't asked, I would not have suggested the back of the run sheet. Without that suggestion we could not have tracked the labels. I sure wasn't thinking about it. But it turned out that way.
Don't assume that what you are is not valuable. Sometimes the things we see as detriments actually contribute to a special flavour that makes us worth more in certain roles.
You have to find the qualities that make you better. Maybe not being able to run around has honed your fine motor skills. Maybe it has honed your memory, or your mental skills.
Don't assume that the one thing you don't have is the be-all and end-all of your identity. To many people it's probably entirely irrelevant. They hire you for what you CAN do, not what you can't.
2. People mentally have trajectories into the future that don't have any room in them for CHANGE. Where did you factor into your view of your life at fifty the advances in medicine already picking up speed so dramatically?
Where did you factor in the change of your life, the getting of better jobs, career moves, personal growth, personal development? What makes you feel that you at 20 is the same person as you at 50? Dear lord I am nothing like my 20 yr old self. :) I am way better. And most of that happened after I turned forty.
:)
How exactly is life supposed to change when I don't have the energy to change it? I feel that I'll still be the same person because this is the same person I've been since I was about 12. In the past 8 years, the 8 years meant to be the most important in a young person's life, I went to school, waited until I could graduate... and then stopped. If I wasn't working with my mother, I wouldn't have a job at all. It doesn't matter if there are new medications, because I don't have insurance. We don't make enough, but we make too much for people to think we need help. My stepfather is keeping us from living in a house, because he refuses to sign a paper that would let my mother stop owning a house we once lived in a long time ago. I've tried to progress, but I keep slipping back instead. I do things for the store I work at, make training sheets, lists of things that need to be done, but nobody really looks at them. I know, because they keep making the same stupid mistakes they made before I had them. What am I supposed to do?
I find that teaching these people takes one-on-one trainings. it's just something about people: they want to be told, they want to be shown, they don't want to learn without being personally taught. So I do a lot of one-on-one stuff.
But prior to that you have to get your line manager's consent to go ahead with the training. Without the backing of the higher ups, without teeth when people won't learn, there is no teaching and it won't happen at all.
You've got problems right now, and looking at them I can see they are not okay. ex step dad is not being okay. Have you gone to visit him, to find out why he is being like this? Perhaps hearing his side of the story will help him offload whatever hangup he's got going on. Usually when people refuse to sign things, there's some way they want to be heard, something they want to get off their chest. They're using this as collateral to get that thing. So find out what he wants and see how to give it to him, and he will release the house.
As to how you have been, did you get to go to the doctor yet for wellbutrin or similar? You have to push at this or else ask mum to push at it. Someone has to keep pushing and putting it in their diary until it resolves.
You're 20 now, and at your age you may manage to resolve one issue a year, but that's 30 major daunting issues by the time you're fifty. Here's the trick though: you speed up. You get better at things. You get better at rejecting this bad idea and going for that good one. The dross falls away. The landscape becomes simpler and quicker.
Early decisions, early fights with motivation and energy and confusion take ages. But speed improves and efficiency improves. Rather like learning a piece of music. You think it's really hard at the start, you can't see how you will ever get there. But if you just plod at the issues day after day, then very very quickly you have mastered the thing. You only see it looking back.
And you won't see it when you are depressed because your brain will go into tunnel vision.
My stepdad is somewhere in PA with his new girlfriend. We haven't seen him since I was... 18? Yeah, I saw him at graduation, but that was the last time I ever saw him. My mother and I have both been trying to get him to sign it, but he unfriended her on facebook and gives excuses when she asks him to do something about it (I'm waiting for a check to go through, I have a lot of work this week, I don't have time, they're working on it, that kind of thing) If he actually talked to us, we would be able to resolve it, but he's being as pigheaded as he ever was.
We tried to get Medicaid, but we don't qualify because we're a thousand over the bracket, and if I wanted to get even a single medical visit to an urgent care clinic, it would be between 100 and 400 dollars... with my paycheck, that's half of a month's worth of money for me, and my mother doesn't exactly have money laying around either. We simply don't have the money for it. And even if we did have enough to get a UC doctor to look at me, getting the medication isn't going to be part of that.