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Over the past two or three decades, the caprices of fortune have not boded well for mentally ill disabled people. If a person has a mental or emotional difference that makes it hard for them to get and maintain work, it is automatic that they are at risk for homelessness. The amount we receive to live on is inadequate in the San Francisco Bay Area to pay for housing, forcing some to accept institutionalized housing when this is not appropriate for their level of development. Meanwhile, others have it worse. 

Blaming the victim has invariably been the default. This is blaming a disabled adult as being at fault for his or her disability. Some imply a psychiatric condition is a defect of character and mentally divergent people need to straighten themselves out. Employed people are fond of saying they are intrinsically better than the disabled person, because "I have a job, I work for a living." It is a superiority complex, and it is built on false ground. 

Mentally ill people are capable people unless proven otherwise, and those of us over eighteen are actual adults, and we ought to be afforded the same basic respect that most people believe themselves to deserve. 

Some have asserted mentally ill people become homeless because of bad decisions caused by not taking our medication. Bunk. The government doesn't give us enough, rents are too high, food is too high, and we have a corrupt, tangled mess of a social service system. And let's not forget the courts. I won't even go into that one. 

Yet, it is up to us to find a way we can survive, maintain housing, and keep fed, medicated and safe. The reality is no one is going to do this for us, if we are considered competent adults. 

If we can't afford housing because either we can't get hired or because we can't handle the rigors of a job, we need to find another way. It will be different for everyone. If we have a method of bettering our circumstances, we should employ that method, so long as it is safe, legal, and legitimate. There may be some job that would be a job match, that we haven't yet explored. Doing that could be uncomfortable, but it is probably better to be in the category of "employed", so that even if we can't always work, we can have a time of doing better. 

When I worked at nighttime cleanup in 1983, servicing "Flair Markets" in the East Bay, and later when I delivered pizza for Rocket Pizza, I earned enough money to live on and I felt like I was a normal person. And I in fact had money. When I did electronic repair, I didn't earn as much, for whatever reasons. My condition may have affected it, and in a lot of those jobs, the expectations were too much. When self-employed at it, I still couldn't make enough. So, we may not always get a "respectable job" but at least, in a job with less social status, we have provided for ourselves. 

(Today's essay is a ramble--you might have guessed that by now.) 

The value of being employed, even if it doesn't last, is partly that it lends feeling like a "normal" "real" person, "adult". For example, if we need a car repair, paying for it on our own rather than getting a parent to pay for it could be liberating. Collecting a paycheck is liberating. This is so even though we are expected to report our earnings. 

About life: you envision yourself being something or someone, or doing something; you do it, and later it is gone. That's just how it works. Everything goes away at some point. 

There is something to be said for showing up for work every day, putting in a shift, driving home, sleeping, and doing it again the next day. Multiply that by 300 shifts or so, after you subtract weekends and holidays, and you have a year in which you've worked. 

I have done this in my past. Today, I still work--at writing, which is usually an unpaid endeavor. I've been doing this for two decades. I'm labeling it "inverse retirement." 

At some point I hope to have enough sources of paid work in this field so that I can better my financial situation. It is already beginning to feel like a job; wherein I do it whether I feel like it or not. It is an invisible line. And when you cross that line, somewhere up ahead comes the money, I hope. 

Jack Bragen lives and writes in Martinez, California.