Far Removed

I went to my disability hearing.  I sat in a room with my legal counsel and a stenographer.  The administrative law judge was in another state, so she appeared on a large TV monitor.  In the room with the judge was a phone with a vocational rehabilitation expert on speaker. The judge asked my legal counsel some questions.  Then she asked the voc rehab expert some hypothetical questions.  Then she asked me some questions.  I don't know how I did.  I wish I'd had the opportunity to prepare what I would say.  I tried to be clear and concise.  I entirely forgot to address her as "your honor."  My legal counsel said afterward that he thought the ALJ wanted to decide in my favor.  As of this writing I am still waiting for her decision to arrive in the mail. The thought that I might be denied what I deserve because I mispoke or failed to explain something adequately is disquieting.  I am grateful though that the hearing was recorde...

Once, I saw outside my window a child whose shoelace was stuck in the crank of his bicycle.  It was raining and I left my apartment to help him extricate himself.  I act compassionately, and I care about fairness.  My therapist has suggested that this is a contradiction in my character, since I don't have strong emotions and usually don't form attachments to people.  After a therapy session,  I was thinking about the contradiction that seems to arise from my apparent empathy.  I believe I have an explanation.   As a child I had to decide how to interact with people.  I observed that people often treated me differently, and I observed that I felt there was something different about me.  I presumed there was a causal relationship of the latter to the former: that people treated me differently because I seemed different.  I wanted that to change, so I tried to figure people out.  I observed that people wanted things and that b...