In retrospect, I think that is what it was, but it does not matter now. I used to think he could do more just because I could do so much, be he is not me. Hindsight is 20-20.
I knew about myself that I couldn't handle being a supervisor. My record as an employee was checkered. I worked better alone, and when I found the work boring my attention deficit kicked in and I had a hard time concentrating on what I was supposed to do. In addition, I didn't really work often in the right spirit of getting as much done as quckly as I could. I knew the deadline of what I was supposed to do, and worked accordingly. In some tasks I had little self-confidence in myself and thus the stress level was high which made it hard for me to function. I didn't know how to take the initiative through much of my employment and say "I am idle right now. What else can I do?" I was rather passive about that. It was only towards the end that I learned to be less passive about asking for more to do.
After I was laid off, at first I was interested in persuing a new line of being an actuary for an insurance company since I am a math whiz, and have a lot of interest in statistics. But one attribute an actuary is supposed to have is being able to communicate well orally with others, and that's not me at all. I imagine also my attention deficit would have caused me trouble again. I went to one job interview at Geico at Washington, D.C. and as usual didn't do well in the job interview. Incidentally I met Dale Lehman and his wife Kathleen at that time for the second time, and I think three of his children for the first time. I've always been really bad at that. I hate selling myself and also am not good at oral communication. I also didn't feel confident in myself. After that experience, I decided to can trying an actuary, which may not have been the best decision. I tried to go back to being a computer programmer or being otherwise involved in computer software. Most of my previous experience though had been the computer language Fortran which was hardly used any more. I went to the local community college to learn other computer languages so I would have something to offer. However, I hadn't really worked as a programmer for a lot of years, and I didn't have experience working in those languages, and frankly I was not well trained for how people in computer software worked these days. The companies knew that and I never even got a job interview. If I had gotten a job interview, I probably would have not done well. At that point I knew I would never get into the computer software field again, and I had no idea what to work towards next. Any job I could think of I had no enthusiasm for, and I figured whatever it was, it would pay less than my disability payments. I had no where to go with my math skills. At that point, I gave up, and lived on my disability and the trust from my parents. Sara had not had much education, and originally had been a LPN, which she had given up soon after we got married. Until Michael left home Sara could hardly have a paying job because of Michael's needs. After Michael left home, Sara got low paying jobs to help out. Before Michael left I had a higher disability payment to take care of Sara and Michael. Sara developed what we think is Parkinson's and she stopped being able to have paying jobs. She gets a ridicuously low Social Security payment each month because she hadn't made much money working in her lifetime. As if raising and taking care of Michael isn't work.
The situation is now worse and the Baha'is have stepped in to help me in person. I absolutely don't know what I would do without the Baha'i community. I do not want to say any more here because there are lurkers. Suffice to say I will probably be calling you on the phone soon.
This crisis at least started getting you involved in your local Baha'i community. I hope you develop close frienships with at least one of them. I have a Zoom meeting from 7:00 to 8:30 my time today, which would be 4:00 to 5:30 your time.
