Playing Lawyer

The Legal Labor Of Being Officially Disabled In the Global Epicenter Of Late Stage Capitalism

It’s been a while. I know. This feels like a sputtering effort to get back on track and regain my footing as an author after a long, very mentally and emotionally taxing hiatus.

I’ll keep this one short, as I’m still not fully tooled up mentally for writing, despite my nagging urge to get back in the ring, even if only to declare this an official starting point from which more effective momentum can be built.

As some of you may know, over the past several months, I had to temporarily decommission my writing brain to free up mental resources for the complex logistical challenge of moving halfway across the US as a non-driving dyspraxic person with legal disability status. More accurately, it's the cumbersome bureaucratic paperwork that accompanies any major life transition when you have said legal disability status that adds a needless layer of complexity to whatever life decision you might make.

To be exact, I moved from the US state of Kansas¹ back to my familiar haunt, Ellensburg, Washington, in the Pacific Northwest.

Under the presidency of Trump 2.0, I no longer felt safe living in a red state as a disabled person. Plus, homeownership, the very thing that motivated my move to Kansas in the first place, was no longer working for me as a disabled author. I thus sought to absolve myself of the burden of homeownership and move to a community with better public transit connecting outlying areas and more resources for my unique health needs, such as fully accessible gyms. This was something I had planned to do for some time, as I described in this post:

Migration Time, Yet Again

In that post, I also discussed some of the broader issues many neurodivergent people face in finding appropriate housing and communities that align with our unique needs, but I digress.

The basic move and settling in have gone reasonably well. Some of us dyspraxics can actually be quite adept at long-term logistical planning.

In fact, I might be more fully in the headspace for writing if not for the fact that just as I was nearly settled in, the Social Security Administration (SSA) arbitrarily, capriciously, and unlawfully suspended a major part of my disability benefits, placing me under the looming threat of catastrophic financial destitution.

Through the agency of an incompetent, if not unscrupulous, caseworker, this decision was prompted by changes in my personal resources resulting from the sale of my home and the redirection of the proceeds to my special needs trust. However, the trust I established is legally an excluded resource for most means-tested government benefit programs.

As of this writing, I have filed an appeal and am receiving provisional payments while my case is on appeal. So, financially, I should be fine while appealing the matter, and I have done everything I can. No more legwork is required on my end, at least for now.

I have also spoken with several legal experts, all of whom agree that I am not only legally in the right but that SSA erred, especially egregiously, in my case. Hence, by all legal standards, my case is solid gold and thus seemingly solvable.

Yet despite facing what should be an easy legal matter to resolve, I remain more terrified of the future than I have ever been and am really struggling. In fact, all of my firearms are in safekeeping as I write this, and I’m barely able to string words together into a coherent sentence to describe how I’m feeling. But why? Why am I so despondent over what, at least in theory, is a very solvable problem? Why do I spend hours obsessively reading every statute governing Social Security law, ensuring I understand every one that pertains to my case? Simply put, I have grown all too familiar with the crooked, corrupt way SSA operates.

My modest hope of fully restoring the federal disability payments, which are essential for my support, depends not only on having a strong, legally valid rebuttal to the SSA’s decision but also on the uncertain chance that my claim will be reviewed by someone who understands SSA laws and has the integrity to adjudicate fairly. They often create rules on the fly, and there is almost no effective legal recourse to hold them accountable. They hold all the power over your life, and whether they decide based on facts and law seems more like an honor system–a loosely followed one at that.

Imagine having to reckon with such a system for your basic survival. This has been my reality for the past twenty years. I would like to say that what I just experienced is rare, but unfortunately it’s not. Moreover, such abuses are only likely to grow increasingly commonplace in the wake of Trump’s signature budget bill, passed by Congress last year, which made unprecedented cuts to what little remained of our social safety net.

This is why I’m now struggling with debilitating psychological trauma stemming from my current situation with SSA. I have been through similar predicaments before and know that this type of cruelty is far from uncommon.

Moreover, such cruelty will only worsen as Trump’s signature budget bill, passed last year, further erodes our social safety net, which had long been criminally underfunded. The Big Heinous Bill has accelerated the neoliberal formula of ever-diminishing revenues from a shrinking tax base, diverted primarily to corporate welfare and frivolous military engagements abroad. This is what neoliberalism in its death throes looks like.

The Autistic Burnout Project writes eloquently and powerfully about her own experience with this same phenomenon here

The Big Ugly Eraser is Already Here

My point in bringing up all of this is not to commiserate or elicit sympathy. Rather, my intent is to shed light on an aspect of the disabled experience that shows just how deeply embedded ableism is in society’s institutions. It is tragically commonplace for many disabled people to essentially live as amateur attorneys just to fight for our basic survival within a system that seeks to legislate away our basic right to physically exist. Institutions purportedly developed to support disabled people become weaponized as a form of punitive social control.

In this post, I describe what I believe would be a viable replacement for our current system.

A Spotlight on 3P’s "American Disability Compensation"(ADC)Model:

I was hoping that by this point I would be in a headspace to devote my efforts to writing more in-depth, research-based political posts that will tie into the second book project I am planning, but instead I am struggling with a major setback inflicted by our cruel disability system. Even once I resolve the basic issue, I may still require lots of rest and recovery, and perhaps therapy, to fully get back to my full and normal functionality.

Suffice it to say, experiences like this often leave me wondering why on earth I had to be born in the US as a disabled person. Why not at least Denmark, Finland, or some other more civilized and equitable corner of the global capitalist world?

1. At the time of purchasing my home in mid 2021, Kansas was geographically the closest place to where I lived where I could find a home within my budget.