OPM Disability Retirement: A Day Does Not a Life Make, Nor a Decade

The tragedy of extinguishment is the failure to recognize future potentiality.  We often gauge the value of a lifetime based upon the quality of any given day.  Yet, what happens in an arbitrary period of a life, whether viewed randomly on a day, or even assessed and evaluated over a decade, will rarely reflect the comparative worth of a lifetime as analyzed on a linear continuum.

Youth is a wasted period of emergence; middle-age is often a reflection upon that wasteland of remorse; and old age brings physical and cognitive infirmities which engage in fruitless efforts of counting the remaining days.  And so does a circularity of the absurd prevail upon us.

Medical conditions merely exacerbate and are an unwelcome source of further despair.  When a medical condition impacts upon one’s “quality” of life, whether upon the ability to perform one’s positional duties

as in the Federal sector, or debilitates and prevents the physical capacity, such a condition magnifies in exponential despair the devaluing of the human condition.

For Federal and Postal employees who find that a medical condition prevents him or her from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s job, the option of filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether one is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, is a way of countering the valuation of a lifetime of contributions based upon a given day of despair.

Federal agencies and the U.S. Postal Service, whether intentionally or unwittingly, will make disparaging judgments upon the worth of an individual once a medical condition begins to prevent one from performing all of the essential elements of one’s job.  But such valuations are based upon pure ignorance of witless magnitude.

For every Federal employee and U.S. Postal worker, judgment on any given day does not a life make, and indeed, nor does even a decade declare the true value and worth of a person.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Disability Retirement from the USPS and other Federal Government Agencies: Belonging

There are no more causes by which people live, and those who do, do so within an artifice of self-justifying chameleons of linguistic gibberish. Once upon a time, grand philosophical systems were propounded; from the historical backdrop of Plato’s Republic, to the teleological schemata of Aristotle’s Metaphysics; to Aquinas’ Christian worldview, Kant’s bifurcation of the known and knowable worlds; but with deconstructionism, linguistic playgrounds of modernity, and the debunking of political innocence with the advent of information technology and the dissemination of all things private melded into the public arena, where Facebook constitutes the quantitative assemblage of friends, likes and self-promoted happiness on virtual images of frozen smiles and milk-white teeth; and in the end, what we are left with is a needed sense of belonging.

Belonging represents the last vestige of human instinct on the evolutionary scale of survival; and so men and women strive to hold on to hollow and ghostly caricatures of empty promises. For Federal employees and Postal workers who suffer from a condition, such that the medical condition prevents the Federal or Postal worker from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s positional duties, it is often a stark choice presented: to remain with the Federal or Postal job; to resign and walk away with nothing to show for the years of invested time and effort into one’s career, except for a deferred annuity well into old age; or to file for Federal OPM Disability Retirement benefits.

The threat of loneliness and severance of ties to an agency, a mission and a purpose in life, is one which compels the Federal or Postal employee to “hold on” to that which has already been lost, for a period longer than sage advice would allow for, and certainly beyond the point of medical interest for the Federal or Postal employee whose deterioration of health, whether physical, emotional or psychological, continues with unabated progression.

The need to belong is a powerful instinct of evolutionary vestiges; and though we may try to conceal the origins of our being by spending countless hours on the Internet remaking ourselves because causes of yore have proven to be empty vessels of timeless interludes between graveyards filled with unnamed masses of those whom history has forgotten, but for quietude felt on the reddened horizon of memorials and notebooks of ageless spectrums of dusty memories — we seek to belong.

Filing for Federal Disability Retirement through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management is always a hard decision to make. It is difficult because, the act of doing so is a recognition of both a need to step into an unknown future, as well as a severing of ties of the known past. Both sides of the singular act reveal the instinct of timeless necessity: belonging.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

Retiring from Federal Service with OPM Disability Retirement: Happy Puppy

Overused words lose their intended efficacy.  Perhaps the point of decay came about when the (unnamed) fast-food company decided to combine the word with the term, “meal”, and thereafter kids, grandkids and celebrity popularization effectively killed the last semblance of meaning.  But when watching the exuberance exhibited by a puppy, where commonplace activities are engaged in with reactive and unbounded energy, it is appropriate and meaningful to compound the two, and ascribe the descriptively emotive, “happy puppy“.

Whether it is the latter term which enlivens the former, or vice versa, is a question of inference; for, with the loss of meaning generally of the former, but with a retained appreciation that the latter is always inextricably bundled with ecstatic joy and delicious laughter; sometimes, by mere inference and inseparable conceptual coalescence of words, the singular vacuity of a word can be reinvigorated.  It also is often ascribed in anthropomorphic terms, as well as its opposite:  men and women are described as “happy puppies” or “sad puppies”, and the accompanying imagery is one of circumstantial delightfulness or despondency.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition, such that the medical condition prevents one from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s Federal or Postal job, if the elusive concept of “happiness” has been replaced with the daily toil of anguish and turmoil of angst, it is perhaps time to consider filing for Federal OPM Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal worker is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset.

When once the Federal or Postal employee was described as “one happy puppy”, but now avoidance and treatment as the winds of a plague have brushed upon the workplace each time the Federal or Postal employee enters the premises, and whispers of the arrival of that “sad puppy” abound like a pervasive brushfire of vituperative verbal assault; then, it is time to prepare, formulate and file for Disability Retirement benefits through OPM.

For, when the reality of a circumstance overshadows the conceptual force of words, then it becomes an opportunity for the sad puppy to seek the higher grounds of greater joy, and to wag its proverbial tail into the sunset of a happy life.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire