Disability And Personal Finance – Part 1

I recently came across a blog called I pick up pennies and when I read the about me page, I wrote the author of the blog (Abigail) an email asking if we could swap guest post. I wanted her to write about her disability, a bit about her personal finance and how was the process of her application to get disability benefits. One of the reasons why I was interested in that is because too many (if not all) personal finance blogs are written by abled body people who simply talk about things like retirement, passive income, investment etc. But to someone who is on disability checks, I’m pretty sure their world could not be further from what’s written in the mainstream press and blogs. To my astonishment, Abigail wrote such a personal and touching piece that I was floored when I read it. Regular readers here would know that I do my best to provide updates on the best credit card and reward deals. I’ve occasionally written about other money topics but today (since it is the weekend), I am going to stray further and present you with this wonderful guest post from Abigail. In fact, the post is so long that I am breaking it into two parts. I hope that this will give us an insight to another group of folks who have a totally different set of problems than many of us. It sure makes me feel having credit card debt (while burdensome and stressful) is not the end of the world.

I was 25 years old when I applied for Social Security disability benefits.

My background – I had spent the last six years in various forms of denial about my condition. A rare, neurological disease, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, had landed me in the hospital for about three and a half months, most of which was spent on life support. Along with temporarily paralyzing most of my body, the illness had made my lungs too weak to draw enough oxygen on their own.

I rushed back into classes fall quarter – only five months after leaving the hospital, and about three months after I had learned to walk unassisted. I had severe bouts of fatigue, but denial enhanced my usual stubborn nature. I was sure I could get back to a “normal” life.

Life After College – After I was done with college, I tried various forms of jobs, but nothing was sustainable. Part-time didn’t bring in enough money. Full-time work left me so exhausted that I wept in the shower each morning out of pure fatigue. Two part-time jobs left me too scattered – and still too exhausted – to keep up, though I was able to set my own hours to an extent. I also tried temp work, but anything for more than a day or two, and I was useless.

I did try some resident manager work and later added occasional temp work to the mix. Even so, there were things that, between the depression and fatigue, I just couldn’t handle.

Lost in life – So, at age 25, I found myself living with my mom. She paid the rent, and I tried to rest up. Also, I spent time trying not to think too hard about my situation: I was jobless, too exhausted to do much of anything, and dependent on a parent for basic necessities.

I felt like I had taken a wrong turn somewhere, but the only one I found was completely out of my control. I hadn’t gotten sick from carelessness. It was just a random (10 people out of a million get Guillain-Barre) and senseless fact: I contracted a rare neurological disease, and it utterly changed the landscape of my life.

So when my mom told me to apply for disability, I knew it was really the only viable option. Still, I was crushed. But what choice did I have? Even three-day temp work was impossible. And no matter how much sleep I got, I woke up exhausted, my thinking lost in a fog of fatigue. No matter what I ate or how much I moderated my activity, I wasn’t seeing any progress

Still, I put it off for nearly two months. I knew that once I filled out that application, I would be admitting to something irreversible: being disabled. That simply wasn’t me. Disability was an abstract, terrifying notion – and it was something that happened to other people.

I had been working since I was 14. Actually, 12 if you count babysitting. The summer before college, I worked two full-time jobs to help pad my savings account. The summer after that, I worked one full-time and one part-time job.

In my family, a work ethic was important. It wasn’t so much what you do, but that you do it in a hard-working, dedicated fashion. So to admit I might never be able to work again… That was akin to admitting I had been stripped of one of the basic tenets of my personality.

Lost in despair – About a year after I got sick, I started to fall apart. Denial gets a bad rap, but it’s actually an important survival tool.Have traumatic stuff that your brain can’t handle? No problem, we’ll just cut it down into bite-sized chunks. You can take it in a bit at a time.

Really, it’s only when denial lingers – when you never get around to facing the reality of your situation – that it becomes a problem. And that’s where I was. When I told people the story of the previous year, I ended with, “But I’m okay now. I get tired, but I’m fine.”
It took my therapist a good 10 minutes of back and forth to get me to admit to life support:

“You were on life support.”
“Uh, no I wasn’t.”
“Well, let’s see: You were on a ventilator because you couldn’t breathe.”
“Right.”
“And you couldn’t chew or swallow, so they had you hooked up to a feeding tube.”
“Yeah.”
“And they had a heart monitor.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So you were on life support.”
“No.”

Another time around or so, and I got very quiet. And then I started to weep. To admit to life support was to admit to true, devastating, life-threatening trauma. But I needed everything to be alright. I needed everything to get back to normal.

My therapist diagnosed me with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, as well as depression – both from the illness and pre-existing depression that had probably always been there. I spent the next couple of years working with her and trying to get better, with varying degrees of success.

But, at age 25, I lost whatever composure I had maintained over those years. I was restless all the time. I was miserable, and felt tormented by my condition and my prospects for the future. While I had never considered the universe to be a fair place, I was devastated by the injustice being visited upon me.

What really got me, though, were the constant negative thoughts. The questions that wouldn’t go away. Could I ever take care of a child? Who would want a partner who couldn’t pull her own weight? Would I be a drain on my family forever?

As time wore on, the questions got louder, until they drowned out even the distractions I employed: TV, reading, Iming with friends. That is about the time I started having suicidal thoughts.

In retrospect, I’m sureprised they didn’t happen sooner. But at the time, it felt like one more weakness, one more failure – to maintain a semblance of sanity – in a long list of crushing defeats.

Stay tuned for part 2