FERS Disability Retirement: The Chaos of Lives

Is it merely a skewed perspective, or are lives lived in greater chaos than in past times?

One tends to see the “present” within a vacuum of historicity; and, not possessing a particularized knowledge of historical context (other than sporadic readings here and there and reliance upon grade-school memories of important dates memorized, events dramatized, etc.), it is difficult to make comparisons within a vacuum of ignorance.

The chaos of lives is evident — of stressful jobs, violence erupting, families disintegrating, depression abounding, a sense of social isolation untold — did the pandemic reveal in exponential form, the cracks in the dam which held back the torrent of underlying malaise?

Yet, reading about previous historical times — of famines and pestilences; of world wars destroying entire countries and wreaking havoc upon continents afar; is this time any different than past epochs?

Of course, in the end, what matters is not the greater geopolitical divides and conflicts, but of individual lives; for, it is all well and good to speak in generalizations, but in the end, it is the neighbor next door to whom we owe our allegiance, and not to dustbins of historical periods.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition where the chaos of lives appears with force and individual reality through the inability to continue to perform in one’s chosen career — the “way out” of such chaos is to consider preparing, formulating and filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, under FERS.

Contact a FERS Retirement Attorney who specializes in Federal Disability Retirement Law, and consider the pathway out of the chaos of lives — your own.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill
Lawyer exclusively representing Federal and Postal employees to secure their Federal Disability Retirement benefits under FERS from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

 

FERS Disability Retirement from the OPM: Win to Lose

It is an anomaly, a contradiction, and sometimes even a bit of hypocrisy.  Often, it is definitionally bifurcated and described in metaphorical terms, as such: You win the small battles, but lose the greater war.  You hide the pain, slough off with a shrug the days you had to take off; and when asked by coworkers how your weekend was, you respond with vague statements which fill the pablum of meaninglessness with volumes of words without substance of content.

Of psychiatric symptoms, you mask them well, resisting treatment, hiding the days of despondency and tear-filled panic attacks, going out into the hallway or staying in the bathroom until the sweaty hands can be washed with cold water or the wrenching paralysis can be calmed.  Then, there comes a critical point where it can no longer be hidden; the private battles boil over into public symptomatologies; further advance cannot be had.

What to do?  For the Federal or Postal employee who can no longer perform one or more of the essential elements of one’s Federal or Postal job, and who needs to file for Federal Disability Retirement benefits under FERS through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the problem comes about because you have been “winning” all of this time — great performance reviews, maybe even awards and accolades.

But by “winning”, you are losing — both in terms of your health, as well as any evidence of deficiencies in performance.  And so OPM will look at that and say, “You’ve been able to do your job, so what’s the problem, here?”

Consult with a disability attorney who specializes in Federal Disability Retirement Law, and begin to formulate the foundation which turns about the “win to lose” approach to a “win to win” or even “lose to win” progress forward.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill
Lawyer exclusively representing Federal and Postal employees to secure their Federal Disability Retirement benefits under FERS from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

 

Medical Retirement for Federal Employees: Waves of Misfortune

Metaphors allow us to understand our circumstances; by relating the circumstance to the natural world around us, we feel a greater kinship when, in all other aspects of our lives, we have tried to alienate ourselves and artificially separate our lives from the origins of our own existence.  Similes, of course, always contain the comparative contrast that allows for a space between that which is compared and the reality of “what is”.

Thus, to say that “X is like Y” is quite different from saying that “X is Y”, even though we know in both instances that X is not Y, and that is precisely why we assert that there is a likeness between X and Y (because “likeness” is not the same as “sameness”) and also why we declare X to be Y even though they are not one and the same.  Thus is there a difference between “Waves of misfortune” (a metaphor) and “Misfortune are like waves” (a simile).

The comparative preposition creates a once-removed parallelism (simile), whereas the metaphor makes no doubt of the mirror image of one with the other.

Medical conditions are more like metaphors (here, we are utilizing a simile to describe a metaphor); there is no space or removal between the situations being compared.  To have a medical condition is not “like” something else; rather, it is the reality of one’s existence.  It is through metaphors, however, as well as similes that we describe the symptoms to our doctors and others, to try and help them understand what it is like to be in constant pain, to be depressed, to be profoundly fatigued.

And for Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition such that the medical condition necessitates preparing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, to be submitted to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, it must be understood that the Federal Disability Retirement “package” is a paper presentation to OPM, and thus must by necessity use both metaphors and similes in order to persuade OPM of having met the legal criteria of a FERS Disability Retirement application.

The “waves of misfortune” must be described persuasively, lest they become a metaphor for failure in preparing, formulating and filing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application that results in a denial as opposed to an approval.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Federal Disability Retirement Claims: Being another

When you read that some actor, writer, politician or commentator (dare we ask why, in a single sentence, all of them have been lumped side by side) says X or does Y, we often allow our own ego as the “one-upsmanship” to overtake us, and we imagine that, if we were there, we would have said “XX” instead of “X”, or done “YY” instead of the mere “Y”.

At the moment, though we rarely recognize the egocentric reality of what we are doing, we actually “become” that actor, that writer, that politician or that commentator, and assume the role and identity of the person we have replaced in our mind’s eye.  Insanity, of course, comes about when a further step is taken — of believing not what we “would” have done or said, but incontrovertibly becoming that someone whom we are not.

The quantity of time expended within the insularity of our lives is astounding; and the personal — albeit creative and imaginative — excursions into another type of virtual reality consumes a greater part of each day, every hour and multiple minutes of our disjointed lives.  Perhaps this occurs in a quick flash of a stream of passing thoughts; or a long, enduring daydream that recurs through the day, the week, and over a month’s time; but of whatever duration, being another is something that we all do, and always at the expense one’s own ego and those who are close to us.

Being another also occurs in hopeful encounters with our own circumstances.  We imagine that we are ourselves, but also another who is simultaneously identical and yet different.  That is what a medical condition does — it divides the reality of who we are today from the memory of who we were yesterday, and further projects a person of what will become of us in the future, near or far.  Often, emotions become entangled in the images of who we are, and so regret pervades the past, anxiety overwhelms the present, and fear pursues the future.

Medical conditions tend to inject a factor that we have no control over, and it is that loss of control, combined with who we see ourselves as, and who we would rather be or become, that presents a dilemma: As circumstances change, can we continue to remain who we are and allow for being another — the “other” being the person who we once were — to continue as if such changes of circumstances never occurred?

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition, where the medical condition has “changed” a person to the extent that he or she is now “another” — someone not quite dissimilar to yesterday’s you but also not identical to today’s yesterday of the person we just met — because of circumstances beyond one’s control, it may be time to do that which only another in a different time and distinguishing context may have contemplated: file for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset.

The reality is that we are never the same as who we were yesterday, and last year’s child of imaginative “being another” has grown into the “other” that was once imagined.

In the end, the essence of who we are will not have changed because of a medical condition, and what we do in life beyond filing for and obtaining a Federal Disability Retirement is more important than feeling self-pity for not having fulfilled one’s desire for being another, who was yesterday’s another in a different role from today’s another or tomorrow’s another.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Medical Retirement from Federal Employment: Life is rarely ‘Just’

Is it just?  And of the query, what meaning do we ascribe to it?  Of one formulation, an implied addendum unspoken – as in, “Is life just about going through the motions, or is there more to it than that?”  In another manner of meaning, it can encapsulate the greater paradigms of fairness, balance and equality of opportunity:  the ‘just’ is merely an abbreviation of the greater concept of ‘Justice‘ with a capital J.

Or, perhaps the duality of meanings is intended – for, in the former manner of speaking, is there not an implicit denotation that the wider connotation is inferred – as in, “Is life just about going through the motions, having some pleasure in life, or is there more to it than that, like trying to achieve a sense of Justice in this world?”  Are there multiple meanings in such a simple word, merely derived from the emitted utterance, whether or not intended, sought or even realized?  And, indeed, there is truth in the statement, isn’t there?

Life is rarely ‘just’; it is much more than that, and often implicitly encompasses the wider capitalization even if you don’t mean it as such.  The ‘just’ is an attempt to minimize and marginalize; it fails to recognize the complexity of the greater issues involved, unless, of course, the further query is invoked:  If it is not just about X, then what does it encapsulate?

No, life is rarely ‘just’ about this or that; it may involve them, but in addition, much more, unless containing and avoiding the concerns outside of the carefully-demarcated divides crafted in order to simplify, preserve and ignore that which falls outside of the arbitrary boundaries created, becomes an achievable goal of choice.  Some are able to insulate and ignore, while most others cannot ignore the injustices prevailing.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who are contemplating filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, the question is often posed:  Oh, is it just filling out those forms?

Well – not quite.  Yes, it does involve filling out the applicable forms, but in order to prepare an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, it will likely involve much more than that – of obtaining relevant and compelling medical documentation that meets the legal criteria of Federal Disability Retirement laws, statutes and regulations; and then there is the wider question which was originally posed, involved the ‘Just’ as the abbreviated form of ‘Justice’ – that, in order to achieve it, the relevant legal argumentation must be made.

No, life is rarely ‘just’ about this or that; it almost always just involves much more.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Early Medical Retirement for Federal and Postal Employees: At any given moment…

Despite evidence to the contrary, we tend to live life expecting disaster just around the next corner; and when it does happen, of course, it only confirms the greatest fears which we had anticipated all along.  Whether any singular calamity is merely a magnification of our expectation of life’s fragile coordinates of unfairness, or simply a reflection of truth in an objectively impassive and uncaring world, it is our sense of destiny left to the fates of gods who care not and submission to the evolutionary Darwinism of predatory-to-prey beliefs which obviates any residual joy of life.  Then, when a wrong turn is made, we shake our heads knowingly and whisper in a soliloquy of wisdom unconstrained, “I knew it,” or something akin thereto, like, “Of course”.

Does confirmation of that which is expected, a basis for cynicism?  We certainly give lip-service to children, dogs and people of lesser means and circumstances by providing unsolicited, positive coaching advice on life and living:  “There is hope, yet”; “Tomorrow is a brighter day”; “Today is the best day of the rest of your life”; and other quips of mindless wisdom meant to appease, while we knowingly whisper in the privacy of our caverns of suspicion with an addendum of:  “You just don’t know how bad it can get.”  And so it goes (as the great positive thinker, Kurt Vonnegut, used to say — but then, anyone who survived the bombing of Dresden has a right to hold such dilapidated opinions of shabbiness).

Thus, in a similar vein, for the Federal employee and U.S. Postal worker who finds that treatment at the hands of one’s own Federal agency or the U.S. Postal Service when the time of need for support and acceptance is at its pinnacle — just doesn’t quite meet the standard of excellence expected in such moments, should be forgiven for having that shuddering tumult of suspicious concavity, when the Federal or Postal employee whispers, “At any given moment…” (i.e., the other shoe will drop; the Federal agency or U.S. Postal Service will further confirm their uncaring attitude; or some similar continuation of the initiating thought).

Preparing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, is often the solution to extricating oneself from the calamity of having a medical condition, such that the medical condition prevents the Federal or Postal employee from continuing in the positional duties of the Federal or Postal employment.  For, in the end, you do not want to stick around too long to verify and validate that thoughtful knowledge of wisdom you possessed as a Federal or Postal employee, when you first learned that life is not a bed of roses, rarely a shining star, and certainly not the lottery ticket each and every day, when — at any given moment — that proverbial “other shoe” may drop if you are a Federal or Postal employee needing to filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Federal & Postal Disability Retirement: Purgatory Reverie

The state of the intermediate, the surreal loss of traction in suspended animation; of trying to jog on ice, or to reach a destination traveling on a treadmill; this is a sense one is left with in dealing with a juggernaut of a bureaucratic morass.

In this day of immediacy, where the instant satisfaction of wants and the now of gratifications is met and reinforced by the push of a key, the click of a mouse, and touch of a sensor; and as virtue is no longer looked upon as a necessary ingredient of character, but rather an irritating obstacle to a material goal, so patience cannot be wanting where fissures have widened to such an extent that chasms have created chaos.  Planning ahead is always the key to the timely confluence of achieving the stated goal.  And then some. And perhaps even to multiply the waiting time by a factor of 2.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition, such that the medical condition prevents the Federal and Postal worker from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s job, it is precisely that inherent self-contradiction of the constancy of being forever suspended, which gives rise to frustration and turmoil.

Much of it is in anticipation of what the Agency, or the U.S. Postal Service, will or will not do.  Will they initiate an adverse action during the process?  Will they approve the discretionary LWOP request?  Will they “support” the Federal Disability Retirement application, or attempt to undermine the procedural march towards OPM’s approval?

Waiting upon an agency is never a good idea; neither in deciding to move forward on a Federal Disability Retirement application, nor in trying to make an educated guess as to what the agency’s reaction would be (or, in dealing with one’s agency, is it an oxymoron to concurrently use the terms “educated” and “guess”?).  Agencies move at their own pace, and do what they want, when they want, as fiefdoms and totalitarian republics are decidedly meant to provoke.

It is never a good idea to make one’s decision concerning preparing, formulating and filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits, whether one is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, by waiting upon an agency’s actions; for, the immediacy of ignorance may never come about, or suddenly be initiated yesterday; and as purgatory is in and of itself a reverie of angels suspended in timeless harpsichords of orchestrated serenity, so the ill Federal or injured Postal employee who thinks that it is a good idea to wait upon the Federal agency or the U.S. Postal Service before initiating a Federal Disability Retirement application, will of course remain lost in the long and winding road leading to the pearly gates of tomorrow.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire