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thatabbygirli love my job.
my job rules.
i adore my job.
the job i have is the best.
woo for my job!
and all of the above was completely, 100%, deadly serious. this is the job that was made for me to do, in no small part because i made it up in my head as the job i'd most like to do if i could do any job in the world. it's so interesting to see all the various parts of my background come together in a coherent whole. all that work i did to get a psychology degree in undergrad, that silly study i did about misperceptions of people with mental illnesses is contributing--even though i thought it would all be pretty useless once i decided to go into law. my own experiences with mental illness help a lot, too, if only because it's easier for me to be sympathetic to the plight of the paranoid schizophrenic women who wander into the office instead of dismissing them as silly crazy people.
so i get to combine all of that with all my work in government benefits law. that first job i got after graduating from college, working the phones for the welfare hotline at legal aid in chicago, was leading directly to this. all those afternoons during law school i spent hanging out at filthy welfare offices talking to sometimes amusing and sometimes vilely offensive people, leading directly to this by teaching me to handle both the recipients and the administration with tact and diplomacy.
and thank god for that summer job i had in boston. no matter how much that summer was a failure for other reasons--the death of a relationship, that ungodly heat, my wild loneliness and depression--that job was the one that showed me that my interests could be combined, that i could focus on mentally ill welfare recipients. that i could move from helping individuals to changing policies to help hundreds and thousands of individuals.
and i'm freaking good at it! i understand how the systems work. i understand how the administrators work, how to make it easy for them to reach the decision i want. i understand how the recipients work, and how a very important part of our job is simply to validate them, to be a figure of authority agreeing with their point of view, agreeing that they have been mistreated, and then getting to see them grasp the knowledge to work with us to change things, and eventually to work by themselves to change things.
so it seems to all have paid off, both literally and metaphorically. most of you know what a struggle it was for me to get through law school. i dropped out for a little bit, after i had just stopped attending classes for over a month, unable to face those people who were there on the shortest line between them and $100,000 a year and a lexus. but this is what i wanted. and i was good enough, and smart enough, to survive school, to conceive of my project, to beat out who knows how many other people to become one of 51 fellowship recipients in the whole country.
to get paid to do what i love and at what i excel.
i'm pumped up today because i secured a major victory at work. one of my clients is a learning disabled woman with a three year old sun who receives welfare benefits. she is enrolled in a nursing certificate program at a local community college. while she gets great grades, she can only take a half-time course load because of the study hours she has to put in to keep up in her classes, due to her difficulties processing visual information. because she hasn't completed the program within the time alloted by the welfare program, the administration told her she would have to quit the program and participate in 32 hours of community service (read: stuffing envelopes at the welfare office) instead. i worked with a supervising attorney to write a demand letter asking them to provide her with additional time to complete the program, or at least count her hours of hospital internship as community service so she could continue her training. all of this was complicated by the fact that the welfare office had referred her for a learning disability evaluation, and the evaluator, after doing a cursory interview, found that she had no disabilities. but when i called to follow up on the letter, they said the were going to allot her the extra time.
this is a victory not only for her--and i could tell, talking to her so much over the past few weeks, how anxious she was about having to return to her previous job as a waitress at red lobster after her welfare runs out--but also a big policy step for our office. this indicates to the welfare office that we are prepared to fight hard on learning disabled issues and that we won't tolerate cursory evaluations.
i feel so good about all of this. it seems too good to be true. i'm so glad all that crap was really worth it, because there were far too many times when i didn't really believe it would amount to anything.
my job rules.
i adore my job.
the job i have is the best.
woo for my job!
and all of the above was completely, 100%, deadly serious. this is the job that was made for me to do, in no small part because i made it up in my head as the job i'd most like to do if i could do any job in the world. it's so interesting to see all the various parts of my background come together in a coherent whole. all that work i did to get a psychology degree in undergrad, that silly study i did about misperceptions of people with mental illnesses is contributing--even though i thought it would all be pretty useless once i decided to go into law. my own experiences with mental illness help a lot, too, if only because it's easier for me to be sympathetic to the plight of the paranoid schizophrenic women who wander into the office instead of dismissing them as silly crazy people.
so i get to combine all of that with all my work in government benefits law. that first job i got after graduating from college, working the phones for the welfare hotline at legal aid in chicago, was leading directly to this. all those afternoons during law school i spent hanging out at filthy welfare offices talking to sometimes amusing and sometimes vilely offensive people, leading directly to this by teaching me to handle both the recipients and the administration with tact and diplomacy.
and thank god for that summer job i had in boston. no matter how much that summer was a failure for other reasons--the death of a relationship, that ungodly heat, my wild loneliness and depression--that job was the one that showed me that my interests could be combined, that i could focus on mentally ill welfare recipients. that i could move from helping individuals to changing policies to help hundreds and thousands of individuals.
and i'm freaking good at it! i understand how the systems work. i understand how the administrators work, how to make it easy for them to reach the decision i want. i understand how the recipients work, and how a very important part of our job is simply to validate them, to be a figure of authority agreeing with their point of view, agreeing that they have been mistreated, and then getting to see them grasp the knowledge to work with us to change things, and eventually to work by themselves to change things.
so it seems to all have paid off, both literally and metaphorically. most of you know what a struggle it was for me to get through law school. i dropped out for a little bit, after i had just stopped attending classes for over a month, unable to face those people who were there on the shortest line between them and $100,000 a year and a lexus. but this is what i wanted. and i was good enough, and smart enough, to survive school, to conceive of my project, to beat out who knows how many other people to become one of 51 fellowship recipients in the whole country.
to get paid to do what i love and at what i excel.
i'm pumped up today because i secured a major victory at work. one of my clients is a learning disabled woman with a three year old sun who receives welfare benefits. she is enrolled in a nursing certificate program at a local community college. while she gets great grades, she can only take a half-time course load because of the study hours she has to put in to keep up in her classes, due to her difficulties processing visual information. because she hasn't completed the program within the time alloted by the welfare program, the administration told her she would have to quit the program and participate in 32 hours of community service (read: stuffing envelopes at the welfare office) instead. i worked with a supervising attorney to write a demand letter asking them to provide her with additional time to complete the program, or at least count her hours of hospital internship as community service so she could continue her training. all of this was complicated by the fact that the welfare office had referred her for a learning disability evaluation, and the evaluator, after doing a cursory interview, found that she had no disabilities. but when i called to follow up on the letter, they said the were going to allot her the extra time.
this is a victory not only for her--and i could tell, talking to her so much over the past few weeks, how anxious she was about having to return to her previous job as a waitress at red lobster after her welfare runs out--but also a big policy step for our office. this indicates to the welfare office that we are prepared to fight hard on learning disabled issues and that we won't tolerate cursory evaluations.
i feel so good about all of this. it seems too good to be true. i'm so glad all that crap was really worth it, because there were far too many times when i didn't really believe it would amount to anything.
