supporting the disabled (3)

A successful middle aged professional asked me over the weekend if I missed the ego satisfaction of being a successful middle aged professional. I said that looking after people was more fulfilling and real to me than much of what I’d done in my career. That was my rote answer and it’s true but it’s not the whole truth.

The work can also be humiliating. I grew up upper middle class in a class ridden society where we had servants. What I do now easily classifies as servant work, work that only those who are uneducated and poor do, only those who have no other choices. To be a servant, by definition, is to be lesser.

In many ways, disability support work in Australia still falls under that definition. The majority of the people I work with are migrants from developing world countries who have few other choices. It can be relatively well paid if you work privately but many migrants face barriers of confidence, acceptance and racism to be able to find private clients.

And so, for the many, it means working for a company who takes 40% or so of the hourly rate they charge their clients and place casual staff who often drive long distances and chase as many shifts as they can so they can make ends meet and send money home.

But back to humiliation. I have a complex relationship with it. In a way, i take pride in how “low” I’ve sunk. I cheerfully share that I clean bums as part of my work. I don’t feel embarrassed socially by this. After all, I’m doing this by choice although I have a suspicion that the longer I do this, the less of a choice it becomes.

The humiliation comes at odd times, when I catch myself doing a menial task and i am abruptly transformed from me being who I am to me being a servant. It doesn’t happen often and it doesn’t last long but it causes an existential wave – what on earth am I doing and why?

At that point, I fall back into old habits and think about how much I am earning and the number of hours I need to have in order to pull me weight never mind that I’m explicitly not doing this for money.

The other scarier question is if I am finding this humiliating servant work, what should I be doing instead?

Supporting the disabled (2)

I have a ten and a half hour shift every week providing complex care. The work is a combination of routine and sudden stressful change. There’s a risk of errors causing more errors all of which then requires more work which brings about more risk. 

On a good day, there’s not much to do in the afternoon and I’m counting the hours as I perform simple cleaning and tidying jobs. On a bad day, I’m run off my feet and exhausted by the end of shift with my adrenal systems a total wreck. Looking after a person who is so fragile and where mistakes can be catastrophic is stressful, especially when I am working alone in their home during those long shifts.

On both types of days towards the late afternoon, i wonder why the hell I am doing this when I could be earning four times as much sitting behind my desk, running meetings and writing up documents. But then, I can’t see myself returning to that either. 

And the point of all this change, I tell myself, is not money but time.

Having reached 52 last year and achieving a certain amount of financial stability for the future, I didn’t want my life to just have been a series of parties and IT consultancy. I wanted a larger life and one that would extend the next decade if not more. I could see that staying in IT was going to compress the passage of time. My last ten years had passed in a blink and even though the pandemic had a fair bit to do with that, I could see the same happening for the next ten at which point I would be 62 and losing the neuro flexibility to do something about it as well as risking the narrowing of options that comes with ageism.

Anyway, jumping into complex disability care had certainly worked. The first few months of working in disability was as intense as my stint travelling through India. When I think about it, I can’t believe it’s only been 10 months. But like it was in India after 5 months, the novelty has passed. When I was in India and over it, I started to look towards returning home.

In this case however, there isn’t one. All I can do is to look for the next figurative country. 

Supporting the disabled (1)

I can’t really remember when I wrote here last. It was certainly way before the pandemic. Looking just then at my last entry it was in October 2018. It’s now September 2023, nearly five years later.

Lots has happened since. Enough at least that I am dusting off this very public and yet strangely private journal – the only journal I’ve ever succeeded in keeping. The journal I am coming back to now because I need a place to reflect, especially in these long shifts when my thoughts seems to run the same loop over and over again.

Last November, I left the industry I’d been working in for nearly 26 years. It was IT, but the business side of it. I was good at it and it paid well but it wasn’t good for me, not on the whole anyway. I’d never felt that fulfilled by it. At least that’s the story I tell myself. It’s part of the truth but not the whole one.

Last November, I started working in disability support as a front line worker. I chose it because in Australia, it requires no experience or training to support often very vulnerable people. All it needs is an online vetting process presumably to check you don’t have a record.

I tell myself and others that I chose to do this because I wanted to quickly find out if my general statements of wanting to do something more meaningful and more person centred would actually translated into reality.

Again, I think it’s only part of the truth. When I try to remember the feeling of my decision, it reminds me of when I left Melbourne to cycle to Darwin in 1999. I’d decided to end something rather than start something. I was trying to get away from Melbourne and the person I was there.

White Victimhood / White Rights

Most of the Left’s responses to the white victimhood / white rights movement in my opinion, misses the mark. Going on about white privilege isnt helpful when the segment of the population that responds to the message are most likely to be poor and disenfranchised.

The Left should focus on what made it the Left in the first place: class. The message should go something like this:

“Poverty is color blind. Poor health, poor access to services, poor education – all of these things afflict every section of our society. And this includes large segments of the majority: white people. It may seem that the government has policies that favors non-white minorities, but this is untrue. The government has policies aimed at farmers: predominantly these are white people. The government has policies aimed at reducing gap between urban and regional communities: again these communities are predominantly white. A responsible government does not target policies based on identity or race alone – but on the problems and challenges that face a particular segment of our community. And that is always and will always be color blind.”

Changing your mind

Over the weekend, I finished Michael Pollan’s new book: How to change your mind. Given his popularity and the thirst of the elite to 1) better themselves either from a personal development or performance enhancement way 2) heal themselves of anxiety / depression, I am expecting that psychedelics will be fully legalised in some states within the US at least for medical treatment within the next few years. There’s already significant anecdotal evidence that micro-dosing is rising especially within the tech sector.

Australia will take some time to follow given that any movement on cannabis de-criminalisation seems to have gone backward, I doubt that there’ll be much movement on psychedelics.

The primary interesting bit of information I got from the book was that meditation seems to have a similar (if lesser) effect as the guided therapeutic use of psychedelics. Towards the end of the book, Michael Pollan’s comparison with Buddhist practices and philosophies increase. I especially found the descriptions of the default mode network‘s functions to be useful. I’d not heard about it before but it fits very well with my own experiences as a meditator and it makes sense.

The second bit that I found interesting was that every guided meditation psychedelic journey the author experienced had music. Given how important music is to me and how critical I can be, I can’t imagine ever wanting someone else to dictate my play-list at the best of times – much less when I am under the influence.