I never really had a career plan. I didn’t have a life plan either. Most of what has happened to me feels accidental, things that happened along the way while I was pursuing my eating disorder, while I was living with mental illness. Plans were for later, when I was better, when I was perfect. But later almost never comes.

Maybe that one time in Poughkeepsie.

I had vague ideas about my future – move to Hollywood and be an actress, move to New Zealand and be a lawyer, move anywhere and be anything but me – but those were mostly connected to the idea of the geographic cure. I thought maybe I wouldn’t be me somewhere else.

I guess not being me was the plan.

I had no passions beyond my eating disorder, and no real interests beyond getting thin, save for a desire to escape. I’ve always loved books and movies: they allow me to get away from myself for a while. Dissociation does something similar. But you always come back to you.

It’s not that I haven’t had education and employment. They just don’t take.

I’d start jobs with enthusiasm and passion – everybody loves a lifeline – but a job can’t fix you any more than a location can, and so my neuroses would come roaring back before the honeymoon was even over. And the relationships were forever doomed. Three years is about the longest I can maintain when undertaking outside work. Three years before I decompensate to a level that requires time off to recover, reset, reboot, and repeat.

Though the pattern differed this last time. I have been on long term disability since 2014, and I’m not sure I’ll ever make it back to employment. I haven’t been able to fully reboot. I haven’t been able to return to an ostensibly fully functioning baseline. This is a hard thing to face. But I broke something in my brain at my last job, and it doesn’t appear to be healing this time. I remain fractured and a little fragile in a way that was not true before the events of my last months and days there a decade on.

Though that last day was a very bad one.

Permanent disability frustrates me sometimes. It makes me angry and sad. It’s hard not to take it personally, and hard not to feel like a failure. I do what I can do these days, but I wonder about the might-have-beens. What if I hadn’t encountered repeated trauma as a child? What if I hadn’t developed an eating disorder to cope? What if society devoted appropriate resources towards treating eating disorder and mental illnesses?

I think I’d still try law. I’m fond of words, and don’t mind a debate.

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