Solid Block of Ise

Most of my friends and family (and old readers of this blog) know that I’ve been out of the workplace for a good many years. The reasons are simple and complex at the same time: suffering from a clinical depression really kills off your energy and life-force.

It’s been five years since I last had a real job. Since then I’ve been through the Swedish health-machine a few times and have slowly been recuperating and slowly getting back to being something that resembles a normal human being. My soul is deeply scarred from this experience, but I’ve been fighting the good fight even though I’ve lost a few battles along the way.

Beginning of September I was asked if I wanted to be involved in a government-sponsored project called PILA. I guess it’s an acronym of some kind but what it stands for is beyond me. It was never explained and I wasn’t really interested in the meaning either. No, what made me interested in it was that it’s a program to help people who’ve been out of the work-force and on sick-pension for more than two years find their way back into the workforce. It would seem that some aparatchik (old soviet word, roughly “bureaucrat”) somewhere realized that when you’ve been on sick-leave and/or pension for a long time it’s difficult to get back to the workforce. They realized that not only might there be physical or other difficult conditions that need special care, but also that companies and former/current employers are very skeptical towards hiring or re-hiring someone who suffers from difficult conditions.

I’ve experienced this myself, I’ve tried getting some kind of internship or similar but as soon as the question why I’ve been gone for so many years and the answer “clinical depression” comes up I’m immediately treated like I was a leper or something. “Thanks, but we can’t really do this now because of [some bullshit excuse]“.

So, this was all very interesting to me and I happily agreed to go through with this since I’m really tired of being caught in the limbo that exists between the real world and the swedish health-system.

I had a chat with a fairly amiable woman at Försäkringskassan (the Swedish government health-insurance institution, similar to the American Social Security but actually functioning somewhat) who told me that most of the process was to be managed by an external rehab-company. After this company reported in with an assessment of my health (both physical as well as psychological) they would try to find a company or institution where I could start my work-rehab-thing. I thought it sounded great and for a few days in beginning of September I went through the hoops there. I talked to a shrink, a doctor, a physical therapist as well as a fairly long line of other nice people who poked and prodded me in very gentle manners. The verdict came in that I was fit and ready to start the process and then Försäkringskassan as well as Arbetsförmedlingen (government-operated employment agency) went to work on finding me something that fit with my interests, my skills and also with the limitations of my current situation. The biggest of these are an extreme intolerance to stressful environments, so it would have to be something fairly gentle. Also it would start off as no more than a few hours a week, to let me adjust to it.

I lost a lot of faith in the humanity of many companies since they mostly gave the same half-assed excuses to them as they’d given to me earlier, and the process of finding a suitable place to rehab grew somewhat long. Despite the cheery girl assigned my case who was exploring every possible opportunity I suddenly felt very bleak about the prospects of finding something that agreed to the conditions. I almost lost complete faith in the whole thing, it had started out on such a positive note but then it just lost a lot of momentum.

Then things started looking up again.

One of the possible locations was in the municipality, in the IT-support department of the municipal building. It’s quite large and I’d talked to a woman there last week who said that my skills were pretty much up to par, but that she’d have to come back later to make sure that it was possible to receive me. She was very professional and courteous and made clear that it had nothing to do with me - she just wanted to make sure that she could provide me with the proper environment and also find someone who could supervise me and show me the ropes.

Yesterday I got a call from the cheery girl, who said that she’d talked to the same lady as I had and she’d confirmed that they could receive me. This is excellent news, and next Thursday I’m going to meet with this woman and draw up a schedule. I’m totally stoked about this, and most of the bleakness I experienced has left me.

Yay! I might have a real future again!

Now, please excuse me while I do my happy dance.

License

This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 Sweden License.