FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement: The mythology we create

Last Updated on February 16, 2018 by FERS Disability Attorney

Folklores and mythologies we have read as children; they stir the imagination, of gods in faraway lands in times now forgotten, and of tales of daring and courage in the moral plays of a universe now turned between the tides of time and the ebbing of history.

We are told that they were a manner in which to explain the unexplainable; that, until the great Age of Science came along and placed everything in its logical perspective, we once believed in the mythology of gods, superstitions and the folklore of our own imaginations.

But what of the mythologies we create in modernity?  Of the infallibility of science, when the very judgment and discourse is still based upon human frailty and self-interest?  Of phenomena which we cannot explain but somehow ascribe words that sound meaningful and complex to the understanding of others, and so we continue on in the mysteries we create?

And of mythologies we create — whether in our own minds without ever sharing with others, or the daydreams we are trapped in which we repeat almost daily, as an escape from the drudgery of the reality we must endure; or, perhaps of the lie that began as a pebble in the stream but kept growing over the years until it became a boulder that stemmed the tide of discourse and created a dam which fed a lake?

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition, such that the medical condition begins to prevent the Federal or Postal worker from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s Federal or Postal job, the mythology we create can be somewhat on a lesser scale of mischief or criminality.

It need not tell the story of a civilization’s origins or in explaining some overwhelming phenomena of the universe.  No, it can be a story that is created to explain away the excessive use of Sick Leave or Annual Leave; it can be the mere telling of a tale that tomorrow the medical condition will miraculously go away; or it can be in the very self-deception that you can continue to endure the pain and suffering and hide it from your coworkers, supervisors and the Agency as a whole.

Federal Disability Retirement is a benefit that allows for the Federal or Postal worker to retire early based upon one’s medical inability to perform one or more of the essential elements of one’s Federal or Postal job.

In filing a Federal Disability Retirement application, however, it may require you to shatter the mythology we have come to create, and face the reality that the gods of thunder and lightening no longer throw down the zigzagging bolts of anger and revenge from high above, but rather, the rains of today may give way to the sunshine of tomorrow, explainable by the natural causes of science and that this amazing world of causality may yet be defined without purpose.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire