Montreal riot cop points smoke grenade launcher point-blank at unarmed/unmasked protester.

Right now I am back on the public dole. Which I loathe mentioning because it's such a weak social position. But it's the truth and as terrible as the system is I admit my pittance does come from its hands.

I've been on and off that though since stepping out of work. This whole nonsense started when I thought I had 42 weeks of EI saved up. I was going to use money I paid into for funding this little mental health recovery. But it took 3 months for that to get worked out. It wasn't until 6 months after departing my employer that I even saw someone who had any diagnosis for me at all. Which is about the time my 15 weeks of medical EI ran out. Which I overlooked in all the paperwork but the calender online gave my expiry date as 42 weeks. This nonsense sunk my credit and I was pretty much done as a financial being. AND I still didn't have a diagnosis but everyone assured me I was clearly sick.

So since then I tried to launch a venture that didn't go but I didn't think it had much of a chance but you take what you can. That earned me money to live off of for several months but when I went to go back to public assistance reapplying activated some bureaucratic glitch where I lost my eligibility and had to move into someones basement for awhile. Essentially they said that because I owned a condo I couldn't get assistance. The condo's mortgage is 75,000 and its value is around 69,000. I tried for months to sell it when things were going bad but no realtor would touch it. So since my ex wife (whose father guaranteed it) lives in it I'm somehow ineligible for assistance. Even though that then caused me too have no place to live.

And I do what I can within this strange world I've found myself in. I used to handle billions of dollars and now I'm not trusted with $500. People tell me how things run when I used to be employed to analyze these very things. I can still do all of it but I can't handle people right now. I know this makes me a bad employee and my original intention was to recover to become a viable employee again. Since I went into this free fall it's given me a lot of time to reflect on what is happening to me. Over and over in my life I've experienced issues, analyzed them and overcome them. I got a college education from growing up impoverished, I lost 120lbs, and recently completed every aspect of a game including sound and graphics which actually looks like it might hold some hope for all of this nonsense.

This ranting just comes from my analysis of the situation I find myself in. I need sustenance and other basic needs and my mental illness currently makes it difficult to interact with people. I want help to overcome this because I understand I need help to overcome this but there are financial barriers in the way to the tune of up to $350 weekly for treatment. Which since leaving work the experience of being impoverished has greatly exacerbated my symptoms were now I can barely leave the house to even go search for work if I wanted to. I've utilized every resource I have available and this is all I can muster. I am staring over at a 3D printer I have nearly assembled right now that has been waiting on a few extra parts. And yet our society is organized in such a way that I can't capitalize on any of it. I god damn try but the game is fucking rigged. I can see very clearly that its rigged and why I am in this position but I can't do anything about it quickly. My god if I can get some momentum on this though that's gonna be something. I start getting some income I can get over these issues I'm having and then I can put more of this into practice.

But it's a real sticky wicket I find myself in and I really would like to change that for myself and anyone I know like myself. Remember all of this is done by someone who is actively trying to get help for mental illness they know they need help with. And I'm left like this. I can feel bad for myself all I want but it honestly scares me to think of those even less stable then myself... this experience has seemed incredibly cruel to me but I keep up hope because I must. Others might become more frustrated and hopeless. It's better for everyone if the mentally ill are treated like people. Which is really hard in such a competitive society. The competition isn't based on resource scarcity though hence my ranting about these "jobs" we go to. Like a lot of the people I have seen for counselling don't care and I can tell, they are there for a job and it feels that way. Why then do we pay people to pretend to care to people who actually need real honest human connection? Because anyone that can provide that HAS to have a job to get sustenance. We work more and more and more to produce more and more and more and more. But we have less and less time for all of it. The reasons for this are silly and arbitrary. The biggest thing holding back change is that people don't really know how easy it is to change. The current world we have feels like all there ever could be.

So all my savings are long gone, I'm even too broke to declare bankruptcy. Apparently there are things I can do but admittedly in the last 6 months I've become rather agoraphobic and now that is making things even more difficult. Again my doctor knows about this, so does my case worker, so does my damn MP and my lawyer. This is the sum total of help I can get for mental illness. I'm not a glowing recommendation for financial success but that's part of my point. Why does being born into poverty damn me and others like this?

/r/canada Thread Parent Link - i.imgur.com