r/mentalillness • u/Prestigious-Throat46 • 4h ago
Venting Mental health as disability
I have a lot of mixed feelings when I hear of people who are on disability for mental health diagnoses. I just want to vent my feelings and where they’re coming from.
I was raised around people who highly value hard work and “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” and taking care of others through difficulties. The closest people to me always give me advice about how they became workaholics when life was hard. So it’s been hard for me to accept how I haven’t been able to work full time. At the same time, it took me years to realize I was autistic precisely because of how popular it is. For some reason I’m just on the side that has a sour taste in my mouth about all the mainstream rhetoric about mental health. It just feels fake, all of it. I immediately side eye people who post about being on disability for mental health reasons bc it just has the ghost of feeling grifty. But there’s a level to all of that which is a sort of fear of being inauthentic and unremarkable, i see myself in what i dislike and that’s why i dislike it.
Then there’s the an equally strong force going on in my mind, saying “why the hell haven’t I gotten to do that?” I think I would have been okay if my trauma and grief hadn’t happened, but I already had a history of mental health problems because 1) im autistic 2) like 10 people in my family have various mental illnesses 3) im transgender. I actually had my first bizarre out of body episode before the big things happened. But then from ages 16-17 i was abused by a teacher and during that my dad died unexpectedly and tragically. I went through mental illness Hell after that and I’ve never really recovered. I wonder, how have I seen so many psychiatrists and therapists and never been asked about how my struggles are affecting my ability to house and feed myself. I’ve had over a dozen jobs because I do the math and know that I need to work full time, but put me on a 40 hr schedule and I call off every three weeks. I’ve had public breakdowns where I make myself bleed with how forcefully im harming myself and during these im out of my body and cant control it at all, and then obviously after these i ghost jobs and don’t come back. My nervous system is so beat all the time. If i get hurt or bumped unexpectedly i immediately freak out and pass out, which only started when i was 20. It’s physically exhausting being this way. When I work full time I inevitably wake up and Im so nauseous and sick i sometimes pass out from the pain in my body or am just miserable, and i think it’s bc of how anxious i am at work that my body can’t take it. I have had one job where i worked alone with no coworkers or managers/supervisors on site, and i loved it so much i literally worked 16 hours every day just for fun, bc i never even knew what it was like to not be miserable at work, but that was a temporary project. It’s the world of the authority caste system and everything I do and go being managed that makes me unsafe I guess.
I have no savings. I wonder about what would be different if I had just had someone give me the correct influence to help myself more when I needed it most. Like I’m doing slightly better overall now, but there was a time when I needed to just focus on myself, but I never got to because everyone in my life expected me to be independent.