I can’t tell you how much stress I have been under since October when I got a letter in the mail stating that disability had decided I was no longer in need of their services and without any warning what-so-ever they booted me off insurance and benefits. Thank God I wasn’t living anywhere that needed rent, I would have been evicted!!
I filed a disagreement with their decision and asked to be kept on benefits in the meantime. They asked me to see a state shrink and I complied. I thought I had a great rapport with this woman, she seemed to really understand that my issues weren’t my mental health, they were my physical health which is spontaneous and angry. I felt good about the whole situation. And then I heard nothing. For months.
Now, I was still stressed out under the threat of being booted off the system. No news is not always good news and I knew contacting them and asking what was up could also spell my doom so I didn’t. I have been out-of-my-mind stressed out from this situation to the point I haven’t been able to focus on anything. I stopped reading, I stopped doing book reviews, I stopped writing, I didn’t even have the energy to keep up a presence on Twitter. Fucking Twitter. And then I got a phone call stating that I was still under review and this time it’d be with “fresh eyes” as someone else took over my case. And I got a second request to see a shrink, a different shrink, all while being asked to fill out form after form after form asking the same questions again and again. Well at this point I was getting hostile. One of the questions was about my migraines, “Do you know what causes them?” to which I scrawled out in hastily written chicken scratch, “Good grief, if I knew what was causing them I’d be avoiding it like the plague!” I was no less testy with shrink #2 who did a MUCH shorter exam. I was pretty out of it that day.
So now I have received all my files back to help me prepare for the court appeal in a couple weeks. I read through them and I am fucking livid. Over and over and over again there are repeated requests to my normal doctors office for records and no evidence they ever sent anything at any point making it look like I was not going or doing anything for myself. In addition to that there was the reports from the shrinks and the first one, the one I liked and tried so hard to be normal and friendly towards, was a complete dick to me saying repeatedly that in her opinion I was of high intelligence and could function just fine in a work setting. She made no effort to say she meant this only in a psychological sense because my claim is and always has been for physical illness. The second shrink said much the same, that mentally speaking I was fine to work, but also made sure to mention that this only applied to my mental state, not my physical state. THANK YOU. That’s all I needed.
I don’t know if I will be kept on the system or not. What I do know is that the paperwork they sent me and people I know to write out are SUPER consistent over the years – because I’m not fucking lying! I’m on disability because my stomach pains and migraines at complete random like to lay me up in bed for days at a stretch. This is not conducive to being able to work. I don’t know what my triggers are and every doctor I have ever been to have labelled me a complete mystery so I have no real diagnosis. This doesn’t mean I pulling the claim out of my ass.
I am so fucking tired of fighting so hard for pennies. The most the average person on disability can receive a month is $721. That’s 2/3rds of a minimum wage job and we’ve already proved people cannot live on a single minimum wage job. I live with my parents because I don’t want to rely on having a romantic partner to have a roof over my head but they’re getting old and I am getting increasingly anxious about the situation. In addition to this I have zero faith I will be able to stay on the system considering this is the second time they’ve tried to dump me off it. The first time didn’t get as far as a court review but this time… this time did.
It’s not like I haven’t tried coming up with job ideas and making myself useful it’s just none of them have paid shit. Last month I made $5 on AdSense for my blogs. Last year I made $24 in book sales on the three novels I spent 15 years writing. I’ve tried to sell my photography, my art, literally everything I do and I spend every second I am “OK” trying to produce something, anything. And trust me being “above average intelligence” makes this just that much more frustrating when nothing pans out! So what am I going to do if they kick me for good? The only thing I can do to survive…. anything, until I burn out and go back to sleeping it off.