Friday 17 July 2009

Shadows

You know that movie with Sandra Bullock, 'The Net', where she plays a computer geek whose identity is erased as part of some corporate espionage plot? I feel like her. She's a freelance IT specialist, so she works from home. Her clients are all over the place, so her only contact with them is online or by phone. Her only 'friends' are people in online chat rooms that she's never actually met and who don't even know her real name. The very fact that she has no human contact (bar the dodgy boyfriend who shows up halfway through) is the whole crux of the story - her identity can be easily erased because it's not like she really exists; she's a shadow person created by the electronic age.

For me, the saddest - and possibly the scariest - part of the whole movie, though, is right at the very start, when she orders a pizza by phone, calls up a 'friend' in a chat room and sets one of the computer screensavers to show a roaring fire. That's her idea of a night in with friends. It seems the loneliest and most empty existence imaginable.

But that's how I feel too - a shadow person, created not by technology, but by this disability.

I know I'm not as bad as her - I have real friends, I get to see people and they know my real name - I'm lucky, by comparison. But the majority of my time is spent on my own because it's so hard to go anywhere, and the majority of my communicatioin is electronic. Technology really is a lifeline for me. My contact with friends and family is by phone and email, plus the occasional visit. I work almost exclusively from home, and it's almost all done by internet / email; it means I can stay in contact and I can do my job. But it also means that I can go for days on end without seeing or even speaking to a single person. Talking on the phone is good, but it's still not the same as real human contact - you can't see the other person's facial expressions, you can't judge their responses or adapt your own appropriately. Half of the whole experience is missing.

And it's going to get worse. At the moment I'm so much at home because the pain and the meds have been so bad I either can't get to the office, or I need to rest so often it just isn't worth it, but I keep hoping things might improve. Now, though, my employers want to move my team upstairs, where I won't be able to go, so I'll either be working at home all the time - alone - or in a separate office downstairs - alone. Either way, I'll be on my own.

I didn't ask to be living and working alone. In fact years ago, when that seemed to be where my life was headed, I made changes specifically to prevent it; I gave up freelancing and went back to work with a team because I was suddenly (intentionally) single and I didn't think it was healthy to be by myself 24/7. Some years later, I quit postgrad study in part because it was just getting too solitary. And yet here I am, precisely where I didn't want to be.

Friends do still invite me to stuff of course, and I try to go. They're very thoughtful and they try to make it as easy for me as possible, saying things like 'you don't have to come for the whole thing', or 'you can go off and lie down anytime you like, it's no problem'. I love them for being so considerate, and for still wanting me there even though it inevitably complicates things. But the very fact that it's necessary to think that way makes me feel like I'm only half a member of the group. A Shadow person.

It's the same at work. My bosses are so worried to make sure I can cope, that I'm not overloaded (especially as that's exactly what happened last year) that all I seem to do now is training and vague-non urgent stuff that has no deadline so it doesn't matter if it takes me forever to finish it. Oh, and hour upon hour of trying to make the stupid voice activation software work. It's not my bosses' fault that the one active project I was working on got pulled, and I'm grateful they're so considerate of my situation and are doing everything they can to make sure I don't have lots of work pressure to deal with on top of everything else. But it still makes me feel like I'm half an employee. My initials never turn up in the action points of meeting minutes. I rarely get an email where I'm the main recipient, not just a cc.

The whole thing about me being so desperate to stay in work is not just that I have something to do every day - let's face it, I could fill my days writing this crap - it's so I feel useful, productive, like I'm contributing something. Like there's some point to all the rest of it; a reason to lie awake all night racked with pain, a reason to have to stop every 3 steps when I walk anywhere, a reason for having to make two trips from the kitchen just to carry my dinner and a drink through.

I don't just want to be 'employed' in the sense that my time is occupied. I'm not looking just to fill the hours between getting up and going to bed. And I don't want to be half an employee or a Shadow person. I want to be useful; I've got a lot of skills and experience and I want it to be utilised. I want to be bringing something to a job that nobody else can, I want to be going out there and leaving a mark, socially and professionally. I want to be 'employed', as a real person, not a Shadow.

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