Last Updated on January 3, 2015
Word associations are revealing. When once a word is uttered, the immediate association of another concept provides a prelude to the cognitive perspective of an individual. Conceptual relationships are forged through upbringing, personal experiences, and memories fulfilled through impact, trauma, significance of meaning, and attribution of value. The thinking “I” within the subjective realm of a personal universe, is made up of ghosts of the past, goblins of present fears, and gadflies yet to swarm.
Medical conditions, and terms associated with diagnoses and disabilities, whether physical or psychiatric, tend to engender fear and loathing, precisely because of the limitations they impose, the havoc they wreak, and the problems they present.
For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition, such that the medical condition begins to impact the ability and capacity to perform the essential elements of one’s Federal or Postal job, the option of choice to resolve the impending problems of unbalance — of the growing and magnified inability to juggle work, medical care, and physical/cognitive/emotional health — is to file for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal worker is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset.
No, it is not a perfect solution. Yes, it is an option which is final, in the sense that one is retired from the Federal System. But when alternative courses of actions are delimited within the purview of pragmatic choices, conceptual associations must be tempered within the objective realm of reality.
The moon may well be made of blue cheese, and such conceptual associations can be wrought within the realm of Platonic Forms and cognitive gymnastics; but in the real world, conceptual relationships must by necessity be forged within the iron ore of a witch’s cauldron brewing the germinations for future discourse.
Sincerely,
Robert R. McGill, Esquire