There was an attempt to climb the corporate ladder
Stephen Hawking lived a shockingly long time for someone with his condition but no one says all that much about it. They sort of shrug and dismiss it as "Well, I guess we got that prediction wrong."
He had the good sense to talk about physics, not about how he was managing to stay alive when he was supposed to be dead. I have not been similarly wise and it perhaps was not an option for me due to circumstances beyond my control.
Semmelweis was a physician who was more or less murdered for not agreeing with the standard wisdom of his time. He was in charge of two clinics, one with a much higher mortality rate than the other, and produced studies with hard data and recommended sterilizing one's hands after examining cadavers and before examining patients. He had no theory as to why, or at least not a solid theory, and was a bit too early for germ theory.
He was locked up in an insane asylum, very possibly for failing to back down on his "nutty" theory while being hounded by everyone he knew about it and unable to get people to just damn well drop it. He was beaten by guards fairly promptly and died as a consequence of the beating about two weeks later.
I've experienced some of the same social dynamics. I've had people behave really badly towards me and there is no means to get them to stop being awful once it starts. In their warped minds, it's "my fault" they harass me because I made the mistake of talking about getting better while they said ridiculous things like "It's placebo effect."
If "placebo effect" -- if just BELIEVING natural remedies help -- can "cure" a genetic disorder and heal up the hole I used to have in my left lung, well then I guess I'm Darth Vader and have an amazingly powerful mind.
One problem with that incredibly stupid and insane accusation: I never "believed" I would get this much better.
I never imagined the hole in my lung would close. I expected to take $300/month worth of supplements for the rest of my life to try to not get worse and was happy to take that deal in comparison to thousands of dollars a month worth of drugs with horrendous side effects accompanied by a steady decline -- "The normal progression of CF" (code for "Quit expecting your doctor to ACTUALLY get you better and stop annoying us with not liking the sentence of death you live under.")
So insane assholes who like to imagine THEY are "sciency" and I'm some deluded nutter will need to look elsewhere for their bullshit reasons to be dismissive because "belief" didn't get me here.
I never "believed" I would get this well. It just happened, much to my shock.
I've spent a lot of years trying to not end up like Semmelweis and feeling like this was especially challenging because I'm a former homemaker with "a sample of one" in the eyes of much of the world and "anecdotal" evidence, not a physician with differing mortality rates between two clinics and an idea as to why that might be.
This is my umpteenth health blog. I don't know how many I have gone through.
I first began publishing health info to the web because some people asked to forward an email of mine to relatives of theirs who had a child with CF or other serious health issues and I thought if it's public, they can just share the link without asking. And then the initial flurry of interest didn't seem to be followed by more and I'm not sure it was wise to continue.
I continued in part because I watched some documentary about the life of Joan of Arc and it was speculated that when she recanted and said "Ok. FINE. I was not sent by God. I made it all up. Please let me out of prison." they not only didn't let her out of prison but the guards may have begun raping her. As long as there was some small chance she really was sent by God, people may have hesitated to be abusive in that fashion for fear it might be true and they might go to hell.
So my takeaway was that backing down and telling people "Fine. Whatever. Just leave me alone." would likely result in worse things than standing my ground.
But I also chose to follow the wisdom I am fond of from the French language Bible, which supposedly says The nonchalant shall inherit the Earth. instead of The meek shall inherit the Earth. I grew up in a bilingual home, so if I squint a bit I can see those as trying to say essentially the same thing and the English version simply not being the best framing for the concept.
I talk a lot less on forums about "I have a genetic disorder and I'm getting well." Instead, I blog and don't promote the blog.
You can neither accuse me of all the shitty accusations I used to get of being a drama queen, etc. nor of "recanting" it. It's all still there, it's just on a website that I don't promote.
I am standing by what I have said and also NOT doing whatever bullshit they imagined I was doing for simply trying to live my life and solve my problems, a choice that makes me unforgivably rude. I'm a former homemaker. How DARE I make scientists and medical professionals look stupid by solving something they can't solve and RUDELY failing to die on schedule so they can feel like they are smart and know things.
I started my first health blog while I was a homemaker. I have long hoped to monetize my blog writing and support myself this way and that's proven to be ...challenging. And has not involved immediate gratification.
After some years of not making something resembling an adequate income online, I looked around at what actually made money online and decided to try my hand at comicking instead. I had a corporate job at the time that I first tried to pursue this idea.
Going to work and dealing with my health took all my time. I was in a lot of pain most of the time and basically had no life outside of work.
This meant that my jokes tended to be about my job because the job took all my energy and the rest of my time was spent eating, sleeping and so forth. It also tended to be dark humor because I was in a lot of pain and under sentence of death and generally had an extremely shitty life overall, what with being born with a Dread Disease.
So I didn't much develop it because I figured this would be an excellent way to get fired from my job and I needed my job. No amount of "explaining" that I wasn't trying to rag on the company would ever be enough to make it okay to rag on the company in actual fact.
I was homeless the next time I tried to pursue this idea that a comic would be a good way to make money online. I was homeless and being cyberstalked by some narcissistic asshole and I decided to mock him in my comic and thereby try to get him out of my hair while somehow paying my bills.
He was too fucked in the head to realize he was being mocked and instead this nutcase seemingly decided I was writing a loving ode to his insane mysogynistic rapey sack of shit self and this made my mental health worse, not better, and my social problems worse, not better, while not leading to money. So I again discontinued it.
When I had a corporate job, I was working for an insurance company paying accident claims. This involved reading medical records all day.
I felt a bit like Einstein working at the patent office. I knew I was doing something "big" and could potentially someday be famous for it -- assuming they don't first lock me up as a nutter and murder me for being so incredibly rude as to fail to die on a schedule that would please doctors and scientists and affirm they are smart and know things.
Working for an insurance company made it hard for me to even develop my health blog. Again, that was one part simply not having the time and energy after working because I was so sick and had nothing left to give after working 37.5 hours a week. But it was also for fear of being fired for it.
I had someone at the company tell me I was being unnecessarily cautious and paranoid, that there was nothing about having a health blog that should be seen as a "threat" to the company's business model or whatever. People blog. No big.
At the same time, I was being singled out and picked on by a newly transferred in executive in my department for issues that the rules said she was NOT supposed to pick on low level employees over.
If I violated dress code, I was quickly told this was a big issue and MUST NOT HAPPEN AGAIN. Meanwhile, other women could dress like hookers in clear violation of the dress code and wear the same hooker-ific outfit over and over and apparently not have one word said to them about it.
The "rules" always seem to be different for me. Trying to convince others I get treated differently and this is a problem for me tends to convince them I'm an egomaniac who thinks too highly of myself rather than convincing them I genuinely have some kind of social problem I need to solve.
At best, it's a waste of time. At worst, it actively makes my social problems worse.
I have a Certificate in GIS. This is database work and I was good at figuring out the new glitches introduced by any system upgrades in the department where paying claims basically involved interacting with several homegrown databases all day, everyday. I sometimes wrote tutorials or whatever and once won a departmental award for improving a reference sheet we used.
It took me some weeks of trying to navigate the byzantine social heirarchy and find someone with the power to ACTUALLY add my reference sheet to the internal documents. They promptly assigned the maintenance of the newly formatted reference sheet to someone higher ranking than me. She fucked up my beautiful formatting with her very first update of the info, replacing my color coding with a jarring BLACK background for the new information.
Insurance is an industry drowning in information and I twice submitted suggestions that some part of the system should be converted to GIS to help make things more navigable. Both ideas were rejected. The second one was rejected with a nasty little note about how it was basically the same idea I had submitted once before and "Don't do that again, you badly behaved little employee, you."
In five years at Aflac, I met exactly ONE person who knew what the hell GIS was without me explaining it to him first. He was a senior programmer in the IT department where I hoped to eventually get a job as IT work pays a whole lot better than an entry level claims job, claims being essentially a pink collar ghetto run by women, so much so that MOST people in the department got off at 2:00 p.m, in time to pick the kids up from school.
Having grown up in Columbus, Georgia, some of the long-time employees there were people I went to high school with or were childhood friends of mine. A childhood friend who worked in the IT department gave me the low-down on just how big a salary difference we were talking about and it's a life-changing amount of money.
There were plenty of employees at Aflac who dated each other or married each other. It's not against the rules.
But you can't date anyone in your chain of command.
I'm sure this senior programmer from Pakistan -- the only guy who knew what GIS was -- looked up the policy before he asked me out and made sure his ass was covered. It wouldn't ruin HIS career to ask me out.
I'm equally sure he spent exactly zero nanoseconds wondering how this might impact MY career aspirations or even wondering if Aflac might want a GIS professional in their IT department. He was too busy viewing me as nothing but a piece of ass.
For me, simply being asked out by him made it vastly less likely I would ever work in his department. That helped make my decision to quit one month later easier because it meant my career aspirations at the company were effectively dead.
Thanks so much. FYI: In my book, that means you are incapable of ever loving me, butthead. I'm not EVEN a human being to you.
I spent a few days wondering how to explain to him that I have a genetic disorder, I'm celibate for medical reasons, I can't date you even if I wanted to and, oh, I'm also a "harlot" who was unfaithful to my ex and you come from a country with honor killings and I think we just cannot do this dance, thank you.
There seemed to be no good means to even speak to the "easy" part of "I am not dating ANYONE because I'm deathly ill, sorry" -- an issue I had already had a chance to contemplate once when some other employee was being flirty and I decided to politely discourage it, a choice that led to an investigation by HR -- much less the part about "I know from experience I won't be faithful to you if you are an asshole to me and I'd really like to not end up murdered over that personal quirk, THANKS!"
As "luck" would have it, I soon was relieved of any need to fret about such things because about three days after he indicated he would like to have coffee with me sometime while holding my hand, I received a 30-day notice of eviction. I also learned around the same time that the K-mart near my apartment would be closing soon and that would be a big problem for me as I had already given up my car and good luck getting there from here via the local bus system.
I had been having bad dreams for some time that I was on a sinking ship and similar. When I got hired, they passed out free pens and such on a regular basis, almost like getting a prize in your McHappy Meal only these were McHappy Meetings. Then the recession hit and I could read between the lines even though they were bragging about how well the company was doing. At some point, my Aflac-emblazoned pens ran out and I had to -- le gasp -- buy my own, which I noticed because funds were perpetually an issue for me what with financing a miracle cure out of pocket while everyone called me "crazy."
So it was clear that I had no future at this company and my bad dreams had me wondering if the company had a future at all. It had been my goal for some time to leave "on my terms"/"at a time of my choosing" rather than be fired.
I worked a LOT of overtime that December, got my biggest paycheck ever on January 1st and slept in a tent that three day weekend, having been told by family I couldn't come home again as my dad was dying of Alzheimer's, a story told elsewhere.
After three nights in a tent in a patch of woods, I felt better than I had in years. I decided to not return to work, emailed in my resignation and left town.
This was not how I had wanted it to go. I had wanted to develop an adequate income FIRST and then quit. I decided to develop an income from the street and imagined it would take three to six months to establish an income and get back into housing.
Thus began nearly six years of homelessness.
I imagine Aflac hates me and would never forgive me for choosing life. That's okay, I think most of them are rampant assholes too.
He had the good sense to talk about physics, not about how he was managing to stay alive when he was supposed to be dead. I have not been similarly wise and it perhaps was not an option for me due to circumstances beyond my control.
Semmelweis was a physician who was more or less murdered for not agreeing with the standard wisdom of his time. He was in charge of two clinics, one with a much higher mortality rate than the other, and produced studies with hard data and recommended sterilizing one's hands after examining cadavers and before examining patients. He had no theory as to why, or at least not a solid theory, and was a bit too early for germ theory.
He was locked up in an insane asylum, very possibly for failing to back down on his "nutty" theory while being hounded by everyone he knew about it and unable to get people to just damn well drop it. He was beaten by guards fairly promptly and died as a consequence of the beating about two weeks later.
I've experienced some of the same social dynamics. I've had people behave really badly towards me and there is no means to get them to stop being awful once it starts. In their warped minds, it's "my fault" they harass me because I made the mistake of talking about getting better while they said ridiculous things like "It's placebo effect."
If "placebo effect" -- if just BELIEVING natural remedies help -- can "cure" a genetic disorder and heal up the hole I used to have in my left lung, well then I guess I'm Darth Vader and have an amazingly powerful mind.
One problem with that incredibly stupid and insane accusation: I never "believed" I would get this much better.
I never imagined the hole in my lung would close. I expected to take $300/month worth of supplements for the rest of my life to try to not get worse and was happy to take that deal in comparison to thousands of dollars a month worth of drugs with horrendous side effects accompanied by a steady decline -- "The normal progression of CF" (code for "Quit expecting your doctor to ACTUALLY get you better and stop annoying us with not liking the sentence of death you live under.")
So insane assholes who like to imagine THEY are "sciency" and I'm some deluded nutter will need to look elsewhere for their bullshit reasons to be dismissive because "belief" didn't get me here.
I never "believed" I would get this well. It just happened, much to my shock.
I've spent a lot of years trying to not end up like Semmelweis and feeling like this was especially challenging because I'm a former homemaker with "a sample of one" in the eyes of much of the world and "anecdotal" evidence, not a physician with differing mortality rates between two clinics and an idea as to why that might be.
This is my umpteenth health blog. I don't know how many I have gone through.
I first began publishing health info to the web because some people asked to forward an email of mine to relatives of theirs who had a child with CF or other serious health issues and I thought if it's public, they can just share the link without asking. And then the initial flurry of interest didn't seem to be followed by more and I'm not sure it was wise to continue.
I continued in part because I watched some documentary about the life of Joan of Arc and it was speculated that when she recanted and said "Ok. FINE. I was not sent by God. I made it all up. Please let me out of prison." they not only didn't let her out of prison but the guards may have begun raping her. As long as there was some small chance she really was sent by God, people may have hesitated to be abusive in that fashion for fear it might be true and they might go to hell.
So my takeaway was that backing down and telling people "Fine. Whatever. Just leave me alone." would likely result in worse things than standing my ground.
But I also chose to follow the wisdom I am fond of from the French language Bible, which supposedly says The nonchalant shall inherit the Earth. instead of The meek shall inherit the Earth. I grew up in a bilingual home, so if I squint a bit I can see those as trying to say essentially the same thing and the English version simply not being the best framing for the concept.
I talk a lot less on forums about "I have a genetic disorder and I'm getting well." Instead, I blog and don't promote the blog.
You can neither accuse me of all the shitty accusations I used to get of being a drama queen, etc. nor of "recanting" it. It's all still there, it's just on a website that I don't promote.
I am standing by what I have said and also NOT doing whatever bullshit they imagined I was doing for simply trying to live my life and solve my problems, a choice that makes me unforgivably rude. I'm a former homemaker. How DARE I make scientists and medical professionals look stupid by solving something they can't solve and RUDELY failing to die on schedule so they can feel like they are smart and know things.
I started my first health blog while I was a homemaker. I have long hoped to monetize my blog writing and support myself this way and that's proven to be ...challenging. And has not involved immediate gratification.
After some years of not making something resembling an adequate income online, I looked around at what actually made money online and decided to try my hand at comicking instead. I had a corporate job at the time that I first tried to pursue this idea.
Going to work and dealing with my health took all my time. I was in a lot of pain most of the time and basically had no life outside of work.
This meant that my jokes tended to be about my job because the job took all my energy and the rest of my time was spent eating, sleeping and so forth. It also tended to be dark humor because I was in a lot of pain and under sentence of death and generally had an extremely shitty life overall, what with being born with a Dread Disease.
So I didn't much develop it because I figured this would be an excellent way to get fired from my job and I needed my job. No amount of "explaining" that I wasn't trying to rag on the company would ever be enough to make it okay to rag on the company in actual fact.
I was homeless the next time I tried to pursue this idea that a comic would be a good way to make money online. I was homeless and being cyberstalked by some narcissistic asshole and I decided to mock him in my comic and thereby try to get him out of my hair while somehow paying my bills.
He was too fucked in the head to realize he was being mocked and instead this nutcase seemingly decided I was writing a loving ode to his insane mysogynistic rapey sack of shit self and this made my mental health worse, not better, and my social problems worse, not better, while not leading to money. So I again discontinued it.
When I had a corporate job, I was working for an insurance company paying accident claims. This involved reading medical records all day.
I felt a bit like Einstein working at the patent office. I knew I was doing something "big" and could potentially someday be famous for it -- assuming they don't first lock me up as a nutter and murder me for being so incredibly rude as to fail to die on a schedule that would please doctors and scientists and affirm they are smart and know things.
Working for an insurance company made it hard for me to even develop my health blog. Again, that was one part simply not having the time and energy after working because I was so sick and had nothing left to give after working 37.5 hours a week. But it was also for fear of being fired for it.
I had someone at the company tell me I was being unnecessarily cautious and paranoid, that there was nothing about having a health blog that should be seen as a "threat" to the company's business model or whatever. People blog. No big.
At the same time, I was being singled out and picked on by a newly transferred in executive in my department for issues that the rules said she was NOT supposed to pick on low level employees over.
If I violated dress code, I was quickly told this was a big issue and MUST NOT HAPPEN AGAIN. Meanwhile, other women could dress like hookers in clear violation of the dress code and wear the same hooker-ific outfit over and over and apparently not have one word said to them about it.
The "rules" always seem to be different for me. Trying to convince others I get treated differently and this is a problem for me tends to convince them I'm an egomaniac who thinks too highly of myself rather than convincing them I genuinely have some kind of social problem I need to solve.
At best, it's a waste of time. At worst, it actively makes my social problems worse.
I have a Certificate in GIS. This is database work and I was good at figuring out the new glitches introduced by any system upgrades in the department where paying claims basically involved interacting with several homegrown databases all day, everyday. I sometimes wrote tutorials or whatever and once won a departmental award for improving a reference sheet we used.
It took me some weeks of trying to navigate the byzantine social heirarchy and find someone with the power to ACTUALLY add my reference sheet to the internal documents. They promptly assigned the maintenance of the newly formatted reference sheet to someone higher ranking than me. She fucked up my beautiful formatting with her very first update of the info, replacing my color coding with a jarring BLACK background for the new information.
Insurance is an industry drowning in information and I twice submitted suggestions that some part of the system should be converted to GIS to help make things more navigable. Both ideas were rejected. The second one was rejected with a nasty little note about how it was basically the same idea I had submitted once before and "Don't do that again, you badly behaved little employee, you."
In five years at Aflac, I met exactly ONE person who knew what the hell GIS was without me explaining it to him first. He was a senior programmer in the IT department where I hoped to eventually get a job as IT work pays a whole lot better than an entry level claims job, claims being essentially a pink collar ghetto run by women, so much so that MOST people in the department got off at 2:00 p.m, in time to pick the kids up from school.
Having grown up in Columbus, Georgia, some of the long-time employees there were people I went to high school with or were childhood friends of mine. A childhood friend who worked in the IT department gave me the low-down on just how big a salary difference we were talking about and it's a life-changing amount of money.
There were plenty of employees at Aflac who dated each other or married each other. It's not against the rules.
But you can't date anyone in your chain of command.
I'm sure this senior programmer from Pakistan -- the only guy who knew what GIS was -- looked up the policy before he asked me out and made sure his ass was covered. It wouldn't ruin HIS career to ask me out.
I'm equally sure he spent exactly zero nanoseconds wondering how this might impact MY career aspirations or even wondering if Aflac might want a GIS professional in their IT department. He was too busy viewing me as nothing but a piece of ass.
For me, simply being asked out by him made it vastly less likely I would ever work in his department. That helped make my decision to quit one month later easier because it meant my career aspirations at the company were effectively dead.
Thanks so much. FYI: In my book, that means you are incapable of ever loving me, butthead. I'm not EVEN a human being to you.
I spent a few days wondering how to explain to him that I have a genetic disorder, I'm celibate for medical reasons, I can't date you even if I wanted to and, oh, I'm also a "harlot" who was unfaithful to my ex and you come from a country with honor killings and I think we just cannot do this dance, thank you.
There seemed to be no good means to even speak to the "easy" part of "I am not dating ANYONE because I'm deathly ill, sorry" -- an issue I had already had a chance to contemplate once when some other employee was being flirty and I decided to politely discourage it, a choice that led to an investigation by HR -- much less the part about "I know from experience I won't be faithful to you if you are an asshole to me and I'd really like to not end up murdered over that personal quirk, THANKS!"
As "luck" would have it, I soon was relieved of any need to fret about such things because about three days after he indicated he would like to have coffee with me sometime while holding my hand, I received a 30-day notice of eviction. I also learned around the same time that the K-mart near my apartment would be closing soon and that would be a big problem for me as I had already given up my car and good luck getting there from here via the local bus system.
I had been having bad dreams for some time that I was on a sinking ship and similar. When I got hired, they passed out free pens and such on a regular basis, almost like getting a prize in your McHappy Meal only these were McHappy Meetings. Then the recession hit and I could read between the lines even though they were bragging about how well the company was doing. At some point, my Aflac-emblazoned pens ran out and I had to -- le gasp -- buy my own, which I noticed because funds were perpetually an issue for me what with financing a miracle cure out of pocket while everyone called me "crazy."
So it was clear that I had no future at this company and my bad dreams had me wondering if the company had a future at all. It had been my goal for some time to leave "on my terms"/"at a time of my choosing" rather than be fired.
I worked a LOT of overtime that December, got my biggest paycheck ever on January 1st and slept in a tent that three day weekend, having been told by family I couldn't come home again as my dad was dying of Alzheimer's, a story told elsewhere.
After three nights in a tent in a patch of woods, I felt better than I had in years. I decided to not return to work, emailed in my resignation and left town.
This was not how I had wanted it to go. I had wanted to develop an adequate income FIRST and then quit. I decided to develop an income from the street and imagined it would take three to six months to establish an income and get back into housing.
Thus began nearly six years of homelessness.
I imagine Aflac hates me and would never forgive me for choosing life. That's okay, I think most of them are rampant assholes too.
