Federal Employee Disability Information: The unknown

Last Updated on March 28, 2018 by FERS Disability Attorney

What is it about “the unknown” that terrifies us?  Is it merely from the stories of childhood that kept us up late into the night with limbs and face under the heavy blankets, hoping that those goblins wouldn’t suddenly pounce upon the flesh that remained uncovered, with sweat and suffocation preferable to the gnawing of a hungry predator?

Or from insecurities that remained despite the best efforts from parents who were clueless but wanted a dissimilar approach from their own childhoods; yet, despite those efforts to “never be like my mom and dad”, such exertions were merely untested applications from tentative and unlearned methodologies, leaving the insecurities manifesting through thoughtless hesitations because no one knows what they are doing?

The unknown is always, by definition, an uncertainty, and thus a conundrum that instills fear, prefatory pause and trembling of confidence.

When a medical condition enters into the picture as a factor to contend with, the unknown becomes a depth of fear and loathing, precisely because there can never be concretized stability within a wrapping of the unknown.  Suddenly, with the medical condition present, the unknown becomes an uncertainty; the uncertainty compels anxiety and an angst that cannot be controlled.

People enjoy watching horror shows and movies depicting the supernatural; of monsters and goblins that suddenly pop up from nowhere and frighten; because, once removed as a spectator who can fear and yet know simultaneously that you are merely an observer of the horror and mayhem, the fear of the unknown is recognized in the third person, and therefore separable enough from the reality of the virtual.

When one suffers from a medical condition, however, the observer and the sufferer become one and the same, inseparable, unable to merely act as a dispassionate spectator.

For Federal and Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition, such that the medical condition prevents the Federal or Postal worker from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s Federal or Postal job, the unknown is the uncertainty of a future undetermined.

Thus, what needs to be focused upon is what is known, and let the unknown unravel — by preparing, formulating and filing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, to be filed with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, so that the Federal or Postal worker suffering from a medical condition can focus upon the known quantities of life: One’s health, one’s happiness, and the present circumstances that cannot continue perpetually into the future.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire