by Jack Bragen
Living with a mental illness can sometimes be a no-win scenario.
If you fail to take your medication or if you fail to follow other rules, you are subject to being thrown out on the street from your housing because you are considered a troublemaker.
If, on the other hand, you’re taking your medication and you’re doing all of the things you are expected to do, people might say you’re not disabled, and you will be thrown out of your housing, and your benefits could be cut off.
Yet, I have come to realize that keeping up appearances is an essential part of surviving. This is akin to many animals adapting to hide their pain, so as not to seem like a good catch for a predator. If you are a human being and if you have let it go too much, society will stop serving you, and the system will come after you. Society also has a predatory characteristic.
But you must also maintain that you are disabled. You might be better off if you do not come across as too accomplished or too “with it.” I’m not advising that you fabricate anything. Yet people should be able to see the struggle you’re having.
I live in an affluent area and I’m poor. Sometimes when I’ve gone to Walgreens, people have avoided me or have behaved as though I spell trouble. I recently invested thirty dollars in a haircut and beard trim. This was a good investment. It made me more comfortable in public and probably made me more relatable.
But now I might look well put together. Will people think I’m not disabled?
My disabled status is provable.. Four years ago, the government examined and verified me for a “continuing disability.” I don’t think it’s possible to fake these disability assessments, because the very capable psychologists and physicians who perform the exams can spot a faker.
A friend brought up that I am not job-ready, because I struggle merely to get a load of laundry done and do other basic tasks. A job developer at the Department of Rehabilitation expressed a lot of pessimism concerning my ambition to be employed.
The aforementioned shifts the emphasis of the struggle. Although I might need to occasionally substantiate being disabled, I really need and want to have more economic security. I don’t fit into a 9-to-5 job, and consequently I need to come up with alternatives. In general, when mentally ill people age but remain in acceptably good health, we have the opportunity and often the need to earn a few dollars, unless we have family with unlimited wealth who will take care of us. There are some people in that situation.
The possibility of homelessness is a specter that haunts some of us. Some of the people reading this likely have been homeless. I could not survive that, being sixty years old and being dependent on pharmaceuticals, in addition to having osteoarthritis and a slew of other health issues that will remain minor as long as I am living in relatively comfortable conditions.
Aside from mental illness and sleep apnea, I have arthritis in my lower body, and I have spinal stenosis. That could qualify me for not being able-bodied, and it could allow me to legitimately dodge the Trump Administration’s requirement of eighty hours per month of work or other activity to qualify for Medicaid benefits. But that doesn’t produce money in my pocket.
Survival for a disabled older person is directly related to how much they have in the bank. It’s also a matter of health, of relationships, and of the soul. You can have every physical need met to the max, you can be materially well-off, but that alone doesn’t keep you going. In the news there are occasionally gruesome stories of the rich and famous who decided that what they had was not sufficient. I won’t name names. Concerning health, an example is Steve Jobs, one of the wealthiest people in recent history, who fell ill to pancreatic disease and died. To live, you must have your health.
And you must have your soul. The soul can be violated, injured, or wrecked. If we experience too many adverse situations, or too much trauma, the soul can be compromised. This affects our ability to keep going.
If we don’t have a good reason to be here or if we don’t have something to look forward to, “survival” could seem pointless.
Life doesn’t have a money-back guarantee and it doesn’t promise anything. We can’t always make an unworkable situation work. But we should keep trying whenever possible.
Jack Bragen’s writings are searchable.
