24 years old, Disabled & Jobless

Hello beautiful people!

It has been a while since I written to you all. It has been a crazy time in my life. One of reasons why is because I'm kind of having a "midlife" crises at the age of 24. What I mean is that I thought I was going to be at a completely different stage in my life, career-wise, then where I'm currently am presently.

I had always plan to take a short break after I graduated college because I felt like I deserved it. During college, I couldn't really watch TV shows, Youtube, or spend time online researching topics that fascinated me. It would always be class, homework, and study all day every day with the occasional hangouts with friends . So the idea of having free time was amazing to me. But after a while, it got old. I was ready to start being busy again.

During college, my husband and I decided to get married in 2 years. After I took almost a full year break after graduation, I had one year to go still and it was during this time that I got informed, if I got legally married I would lose all my disability benefits because to the government my spouse should be able to provide for us both. In addition to that, if I were to get an income of more than $2,000 a month I would also lose my disability benefits no matter of my martial status. In my opinion, that is total BS and is just a way for the government to limit more the disabled community. But this was just the way it was and still is. I was in a lose-lose situation. I decided since I was going to get married regardless, why would I waste a year of receiving disability benefits, so I waited another year to find a job. I justified the second year of pausing the job hunt with planning my wedding. Planning my wedding gave me purpose again. It was during that time that I realized that while I am busy that is when I am my best self. I felt amazing about myself.

Fast Forward to right now, 4 months since our wedding, I feel like I have no purpose again and it is extremely difficult to admit that because I know that I'm not worthless, I know that I'm educated enough, but I also know that I'm missing something critical to push me forward and I have yet to figure out what that is.

Never in my life have I used my disability as an excuse not to do anything in life but the more and more that I grow, the more realistic I become and I know that even though I have began my job hunt, I probably won't find one as fast as others. For two main reasons that branches off each other. First being, my very clear physically disability and secondly, my speech impairment that is a result of my disability. I believe that the second reason is MUCH more of a "setback" than my first reason. Talking so that everyone you interact with is able to understand you is an essential ability for any job. So how do I make that part of a job accessible? I'll let you know when/if I find a job.

For now, I have began to focus on things that truly matters in life. I believe that for a long time, I let social media dedicated how I should be in my own life and when I failed, I just felt like crap when in reality social media is the last resource, in my opinion, to go to feel validated when trying to achieve a big goal in life. I'm slowly realizing that I do have purpose even if I'm not having an income. Right now is the perfect time to really find out what I can excel at and to find out my true passions. I'm also realizing that in fact, I'm not running out of time in life, I'm still super young and I believe when they say that your 30's are the new 20's and I'm barely 24 so I'm good. What I'm going to say might be a rare statement but I really miss the person I was in college. I was so sure of myself, that it radiated all throughout. I miss being that confident. But I know I will get that back. Right now, I'm just trying to get all the toxicity out from my life and bring in the positivity only vibes. I like to remind myself that even though no one might understand what I'm going through, it doesn't mean that my feelings are invalid. This might be one of the hardest journeys of my life but day by day, I'm getting through it. If you feel like this too, you are not alone. We got this.

Comment section is open for questions/conversations.

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Thank you for reading!

XO Ashley