Federal Disability Retirement Benefits: Escaping reality

In some sense, everyone does it; in another, no one can.  For, in a general, generic meaning of the term, to “escape reality” is to merely engage in an activity that allows one to take a break from the ordinary and mundane, as in going to a movie, watching television, playing a video game or engaging a game of chess. In the same vein of meaning, however, one could argue that such leisurely pastimes constitute a reality no less real than working, dealing with life in other ways and attending to one’s daily duties and obligations – it is simply in a different “form”.

Daydreaming, getting lost in an imaginary world through reading a book, of even sleeping – these also constitute a form of “escaping reality”, if the term implies a narrow meaning manifesting the daily grind of work, family and surrounding obligations.  Going to school, surfing the internet or concocting plans for grandiose schemes – these, too, can be considered “escaping reality”, inasmuch as they do not put food on the table or pay bills; and thus do we face the reality that people possess different meanings when they make critical remarks that are triggered to demean an activity by making the charge that engaging in X is nothing more than an attempt to escape reality.

There are, of course, true escapes that are harmless, and those that, if entertained over too long a period of time, can become an entrenched harm that may be irreversible.  Taking a dream vacation to an isolated island deep in the Caribbean Isles can be a healthy escape from the daily reality of work and exhaustion; imagining a life different from one’s own, through a limited period of daydreaming, may be an acceptable form of transcending the turmoil of a day’s trial; but creating a world where one’s loved one, lost from the reality of this mortal world, is still present through one’s imagination and will of existence, may be considered a sickness when it begins to impede the ability and capacity to take care of one’s own needs.

There is a fine line between healthy escapes and detrimental plunges into the surreal world of the imagination.  How one takes upon the challenges of a medical condition is often a delicate teetering amidst the boundaries of health and unhealthiness.  We would all like to will away medical conditions, but the reality is that the real-ness of the injured, sick or otherwise deteriorating body, mind or both, cannot ultimately be avoided.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers, the idea of preparing a Federal Disability Retirement application is often a step towards recognizing the reality that there is no curative power that will allow the Federal or Postal employee to continue to work in one’s chosen career, and that preparing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, to be ultimately submitted to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, is merely a matter of inevitable time.

Delaying the process, procrastinating the preparatory steps, or avoiding the issue altogether – all are a form of escaping reality.  Whether such an escape is a healthy precursor to the reality which must be faced, only the Federal or Postal worker who is engaging such an escape can tell, as the reality of one’s future may rest upon the very escape afforded by filing a Federal Disability Retirement application through OPM.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Medical Retirement from Federal Employment: Contested lives

We hear of such terms in specific linguistic contexts; of a “contested” divorce, or that a variable version of a testimony or evidence has been “contested”; or that the results of a certain race or game has been contested.  If you drop the affix placed after the stem of the word (i.e., the suffix or the “ed”), and emphasize the first syllable, it becomes a noun; whereas, if you engage in the identical mental exercise but intone upon the second syllable, it becomes a verb.

As a noun, it is normally relegated to a challenging game, a sport or perhaps some duel; when applied with the second word in the title above, it takes on a wider meaning that encompasses an endless spectrum and, unless further delineated, undefined in a disturbing way.  If denoted in a general sense, as in the statement, “All lives are contested,” the generic meaning loses its force; for, it is a truism which is rather inane in that, yes, all lives have facets of contested issues, and in that sense, it becomes a “meaningless” statement of trope and triviality.

Yet, that truism is something which we all experience.  When one hears the complaint, “Life is a series of conflicts and is a contest of endurance,” we nod our heads and know exactly what that means.  We all recognize that our lives encompass a consistent effort to contest (emphasis on second syllable), and that the contest of life is to endure (emphasis on the first syllable); and we must persevere to contest it (again, emphasis on the second syllable).

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition, such that the medical condition prevents the Federal or Postal employee from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s Federal or Postal job, the truism that there are contested lives is a simple fact.  It is not just a matter of going to work – rather, it is going to work with a medical condition.  It is not just going to work and doing one’s job – it is, moreover, doing that and contending with a medical condition, as well as the growing harassment from coworkers, supervisors, and the Agency and Postal Service as a whole.

Preparing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, to be ultimately submitted to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, is also a matter of a contested life – for the bureaucratic process with OPM is an embattlement of sorts, and it only reinforces that inane, trite and trivial aspect of the statement, “We all live contested lives.”

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

OPM Retirement for Mental or Physical Incapacity: Maintaining a schedule

We all abide by them, strive to meet them and toil to achieve them.  We claim that we control “it”, but in fact, it often becomes the monster which completely constrains and restrains, overpowers and undermines.

Maintaining a schedule in life is important.  Some, because of unknown past issues or current difficulties, cannot stand by and allow for a violation of it; others, with more daring personalities and flighty egos, defy it deliberately and result in floundering about without a purposive intent or constructive content.  Maintaining a schedule is often essential to the daily lives of all; for those who have certain learning disabilities, it allows for a structuring of a universe which would otherwise appear chaotic and undisciplined; for others, the very structure imposed restricts the inner creativity of brilliance, and we are left with the genius who follows no man’s path.

Babies and children do well with it; the creative genius who is always distracted by the brilliance within his or her own subjective world, often cannot abide by it; but the rest of us follow a fairly monotonous routine and stick close to it, if only by excuses given of being “five minutes late” or the sorry excuse that the bedside alarm clock failed to rouse us.

Then, there are companies and agencies that seem to fall apart at the seams, where overwork, underpaid staffers and unreliable workers seem to disrupt that most important of schedules – meeting deadlines.  Then, there is the incongruence between one’s personal schedule and the schedule of another entity, and when the two fail to agree or work in consonance, then frustration begins to develop.  The tumult of frustration is often based upon the chasm that occurs between what one expects and the reality which unfolds.  Closing that “gap” is the solution to one’s growing frustration in this world.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who need to, are about to, or have already filed a Federal Disability Retirement application with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, the key to containing one’s frustration over the time-period that the U.S. Office of Personnel Management is taking, extending, violating and ignoring in performing their duties in approving or denying a Federal Disability Retirement application, is to recognize that their “schedule” is one of complete and utter power, and that the Federal or Postal Disability Retirement applicant is in a position of complete powerlessness; and, on top of that, to maintain a schedule apart from what OPM does, while one waits for an outcome that is hoped to be favorable.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Federal Employee Disability Retirement: Those spaces in between

Between each word; separating being from nothingness; that which allows for something is contingent upon the void that distinguishes, and without the lack there can be no substance.  Time doesn’t exist without space for movement of bodies of mass; such stillness echoes the lack of reverberating sounds, where waves bounce from one object to the next, and where Oneness of universe means that the clock no longer matters.  Of life, we imagine the same: there are interludes, but we tend to skip the pain and sorrow between the covers of hidden privacy.

Thus do we abide by the antiseptic, sterilized version of our scripted thoughts within ourselves:  birth; a relatively uneventful childhood; completion of educational goals; a career; retirement; and, despite a last gasp in attempting to defy the rules of mortality, death and a funeral projected where weeping and wailing echoes through the indignities of relatives uncaring during the days of living, with sweet revenge of the last laugh leaving behind the mystery of the beyond.

But what of those spaces in between?

Of chronic medical conditions; of pain beyond mere superficial groans; of hospitalizations, having tubes inserted into every imaginable orifice and pricked, prodded and pummeled with tests and artificial means for purposes of extending breath, heartbeat and pulse.

Only in recent times have we breached the decorum of unspoken sensitivities, and allowed for scenes in movies to reveal private functions behind bathroom doors beyond brushing one’s teeth or combing the hair over that bald spot – not that the audience necessarily needs to view such scenes, but somehow, such depictions apparently manifest the avant-garde in each of us and reveals the sophistication we all sought, like days of old when smoking cigarettes with those ridiculously long-looking holders was the trend to follow, merely because someone else did it, and we were told that such was the fashion of the day and represented the height of elegance in posture.

It is, at least in movies, those spaces in between that the characters presumably go to the bathroom, end up in the hospital and suffer in quiet agony; we just don’t see much, or any, of it, except in recent times.  And so we are filling those spaces in between; not merely with more punctuations, or hyphenations unnecessary but to bridge the gap between words and concepts, but in real life as well, by recognizing that life rarely follows a clean sequence of uninterrupted successions of advancement and teleological awareness, but often has detours, hiccups and sometimes valleys beyond which no one else would want to venture.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who are considering filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, those spaces in between are already known and recognized.  For, the medical condition itself constitutes the empty pauses between many of life’s successes, and the challenges faced in deciding to end a career otherwise fruitful and productive, to be now replaced with a fight against the U.S. Office of Personnel Management to force them to acknowledge eligibility and entitlement to Federal Disability Retirement benefits, is itself the “filling in” of those very spaces we all must face, in between.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

 

Federal Disability Retirement Benefits: ‘Can’ and ‘Have to’

The category of the latter has diminished in recent years, as the general populace has mistakenly misinterpreted the distinctive definitions of liberty and freedom, and reassigned meanings as license and anarchy.  The blank column of the former concept has come to be full, despite the reality of the economic downturn and the shift into a global economy that, we are told, is an inevitable consequence of human progress.

We were taught that the march of progress required the destruction of the American West, where a way of life needed to be trampled upon and destroyed in the name of advancement and civilization; that each step of innovation and progressive paradigms constitute an almost Hegelian fatefulness, and resistance is merely an act of futility within the aggregation of the Leviathan called “Progress”.  The modern parlance consists in the acceptance of every innovation of technology, to the extent that Orwell’s dystopian premonitions have been surpassed by a reality now accepted as mundane and commonplace, and we fail to realize that his magnum opus of a totalitarian future could have been heeded, but now is merely embraced with a yawn and barely a glance backward.

The more that society comes to believe in that which we ‘can’, as opposed to the obligatory mandate of ‘have to’, the less likely is there of a resistance to authority.  And, until the police raid in the middle of the night or the unquestioned stop and search on a highway where others just whiz by without puzzlement or curiosity, is experienced personally by a given individual, the onerous nature of laws passed in the name of safety, security and preventative measures, will be merely a conceptual haze masked by an obscure hypothetical.

Instead, we live day-to-day in the conundrum of being told that we ‘can’ do what we want, desire and fantasize about, and there is little that we ‘have to’ do.  Thus do infidelity and divorces occur; of abandonment of family ties based upon tropes of scintillating sensations; and goals set aside in the namesake of present pleasures.

There is a category of individuals, however, where the luxury of ‘can’ cannot be replaced by mere want of ‘have to’ – a person with a medical condition.  For Federal and Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition, such that the medical condition prevents the Federal or Postal employee from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s Federal or Postal job, the ‘can’ once relied upon transforms into an inability.

Once the inability to perform one or more of the essential elements of one’s Federal or Postal position becomes a reality, then the ‘have to’ is finally realized – of preparing, formulating and filing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, to be submitted to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset.  Do not let the muddle of incessant trope involving ‘can’ become confused with ‘have to’ – for, when one comes to a point of ‘must’, it is time to prepare, formulate and file an effective Federal Employee Disability Retirement application.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Federal Disability Retirement: The Trail of Tears

History is replete with the metaphor of maltreatment; it is the silent graves that cannot speak, anymore, which haunts a nation’s soul.  It is a reminder, of sorts; a way of understanding and revisiting the history and essence of a nation – of the westward expansion and the decimation and systematic thievery against a civilization that was doomed from the start.  But trails soon get overrun by either settlements or city construction; and tears quickly dry up so that the agony of a peoples once felt become a mere memory told in narratives and tales by old men and forgotten women who no longer matter.

Reservations were demarcated and a defeated populace was shuttled into forgotten corners of the world, left to sputter amongst themselves in wallowing memories of defeated battles and violated treaties; and, as modernity replaced the fading residue of an inglorious past, only the diaries and annotations of eyewitnesses maintained a memory of coherent violations otherwise set aside to make room for future time.  Does each one of us, in addition, have a trail of tears?  Do we shed them in the privacy of our scorned thoughts, left to the isolation of our own destroyed lives?

The Medicine Man of yore could not stop the onslaught of that which we deem “progress” and “modernity”; and in the end, it was modern warfare that doomed any resistance to change.  The medical doctor of today, like the appeals of yesteryear to the Great Spirit, can only stem the tide of a progressive and chronic disease; the methodology may have changed, from fasting and foreboding fortunetelling to pharmacological modalities and surgical intervention, but when a diseased body or mind continues to deteriorate despite such intercession, the personal trail of tears follows a parallel course of those we once trampled upon.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition, such that the medical condition prevents the Federal or Postal employee from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s Federal or Postal position, it may be time to consider preparing, formulating and filing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, to be submitted to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

There are always historical travesties, as well as personal ones.  In this world where history barely catches the fancy of those who must contend with the tides of an uncaring world, it is the personal trail of tears which is most important to each individual, and not the “grand scheme” of events which we can neither control nor foresee.

History is what it is – acts committed by ancestors, certainly, but ones which most of us could neither control nor protest against.  But that which we can determine – like the destiny of a future for a Federal or Postal worker who must contend with a medical condition that continues to debilitate and constrain – should be accomplished within the confines of the laws which predominate, lest one’s personal trail of tears begins to parallel that of a past now long forgotten.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Federal Disability Retirement: Tantum ergo

It is the incipit of the last two verses of a Medieval Latin hymn written by St. Thomas Aquinas.  Aquinas is best known for his inclusive osmosis by fiat of stretched logic to accommodate and force commensurability the texts of the ancients (i.e., Aristotle) within the essential boundaries of Christian theology.  His methodology in accomplishing this feat was to posit the weakest of straw man arguments, then to systematically appear to knock them down, and then to declare a forceful conclusion as if the ergo naturally and rationally followed.  That the conclusion is followed by verses subsequent, reflects how life works as well.

Sometimes, we mistake the “Hence” or the “Therefore,” and believe (wrongly) that nothing should follow.  But such conjunctive adverbs are often confused as if they denote answers to mathematical calculations.  Life rarely works in that manner, and it is entirely right that the tantum ergo should follow with additional discourses upon the beatific vision of the hymnal’s content.  Indeed, that is how we often and mistakenly live our lives – to accept with resignation that the declarative utterance, “Therefore, so great,” results in a quietude and silence of subsequent ceremony.  We wait upon it, and when it comes, we submit and concede.  Or, as in cases more common, it never comes, and thus do we surrender.

That is how Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who are on the verge of preparing a Federal Disability Retirement application with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, approach the impending suspicion of doom or failure; the Tantum ergo is declared by the Federal agency or the U.S. Postal Service, and the Federal employee or the U.S. Postal worker accepts it as gospel truth, when in fact one should always recognize a countervailing principle of life:  a lie is a lie, is an untruth, is a lie, is a mis-statement of the law, is still a lie.

This author will not go so far as to say that Human Resource offices throughout the Federal Agencies systematically engage in disseminating falsehoods; perhaps, many merely relate the misinterpretations gained through osmosis of gossip; but, in any event, whether from a Federal agency or the U.S. Postal Service, the groundless surrender based upon a seemingly unassailable declaration that, “Therefore, so great” – whether referring to itself; whether in misstating the legal consequences of failed accommodations and the impact upon filing a Federal Disability Retirement application; of failing to inform the Federal or Postal employee of the rights of filing with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management – the Federal and Postal employee should always be cautious of taking as face value a declaration by the Federal agency or the U.S. Postal Service that single utterance of self worth:  “Therefore, so great.”

Especially when it is referring to itself; always, when ascribing motives unstated; and forever, when trying to undermine the Federal or Postal employee.  And as to the multiple verses which follow upon the Tantum ergo?  Mistake not:  there is always life after Federal Disability Retirement; and let not one be fooled into thinking otherwise.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire