*stares blankly at the wall*I opened this window to do

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*stares blankly at the wall*

I opened this window to do something, I was going to write about– huh. assorted things. i think. my goodness i am tired. health insurance and housing, and confusion.

well #1 I need to get my supervisor to write a letter I can send to the health insurance people explaining my income because since I’m part-time seasonal my last two paychecks, which happen to be nearly-full-time, are not representative of my income and will not entitle me to the degree of subsidy I ought to be able to get through NYS’s health insurance exchange, so I sat all day long and could not make my mouth open to mention it to him, so I’m going to have to send him an email and hope he doesn’t think I’m super weird that I couldn’t say it out loud. my god it would not come out of my mouth, i even rehearsed the words to say, and could not do it, I don’t know what’s up with me and verbal communication but it’s just fucking unreal. I even wrote the damn letter, did all the math to work out what I need, the whole thing. Couldn’t say anything. Ugh. 

and #2 Dude’s mom owns the house we live in, and had been planning on leaving it to Dude and his only sibling (sister) in her will, but was like, why should I wait until I die, let’s just do this now (she recently went on some kick where she figured out that her mother had died when she was 12 years older than she herself is now, so in her mind she’s got 12 years left to do Everything, I don’t ask, she’s a weird dude and very similar to my guy so I’m generally amused but sometimes a little alarmed), and Dude to me was like, is there any reason we shouldn’t buy out my sister’s share in this house we’ve lived in for ten years, and I was like, no; I only live here part-time but there’s still no reason not to own it. We pay basically nothing in rent and so it will cost us more to actually sort it all out properly, but, then we’d own it and could sell it etc so that makes sense. So, sure, no big; then we could actually make repairs to it instead of sort of letting it gently fall down around our ears. I mean, it’s not, but it needs work that we don’t want to ask his mom to do but also don’t want to do if we don’t own it. 

But. I sort of told myself that not being married to Dude was fine because we don’t have kids or own property, and then we’d own property. Or, he would, and then I’d sure feel weird about that. But, if we’re married, we’ll owe more in taxes– we just will, the marriage exemption is a farce– and then I won’t be eligible for low-cost health insurance anymore, and his company doesn’t actually provide it, he has to buy unsubsidized insurance on the exchange. It’s astonishing how much that costs. I’d be right there with him. You’d think there’d be some discount on insurance for two people but there isn’t, not really– I think they’re assuming you’ll be having babies, so it’s mucho expensivo. So we literally can’t really afford to get married. And anyway, he doesn’t want to, he turned me down when I asked (he just said why? thanks buddy) and I’ve kind of felt like shit about that ever since. I’ll be fucked if I bring that sore fucking topic up again. So i’m just going to either not have my name on the deed or just co-own a house with a dude, no big. I don’t even know.

anyway isn’t it great that I’m super terrible at being a fucking adult. mentioned the possible house deal to my parents and they offered $$$ to help, and that’s fine, I know my parents try to be scrupulously fair about giving assistance to their offspring, and have given my older sister a lot of time and expense in travel for babysitting, my middle-little a ton of cash to pay for grad school and similar, and Farmsister, well, tons of incidental money and short-term loans and also co-signing on their mortgage and babysitting their child two whole days a week, so it wouldn’t be unreasonable for me to accept assistance in buying a house, nor would it be unfair, because I haven’t really needed anything from them since college, and I’m incidentally super pleased that my parents have spare money now they’ve retired because they sure as fuck didn’t the entire time I was their actual dependent (I mean that, it was hard on them too), but also, I think, that is a lot to think about and I think Dude will be vaguely insulted by offers of money but you know, my guy, I put your skinny ass through college on my fucking credit cards, do not roll your eyes at me. (I paid them off. then he got a job that paid good money. In that order. Important.)

I feel like these two issues are such a good encapsulation of the trap of my generation/socioeconomic caste, though. Like, I have money, I can get money, good for me, I’m not complaining, it’s a damn sight better than many, but I don’t really have like, regular money that I can count on, nor do I have any real guarantee of stability. Dude makes a great salary at his job, it’s literally five (six?) times what I make per hour, it’s a great job. (Software engineer.) But he’s also aware that jobs in his industry rarely last more than three or four years at the outside, and also that programmers older than forty, mayybe 45, rarely get hired. He’s 37 and staring down the barrel of being unemployable. Ageism is impossible to prove, but he watches it happen all the time. By now he’s the old man on any given team. And his company is great, but they’re expressly a startup looking for a bigger company to buy them out; that’s happened numerous times to Dude, and it always, always sucks for the actual dev team when that happens, and is often the reason why jobs don’t last more than three or four years.

It’s grim. You don’t want to make any promises. You don’t want to do anything that moves you away from the things you’ve used to survive. I’ve spent my entire life insecure and never believing that anything I had would really be mine next time I checked. 

I’m so tired. And I can’t fucking concentrate. And I keep running into things where I’m paralyzed and can’t just– do the thing that would fix it. It’s exhausting. 

I’m lucky. 

I can’t keep up. 

Hey though I just managed to take a shower, which I’ve been trying to get myself to do for a solid couple days now, so there’s that. (I mean. I didn’t smell bad, and I never wash my hair more than once a week, so that wasn’t any worse than usual, but. I really wanted a real shower, you know? Why is that hard? I don’t know, but I’ve been fucking paralyzed about it.)

luninosity: “It is almost universally the case

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luninosity:

“It is almost universally the case in everyday life that the most cherished object is one that has been hand-made by a friend: there is no mystery about this, for the object’s material attributes themselves record and memorialize the intensely personal, extraordinary because exclusive, interior feelings of the maker for just this person—This is for you. But anonymous mass-produced objects contain a collective and equally extraordinary message: whoever you are, and whether or not I like you or even know you, in at least this small way, be well. Thus, within the realm of objects, objects-made-for-anyone bear the same relation to objects-made-for-someone that, within the human relation, caritas does to eros. Whether they reach someone in the extreme conditions of imprisonment or in the benign and ordinary conditions of everyday life, the handkerchief, blanket, and bucket of white paint contain within them the wish for well-being: don’t cry; be warm; watch now, in a few moments even these constricting walls will look more spacious.”

–Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World

klyaksa1 replied to your post “*stares blankly

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I’m so sorry you are dealing with this! Depression can definitely be paralyzing and can impair your ability to handle what seem like very minor issues so they start looking insurmountable. That said, a lot of the difficulties you describe seem to have a common cause. It might be a better investment of your mental resources to try and get treatment (and stick with it) rather then to keep playing catch-up and end up feeling constantly overwhelmed.

Pretty much everything is hung up on me needing to get health insurance, and I can’t do anything until I do that, and I know that, but I do have to attempt to live my life in the meantime. I don’t even know what you mean by playing catch-up; I have literally no choice but to continue to live my life in the absence of treatment until I can get through all the steps that are standing between me and treatment, starting with my lack of health insurance. I’m not even sure what else this is about. Have I said I don’t plan on seeing a doctor? Did I not mention the part where I don’t have health insurance and it’s becoming impossible for me to navigate?

 For the record, though, I have undergone treatment for this, years and years of different medications, and it never made a radical difference, only a subtle one, and some of the differences were actually negative. (The best was when I asked my doctor about pursuing an ADHD diagnosis and she dismissed me out of hand, but second-best was when I asked a different doctor and he said “sure!” and handed me the name of a specialist I’d need to see, who wasn’t covered under my insurance, and then that was that, there was apparently no other way to go forward. Another doctor scribbled down a list of names for me of “therapists” but they were just names, and when I Googled them, it was not apparent who this doctor had intended them to be, or what for, and I’m not entirely sure what I was strictly meant to do with this list of what amounted to random words, so nothing ever came of that either. For the record, these doctors were all part of the same practice and spent the majority of my time there writing everything down, or reviewing the previous notes, so it’s not like they didn’t know what the issue was or I didn’t have continuity of care. They sure did; that’s about all I had.) 

So simply urging me to ‘get treatment’ is a lovely bit of advice but not one that’s in any way helpful to me. I know! I know there are things that can be done! But I have no access to those things presently, and somehow, I have to go on anyway. 

I don’t mean to be snappish, at all, I genuinely appreciate people’s expressions of sympathy and apparent desire to help, I just can’t really parse what this was meant to mean. It’s great that this word “treatment” exists but it’s also great that the moon exists, and they’re about equally relevant to me just now. I have no health insurance, there are a number of hoops I need to jump through to try to get them, and then the difficulty of making appointments with medical professionals when at any given time I am in one of two 300-mile distant locations with totally different health insurance networks is not insignificant, and all of this takes mental resources I just don’t have, and especially, planning for a future I literally don’t have the dimension of vision to even see. 

And in my experience, “treatment” means “take some pills that make you gain enough weight that your clothes don’t fit, continue to be a forgetful, disorganized piece of shit that sometimes can’t have orgasms, then forget to refill the prescription because your executive function’s no better than it was, go through horrible withdrawal symptoms, tell a doctor later and have them shake their head slightly, tell you not to do that, and change the subject.”

Oh, I can’t fucking wait.

torrilin replied to your post “*stares blankly

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Bleergh. We got married because of health insurance. The partner critter’s job provides it, and well. He likes me being healthy and stuff. But there’s other factors too, like WI is a community property state, and both of us have deeply weird anticapitalist credit history that is marginally less problematic when married. But that’s super not normal for disabled/near disabled people, and it fills me with rage. Bonus rage because it’s very likely my parents should get divorced asap for disability.

Ughhhhh I feel you. My folks had very easy choices about all this, and their pensions etc. mean that their pursuit of the very easy normal path is rewarded. 

Of my sisters, one married because of Army rules, the other for access to insurance. My parents find that sort of thing cynical! But the rules benefited them so they’re not really aware of it!

My officemate’s mother just had to divorce her husband right before he died, because otherwise she would have lost her house to pay for his terminal care. It was horrible. She was so distraught. And it fucked up the will! It was a shit-show. 

I think my dude refused to marry me because he thought if I was on his insurance I’d just never get a job again, which is horrible to contemplate– that he had that little faith in me, or what. I just don’t want to even bring it up because the whole thing hurt my feelings so much. 

It’s obnoxious that it’s such a complicated issue. It’s obnoxious that our connections to basic social services are so often so extremely tenuous, and through things that genuinely should not have to bear that sort of weight. 

I don’t know, there’s no easy solution and society’s disinterested in exploring any solutions anyway. 

bodhijyns: I was protecting you.

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bodhijyns:

I was protecting you.

jemmaprophet said: This is a wretched situation

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jemmaprophet said: This is a wretched situation – but I have to sideye The Dude a little bit if he isn’t at least considering the issue. If he loves you, and hopefully he does, he should want you to stay healthy. And that means insurance and doing what it takes to get you onto it. Though with what you’re earning, I’m shocked you don’t qualify for Medicaid?

I *do* qualify, if I can jump thru the hoops. If I marry him, though, I don’t, and won’t have any option. His job does not provide valid insurance, they’re outside NYS and so their plan doesn’t have any providers within 300 miles of us.
So I can’t marry him and still have access to health insurance; I’d have to purchase it unsubsidized on the exchange. Which, presumably, he could afford, but. Our finances are inextricably entwined, and have been for a long time, and for many years I supported *him*, so I refuse to be guilty about it now, but I am always low-grade aware that I contribute less than a quarter of the income to this household, and spend more than he does (all that driving…), and so by now surely he’s paid back all the cash I fronted him early in our relationship and much more than that, but I’m still uncomfortable about it a ltitle bit.
About a decade ago is when we last discussed getting married, and he said no, and at another point I asked him to consider it just for insurance, but it wouldn’t have helped. So, I seem not to have explained that properly before, but there’s a long history here. He does want what’s best for me now; his past apparent belief that I’d freeloader was a solid dozen years ago.
He also refused to list me as a beneficiary on his life insurance back then, but apparently changed his mind at some point and seemed insulted when I was surprised.
I don’t always know what his deal is. But I do know we have joint retirement and savings accounts, and I put money in those early on but lately, all the contributions are him. 

He’s not coming across well in these stories, I guess. I don’t think i’m expressing myself at all well overall, ugh. 

BUT, I did get the letter I needed from my supervisor (I couldn’t ask out loud, but I emailed him and he’s used enough to me that he didn’t seem to think it was that weird), so I can hopefully complete my application to the state for subsidized insurance, and hopefully, hopefully, at least get that taken care of.