On Disability Assistance

Breaking generational trauma by asking for help

I had another post ready, but something happened yesterday that was a big deal.

I was officially accepted for a poverty reduction program where I live, which is the first step to being recognized as a PWD-Person with Disabilities-that can open up more support for me.

What does this mean? Based on my income, my diagnoses and ability to work I have been granted financial assistance for housing, bills and garnered some medical coverage for therapies and dental.

I did not think this would happen so fast. Everything I read online said 3-6 month wait, overburdened systems, undoubtedly you’ll be denied first time round. None of this happened for me. Making the initial application had its difficulties and I needed to ask for help to do certain things, but then it just was suddenly addressed. I was shocked.

For months I have been laying in bed praying to whatever, that I can no longer fight. Cant something just happen. For most of the things I worked so hard for have disappeared, been taken, shut down, turned around, withdrawn, stopped. My world has been seismically reduced, again -literally-to a single room with a window that I cant even comfortably pay for month by month.

My life has been a decades long regression, a private battle of worthlessness and financial trauma because I couldn’t communicate or even realize my support needs-and if I did, it came with the shame of feeling immature and busted among all my contemporaries who held jobs, built careers, made families and even divorced, all within the span of my still not being able to consistently brush my teeth and clean my room. Things 8 year olds can do.

I started this newsletter because I finally know how to talk about all the life I have experienced that no one knows about. I haven’t even been able to bring myself to disclose what really happened around ‘21-22 that fully imploded the tenuous grasp on reality I had. I went through it and have shared it with no one. It is still unresolved and I cant bring myself to type it, but it is to do with money.

I really believe that I am breaking generational curses. No one on either side of the family went to such lengths to understand their mental states (and there were states) nor how it could be the connective tissue of life’s systems, including finances.

The anger and passive aggression I witnessed growing up from both sides was the baseline, watching as the entire family system fractured, estranging everyone as they melted into the molds made for them based on repeated traumas. When my past therapist asked how my family’s financial ruin affected me, I told him it didn’t. To say I was wrong is an understatement. I was utterly disconnected.

Today I am celebrating in my own way. Crying, feeling actual relief for this tangible change. I was silently taught that you just keep going. No matter how you feel, how unappreciated you are, just stay the course and something will come along to help. I was never taught to ask for help before you drown because my parents were never shown, my grand parents simply believing that to live was to suffer in silence.

But of course, they never said that.