dolorosa_12 | Friday open thread: Bitter work

Welcome back to another Friday open thread. This week's question is a suggestion from

likeadeuce: what is something you have learned in the past (5/10/however many) years?

I assume 'learning' can be interpreted as broadly as possible: formal classes or tutorials, a life or academic skill, a life lesson — certainly I'm happy to see responses that encompass all types of learning.

I've got two answers (although there are many, many more things that I have learnt): a sad one, and a happier one.

The sad answer is that by grim necessity (namely, my desire to remain a resident of the country which had become my home, where I met my husband and most of my friends, and where most of the important moments of my adult life took place), I learnt to navigate a cruel, hostile, incompetent, and indifferent bureaucracy. That's right, I'm talking about the UK Home Office, and the ghastly process that is applying for visas and citizenship.

It's hard to tell, when dealing with these applications, whether the Home Office is cruelly incompetent or incompetently cruel. Either way, the process is designed basically as a deterrent, and navigating it is an utter nightmare. (The worst moment: spending a month arguing with them that they were sending me letters — and thus on the verge of issuing me with a citizenship certificate — in the wrong name. They refused to accept this, even though they had my passport, current visa, birth certificate, and eight years' worth of files on me, all in the correct name. It took an intervention by the immigration compliance officer at my employer to get them to fix this mistake, which led me to wonder — what happens to all the people who fall into these kind of disasters and do not have the support of a wealthy, prestigious university to argue their case?)

I became a citizen in 2016, and instead of feeling happy and elated, all I felt was an exhausted, furious sense of relief. And I know this is common from my other immigrant friends. If you want to create a batch of new citizens whose main feeling towards their new country is a sense of enraged fury, you couldn't have designed a more perfect system. In the years since I've been a citizen, the whole process has in fact become even worse.

All that being said, what the experience did teach me was an infinite patience with bureaucracy, and exemplary skills for compiling extensive batches of paperwork to prove various things. And no administrative task will ever daunt me again! Whenever Matthias and I are faced with unpleasant bureaucratic tasks, we always say, 'well, at least it's not as bad as dealing with the Home Office' as a form of encouragement!

A much happier skill which I've picked up during lockdown: container gardening. Not everything has been a success, but I have become a expert at growing tomatoes in pots, and that's been a constant source of delight throughout the past six months. I just ate the last of this year's batch on Monday, and I'm looking forward to growing even more tomatoes next year. I haven't had much luck with other plants, apart from herbs and radishes, but I'll try to be a bit more ambitious in the future.

What have you learnt?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

author_by_night

They refused to accept this, even though they had my passport, current visa, birth certificate, and eight years' worth of files on me, all in the correct name.

That's infuriating. Wow. I'm so sorry you had to deal with that BS!

at happens to all the people who fall into these kind of disasters and do not have the support of a wealthy, prestigious university to argue their case?)

Yes, this exactly. It gets even more tangled for people who face language and cultural barriers.

One thing I've grown cynical about is the fact that people want to solve problems by praying or sharing Facebook memes or whatever else. Right now there's a thing going around where you copy and paste about depression to show that you care. First of all, some of these people come across, initially, as though they're talking about their own experiences with it. Do NOT play with people's heads like that. Second of all, it avoids the conversations we actually need to be having. I don't want to discredit social media too much, because I have also seen great posts that actually do talk about helping and recognizing symptoms, among many other things. That's great. What's not great is "clickbait clickbait clickbait, copy and paste if you also care about people with depression." That's gross. Same with cancer, dementia, you name it.

Some of the kindest and most caring people I know have shared these things, so I know it comes from a good place most of the time. Honestly, there was a time I shared those things. It's just that form my vantage point, it's talking about the thing without really examining it. Everyone knows those things already. But do they know that the happiest people they know might actually be masking and struggling with suicidal thoughts? Do they know how to help if a friend's parent is hospitalized? Do they know how to handle an elderly relative's audio hallucinations?

And yes, some of this comes from my own experiences the last few years. I think that's why I feel so strongly, although I had issues with those memes even before.

Edited Date: 2020-10-09 10:41 am (UTC)

From:

dolorosa_12

It gets even more tangled for people who face language and cultural barriers.

Exactly so. I always say that I went through the whole process with pretty much the maximum privilege possible: white, native English speaker from a Commonwealth country, highly educated, upper middle class, and able-bodied. And even I ran into difficulties — it's so much worse for those who don't have my substantial advantages.

I hate those Facebook memes ('share this status if you care about cancer ... I bet most of you won't share this!'). They're so cynical and emotionally manipulative. I always want to ask the people sharing them if they feel that their work is done once they've clicked 'share' — so much easier to bask in a sense of passive-aggressive superiority than actually take concrete action to actually do something to help solve the issue they're posting about!

From:

kore

Ugh, that is so terrible and I'm so sorry you went through all that. It sounds like some people I know who've applied for disability -- it took them years and years and at the end of it they finally got help and some relief, but getting there was like a trial by combat. I know bureaucracies are not a remotely new thing (Rome had them, right?) but they seem like a particularly modern hell.

Container gardening! I wish I could do that, but I have my mother's black plant-killing thumb. During lockdown I have sort of more or less learned to cook -- I knew how to make dishes before, but I've gotten better at various prep techniques and timing a bunch of things to come out together, rather than cooking A and B and then C so we wound up eating at about ten at night. I also got a lot more adventurous with salads, which might sound daffy, but it was nice to hear T enthuse about a big pile of pretty-looking tasty vegetables.

From:

dolorosa_12

I've always maintained that governments treat migrants, disabled people, and unemployed people the way they would treat everyone if they had the choice.

Learning to cook (or rather learning how to manage the whole cooking process so it became much more streamlined) is a great thing to have learnt, and the dishes you've posted about always look delicious!

From:

likeadeuce

Oh, wow, from what I can tell basically ANY bureaucracy in the US that serves people who really need help is a good deal like that (and so is our 'beloved' 'private' health insurance, don't get me started.)

I'm sure I was thinking of something particular when I submitted this prompt but I'm not sure what it was, and I feel like I've talked about a lot of the particular ways I've learned and grown recently on here before. So I'll just say that I've grown to appreciate how much I *can* change and try new experiences and get excited about new things despite not being a young person. I think I spent a lot of my 30s in a rut, in part, BECAUSE I basically thought 'if I'm this person at 34, it's obviously the person I am going to keep being forever. But then since I turned 40 I've just tried so many new things + learned to be open to different experiences and ways of relating to people and of being in the world (and I've also seen how much my parents have changed and grown since retiring and my siblings as they've become parents and my friends as they've moved into new career fields + nearly all of us becoming activists on some level or other). So yeah 'becoming' doesn't begin or end at a certain time in life and that's sometimes scary but it's also exciting and helps me be hopeful.

From:

dolorosa_12

When I read about health insurance in the US, it genuinely makes my blood run cold. I've lived in three countries with three different types of health insurance, ranging from the NHS here in the UK (where no doctor's appointment of any kind costs a single cent, and the cost of prescriptions is capped at something like £9 (or is free if you are a child, unemployed, disabled or have a chronic health condition)) to a hybrid public-private system in Australia (but where the cost of monthly private health insurance is very low). Neither of those systems is perfect (and in the UK they're privatising the NHS by stealth), but at least no one lives in fear and terror of getting sick. The way US health insurance often seems to be tied to employment, or to family groups seems to me to enable abusive workplaces and families, while the fact that every medical appointment seems to require endless arguments and follow up with insurers just sounds dystopian. The idea of having to deal with that while battling a life-threatening illness or living with a chronic disability is appalling. It must be an absolute nightmare to endure.

I really, really love your response to this prompt. I had a similar realisation when I hit my thirties. I think the age at which this kind of realisation hits is different for different people (and obviously it never happens for some), but it is so incredibly liberating!

'becoming' doesn't begin or end at a certain time in life and that's sometimes scary but it's also exciting and helps me be hopeful

Absolutely, and that's a beautiful thing!