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Assessment at the state hospital pointed in two directions: high-school equivalency classes, or work. The teachers at this mental-health, long-term facility assessed me, and found that I did quite well on their academic tests. I heard a few whisper, “She’s done better than I’d ever do.” I had not only achieved a B.A. degree, after the onset of mental illness, but also carried certification to teach the G.E.D. I thought I’d teach my fellows. But no.
The next day, I was at “work” tacking decorations on Christmas wreaths with a terrible sticky-glue gun for close to 65 cents an hour. We worked only two hours daily, averaging about 20 completely decorated wreaths per week.
The wreaths became more festive than me; soon, I slumped out of bed, clumsily washed up, and occasionally brushed my teeth. I never used deodorant anymore; none of us qualified to smell good, so we didn’t. Disheveled, we shuffled to commissary at the end of each week with our meager wage: $6.50, grand total. Week after week, month after month, the majority of us bought cigarettes, coffee and candy bars. Our money was gone then.
A week before Christmas, we were vandalized in spirit when we saw the sign in the mall: “These mentally ill people made these wreaths.” The price, for which we never received any of the profits: $65 per wreath!
“More porridge, please?”
“This is your last chance to work,” threatened the Bureau of Vocational Rehabilitation counselor. She sent me to sheltered work, cutting strings off pillowcases all day for 45 cents a day for five days a week. Boring. Boring.
At a payphone, right outside that depressingly green-brick building, I pay-phoned Dad. I told him I just lost the job. First day, mid-day, I lost the job. (Actually, I had not lost the job. I quit and asked for severance pay.) I cried. Dad said, “Take it upstairs.” His way of saying, “Pray about it.” I took it across town on a bus and enrolled at a university for my second degree—a master’s.
Three years later, having landed my own professional career as an instructor of philosophy and receiving excellent evaluations by both my supervisor and students, I had to relinquish such a coveted achievement; I made too much to keep my disability and too little to pay the rent.
My Ohio Directional card allots $10 per month for food. Churches give an abundance of canned goods, full of sodium. And they hardly give meat. Tuna is a staple. One whole chicken for a single-person family for Thanksgiving. They usually are closed around Christmas, or just focus on the children. You know, toys and stuff, not food.
Church and state do meet eye-to-eye on the issue of food. As an important American dignitary is said to have put it, “Food is a privilege.” And I am definitely in the category that I have heard some providers express: “Useless eaters!”
Our men say that with their SSI checks, they must choose between getting a haircut and/or shave, or getting deodorant each month. If they are in a group home, or if they have a payee, they can afford neither each month.
So don’t get peeved when that unshaved, smelly man begs you for enough money to secure a small, luxurious pleasure: “You got a cigarette?”
By the way, our medicines act like cough syrups, making us very drowsy and hampering motor reflexes. Our medicines blur our eyes in the same way that the optometrist dilates your eye pupil. But we are like this 24/7!
Think of that before you call him or any of us “able-bodied” enough to work! You see us coming: body disfigured with a large, listless look in our eyes, the occasional twitch of our face, rocking back and forth in our stance: “It’s the medicine, stupid!”
A wise and ancient Egyptian doctor, Imhotep, once said, “Let your food be your medicine, and your medicine, your food.”
“More porridge, please!”