I Can’t Believe I Read the Whole Thing!

I just fin­ished skim­ming the 500+ friends’ page entries I’d missed in the last few days. Damn!

I should have been fin­ish­ing the enor­mous pack­et of forms I received in the mail yes­ter­day. They were from the state Depart­ment of Labor, regard­ing my dis­abil­i­ty claim. This was some­thing of a sur­prise to me—why would they be involved in a Social Secu­ri­ty mat­ter? But appar­ent­ly, they are. And they want every detail of every job I’ve had in the last 15 years. No, they don’t pro­vide enough pages to give them the infor­ma­tion they’re ask­ing for.

One of the forms is sev­en pages of ques­tions about “dai­ly life activ­i­ties.” Things like dress­ing, bathing, cook­ing, shop­ping, social­iz­ing, etc. 

They pro­vide absolute­ly no way to note that SOMETIMES I need help with all of the above—everything is “yes or no.”

They also have ques­tions about cog­ni­tive deficits. They want me to give spe­cif­ic exam­ples of how my mem­o­ry has been affect­ed. I have a feel­ing they won’t find an answer of “I can’t remem­ber” acceptable.

There is a bit at the end with a tiny lit­tle space for telling them about any effects that had­n’t been men­tioned yet. I told them that my sex life just isn’t the same. I think it’s ridicu­lous that they’d leave that out in the first place.

I’m still not com­fort­able with “dis­abled” as a label. I’m try­ing not to think too much about it.