Ultimate Frustration.

This was originally a response to another post.
But I realized it is more about me and my frustration, my constant "fall down seven times, get up eight" that never seems to work for anything that I feel I should share anyway.
Because I'm so "smart" or "capable" or "insert whatever it is that makes me so OBVIOUSLY INELIGIBLE TO RECEIVE ANY ASSISTANCE SO I MUST BE GAMING THE SYSTEM"...
so, whatever.
here.

I'm on SSDI for Bipolar; I was approved the first time I applied. Approval took slightly less than six months from when I first turned in the application.

I was approved in July 2004 and I continue to receive benefits.
At the time of approval I was experiencing some physical symptoms, but pretty much the only thing that SSA was interested in was my psych history, which they zeroed in on. At the time I was fairly dysfunctional. I had no job, no social life to speak of, I was rapidly losing weight, I was on a huge number of medications and nothing seemed to make a difference. I had a recent history of several short-lived jobs that would peter out after several months.

Three years prior I had barely escaped four year university with one valid credit form the entire year, the year after I had moved out and was working two full time jobs and attending a different school full time, achieving approximately a B+ average. Then suddenly, I started experiencing extreme paranoia and anxiety and due to various factors, finally burnt out and returned home. At that point I began to sink into the basically dysfunctional lifestyle I previously described.

Since then I have been in a severe car accident. My speech, memory, time perception, writing and reading were all affected to some extent. I either developed seizures or underlying activity which already existed but was not obvious became much more evident.
Migraines which I had had since I was small became worse.
Gluten sensitivity, which can occasionally be triggered by a physical trauma, appeared around this time- it continues to get worse.

Eventually I recovered, essentially, from most of the peripheral issues from the collision. The neurological problems, some mild to moderate skeletal and muscular issues, and the food sensitivities- related to the accident or not- remained.

I worked with Ticket to Work [an SSA program] and under those guidelines, began to slowly attend school again- eventually I worked up to fulltime and did well at first, but burnt out again and again.

So, here I am now. It is 2013.
I have various allergies and food intolerances that affect me seriously on a day to day basis. I have a basic level of pain and discomfort that I just accept as a fact of life. Recently, my vision seems to randomly go to hell, and it's disturbing because I'm trying to do something productive like develop a thesis for a conference that I want to participate in.
I'm also so ridiculously fatigued that I sometimes take three naps in a day. I have gained a lot of weight because sticking to the crazy restricted diet that my body requires is a lot of work and frustrating and very expensive. If i don't stick to it, my body goes haywire as does my metabolism and I gain weight like crazy.
I've started to go to the gym again, but I'm so tired all the time that I am often falling asleep on the bus on the way to the gym.
I've also now been restricted to working out every other day because of bruising, exhaustion, the return of bursitis in both my shoulders and possibly my hip.
I'm pretty pissed about that.

I am still finding myself off and on symptomatic in terms of both mood and OCD.
I am not quite able to make an immediate leap to a full on career but I still make repeated attempts at employment and never am quite successful.
I have still not received my bachelor's after about a decade of attempts.

Um. So... I'm not an idiot. I'm not lazy.
No, I haven't had repeated hospitalizations, I don't seem terribly insane or unable to take care of myself on a basic level, unintelligent or unable to grasp basic responsibilities. I want to be a part of the world in a very real sense.

I'm trying to figure out how to do that, but when I applied for SSDI and my doctors were filling out forms- and one of them actually did an examination- two of them shared the opinion that I would "never be able to be fully self-supporting"...

I really fear that is true.
I don't understand why that would be, and still try to make sense of it. Every single day. It's not even a mixed blessing. I feel cursed. I'm obviously intelligent and seem very capable of doing anything I want to in any capacity.
I hit a brick wall every. single. time.
It's kind of a miserable thing.
Particularly when you try to explain it to... pretty much anyone at all and no one believes you- it's like they want specific evidence of your dysfunction. They force you to repeatedly try, and fail. For their satisfaction.

And that's how you get to llama school!
*clapclapclapclap!*

...those are the reasons I probably got approved, and why I am stuck in this constant trap of mediocrity.

Yet I constantly find myself faced with individuals who feel it is their right to ask me to defend this crappy situation i find myself in, because I am supposedly "cheating the system", as if this is some kind of luxurious lifestyle. As if I wouldn't rather be in grad school, or working on neurological research or doing ANYTHING but just trying to EXIST and struggling to stay awake so I can read maybe two or three journal articles and hope to finish this proposal and maybe actually do ONE productive thing this year with all this supposed intelligence I have.

I always feel like I'm supposed to do so much with my life.
Not just survive.
But people in this position, that's all we do much of the time.
This is not directed at most, or even many, people here- but please give a second thought before making a judgement on who may or may not "deserve" specific services or assistance? It's not a grand lifestyle.
It's more like a last-resort trap.

Anyway.
Upset.
Thanks for reading.