My Time in Vocational Rehabilitation

We have all known people. Perhaps they are family members. We wondered why they were still living at home in their thirties or forties. We whispered about them and gossiped about them at the dinner table.

I know this all too well because I’m that guy. My dad was in the military, I graduated from high school on an air force base in Japan. I did what a lot of graduates did, I went back to the States by myself to live with relatives.

To say things didn’t work out is an understatement. I moved back in with my parents and siblings soon after they came back to the States when my dad retired a year later.

I tried one last time to get and keep a job, it lasted about three months. I was working in a warehouse, I’m Dyslexic, everything was based on numbers, I screwed up an order for the company’s biggest customer, that was that.

“You need help son, with your brain damage and Dyslexia, you need help finding something you can do.” My dad said at the meeting with him and my mom, they didn’t agree with much of anything when it came to their kids, but they agreed on that.

I was in a federal job training program in Denver when I lived with my grandparents. The taxpayers generously paid us to get drunk and high on the job while we worked in a warehouse.

When I moved back with my parents in Fort Worth Texas, after getting fired from the Tile Company, I went through an evaluation, I’m color blind and Dyslexic, I also have poor spatial skills and poor hand-eye coordination.

The obvious job-training program to place me in was a meat-cutting class. How I finished the class with all my fingers is a mystery to me. The bad thing, I finished the class without knowing how to cut meat.

I spent the rest of my time in Texas unemployed most of the time, I couldn’t stick anywhere. I was in my late twenties, still living with my parents when we moved to Florida.

I didn’t have a chance to try my hand at another job, I was pressured by my parents into another vocational Rehabilitation program. I did so well in Work Adjustment Training the company hired me as a material handler.

I did so well as a material handler, I was soon promoted to trainer. I had reached my level of incompetence. I was fired several months later. It was time for another sit-down with my parents.

I was relieved that we had exhausted all the Vocational Rehabilitation options in Florida. My parents by this time had had it. I was told to get a security guard job, “because anybody could be a security guard.”

I was a security guard in Florida for twenty years. I worked at several sites that I enjoyed, but I still hated the job. When my parents passed away, I used the money they left me to buy a trailer in a trailer park.

I was living with my uncle. I was in my late forties, for the first time in my life I was paying bills and rent like an adult. Eight years later, my uncle died, I hung on for almost a year, I ended up homeless in Minneapolis.

I was able to get State Insurance. I was under the care of Doctors and a Psychotherapist. After Psychological tests and another round of Vocational Evaluations. it was determined that I would probably never be able to work again; and to make things worse, the evaluators thought that I should be in a Home. “Because Lawson’s not able to take care of himself.”

With a report like that, I had no trouble at all getting Disability. I enjoyed working when I wasn’t getting fired or looked down on because I was “slow,” I’m sixty-one years old, I would like to be doing something, but the stroke and what I went through before and during the time I was homeless missed up my head.

I have trouble doing simple things that I was able to do a few years ago. I’m fortunate to have a wife that understands and is willing to help me keep my act together.

None of us are perfect, we all have things that are difficult to do that should be easy. Don’t judge a person that you think is too young to be a security guard, or too smart to be a janitor.

That person tries harder than you will ever know, and he wants to do better. He deserves respect, not ridicule or derision.

Final Thought:

We all have flaws, none of us are perfect, so have compassion for people who are struggling through life, you have no idea what they are wrestling with, be patient and kind, imagine that the person is your son or daughter, it will change your outlook.

Don’t whisper and gossip about that person because they “are slow.” Respect them because they aren’t giving up.