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dolorosa_12) wrote2020-10-09 10:07 am
dolorosa_12) wrote2020-10-09 10:07 am
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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?
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?
no subject
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.
no subject
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!