Making sense of one’s life
It’s a rather difficult and complex topic I’m approaching this time, purely because it’s mostly based on one’s own perception of self-accomplishment. The need to make sense also varies from people to people. My boyfriend doesn’t have that urge to feel useful. For him, playing video games all day/night isn’t an issue, he enjoys it and seems to be satisfied with that part of his life. He became agoraphobic recently, and perhaps he accepted it and its consequence, a new way of living.
But my personality is different, I mostly appreciate when I’m able to help someone when I can use whatever I’ve learned in the past,… whenever I can show I’m not useless. Uselessness is the feeling that hits me the most when I’m depressed, before the fact of having personal issues like health problems that I somehow managed to accept and integrate (not that I « like » those, I live with it and compensate).
My way of being useful is, i.e. by helping people around me with their computers and smartphones thanks to video conference or remote assistance software like TeamViewer (which I’m grateful for, it’s free for personal use, secure, and doesn’t need complicated setup, when the person to help just downloads the QuickSupport version and runs it), or by making simple yet effective websites for an art laboratory/gallery for which I’m also administrator. Those are not very complicated things, and it gives me a warm feeling of accomplishment.
In the past, apart from the people I helped at work as a Business IT Support, I also helped other peoples that trusted me. I value their trust above all, they often have to give me their passwords, rely on me to set up things securely and respect their privacy (because you know, people store things they wouldn’t share with their family on their devices, it’s no surprise there are sometimes sensitive content on laptops and phones, very private pictures,… I don’t judge don’t look, don’t tell. I consider myself bound by professional secrecy).
Of course, I helped my parents, my sister and my grand-parents naturally, but also:
- my parents’ osteopath who had sensitive data about his patients on a hard drive but wanted backups automated… and had absolutely no knowledge about how to get what he wanted.
- the friend who runs that art laboratory, with his numerous personal devices and automated house.
- another friend, renowned French furniture designer
- and generally people I lived with
The problem is that it’s sporadic, it doesn’t keep me busy day after day. I already thought of doing living out of it: starting very small to test the idea, I launched a group on a social network and invited peoples I already helped, plus some friends of them. Only a bunch of people joined the group, I expected that, but even after a few months during which I wrote several posts to explain the goal of the group, I still had no reactions.
I did it wrong surely, with no experience in community building etc, I wasn’t publishing enough posts, or maybe I should have personally contacted each person to tell them of my intentions, my general skills and my availability as an option to help them with IT.
The situation has changed for me in the meantime. The doctors consider I’m not able to work normally because of my conditions, and I receive a social security allowance as a person recognised with minimum 66% handicap. That means, I have a guaranteed income every month, but if I want to have a small occupation, I have to ask permission from the medical adviser of my Health Insurance company, and the amount of money I make out of it is very limited, around 1300€/year. I already asked one permission, to be an administrator of the art gallery but again it’s an occasional stuff.
I’m very interested in the possibility of a part-time occupation that would make me feel useful, that I would organise to fit my specific needs, mental health wise. Some bipolar manage to do it and live an almost normal life, why couldn’t I, now that I’m much more stable?
I used to write in a journaling application, Day One, but that’s for my eyes only, it’s password secured, encrypted too. Here it’s a different story… I don’t know if my writings will ever be useful for anyone else, but I think it can already be for me to put my thoughts on paper — well, on the screen — written like it is intended to be read by somebody else. It forces you to explain things, put in perspective, develop your thoughts or argument. Perhaps an exercise everybody should do?
