FERS & CSRS Medical Retirement: Avoiding emotional identification

We all do it, to one extent or another; doctors who deal with terminal children or relegated to the emergency floors; patients who must see the foreboding grief in the eyes of family members who have been told; psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists who listen “objectively” to the turmoil and trauma of other lives; the capacity for human compartmentalism is nearly inexhaustible. Does the horse who listens to the cab driver in the brilliant short story, “Misery” (or often subtitled as, “Grief” or “To whom shall I tell my grief?”) […] Read More …

FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement: The distance marker

Highways have them; sports arenas and fields are littered with their recognizable placements; and runners rely upon them. On highways, they are often coordinated with exits upcoming, but most drivers fail to recognize their relevance, and rarely take note of them. What most people don’t understand, comprehend, and fail to appreciate, is that their importance is not merely about the distance still left to go, but how far one has already traveled. The former is often tied intimately to the struggles one foresees extending into the future; the latter, forgetful or forgettable, as life’s accolades are rarely declared, and seldom trumpeted. […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement: Those bare moments of honesty

They come in flashes of rare instances; sometimes, in a more subtle manner, like encroachments by a nimble adversary; at others, tantamount to ugly boils erupting in the middle of one’s forehead while interviewing for a sought-after position.  We cloak ourselves in lies, more lies, and obfuscations wrapped in greater deceptions of self-doubt. […] Read More …

Federal Disability Retirement: A First for Everything

We enjoy being “first” in everything.  Whether to engage in unique and bizarre attempts to gain recognition in the Guinness Book of Records, or to compete in a sports event, or perhaps to merely collect first editions of coins, books, etc., the penchant for being identified as the star in front of the line is ingrained.  Yet, when it comes to encounters of a new kind, […] Read More …

Federal Disability Retirement: Of Tomorrow’s Dreams Delayed

We like to think that our lives progress unencumbered in a linear line of advancement, with nary a bump or an obstacle unconquerable, and but for the occasional exuberance of planned erraticisms, the journey should be a smooth ride without surprises. But just as planes sometimes fall from the sky, and nature betrays its perfection by mistaken errors of comedic turmoil, so the linear aspect of constancy often must confront the bumpiness of expectations. Life rarely turns out as planned, and the more we plan, the less we expect fulfillment. […] Read More …

FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement: Static Divides

Most of our lives are struggles to maintain the status quo; for, as change results in turmoil, so rectitude of unchanged repetition requires the least amount of effort, but mere monotony of action to forego any greater expenditure of further efforts. It is when the static longevity of identical mirroring of life begins to harm, that it then divides us. Doing the same thing daily, over and over again, with slight variations to accommodate life’s vicissitudes, allows for the peaceful quietude of daily living; […] Read More …

Federal Disability Retirement: The tapestry of modernity

Every age has its feel of fabric of the times; in ages past, the woven loom of quiet hamlets with curls of smoke slowly rising from the warmth of the hearth; in others, the tension wrought at the dawn of the industrial revolution, where the ways of old and the textiles of handiworks would soon be replaced by the machines of progress. In modernity, there is the tactile sense of restlessness, of communities splintered, where we are told that the inevitable march of progress is but for the dawn of an age of leisure, […] Read More …

Federal Employee Disability Retirement Benefits: The incoherent narrative

The squirrel jumped into the rabbit hole. Then, the floods came, and Noah didn’t like the color of his shoes because they matched the starboard and not the bow, and when the rudderless drift occurred, then did the turtle finally come out from the squirrel’s nest, high atop the water’s edge. The medical conditions caused a lot of stress, and if it wasn’t for the Supervisor who constantly harasses me, I wouldn’t have filed a complaint against him, but the doctors never said I couldn’t work except when the heart attack occurred and Bessie my dog ran across the street and got hit by a car. […] Read More …