How you know
This is how you know you are sick:
This is how you know you are REALLY sick, and not getting better:
Note the effective date: August 2004. Note the time period for under $14k a year income: 3 years.
This means my loans are already forgiven, and I just have to send them the paperwork.
On the one hand, it's nice to be out from under a chunk of debt. And if I should live long enough and find the will to try, I can even go back to college eventually, shouold I regain enough capacity to actually succeed at school, and should it make any sense to me to spend that kind of time and effort in my 40s.
On the other, this is one of the very hardest government acknowledgements of disability to get. And I wouldn't be getting it if there was any chance at all of me getting better, short of some miraculous breakthough.
If I'm lucky, I leave the house thrice in a week, and all but one of those times will typically be a mile round trip to my PO box and maybe the bank. Anything more than 20 minutes on a motorcycle hurts like hell. I still have not been able to complete repairs on the truck after I wrecked it something like 6 months ago, because I just cannot hack lifting bodywork into place on a truck any longer.
It's frightening, watching your capabilities slip away from you. Scary seeing more and more control over your life disappearing. Scary knowing you have no safety net. Scary knowing how many people hate you because they believe you can do more than you and just decided not to.
My life is not a happy, fun place. Ever, really. Every now and again it gets a little exciting, and sometimes I can work hard enough at it to forget how dismal and terrifying things are. But that's as far as it goes. A lovely little hell, a prison in the shape of a body. I know some people who will feel that it is just desserts. Maybe they are right. More on that later..