You do what you can do. Who knows what you can do? Until you try.
Most people have potential, you just have to find your “thing” i.e. something you’re good at, you just have to find your niche and work on your strengths.
Sometimes other people see stuff in us that we can’t see in ourselves. Think about accomplishing something and bounce a few ideas off your family or your shrink and see what they think.
That’s how I became employed. My first few years with schizophrenia I was just your average sick, psychotic run-of-the-mill paranoid schizophrenic. Just bouncing around hospitals that my parents got me into, no real plans or goals.
When I was 21 I got out of the hospital after 8 months and my parents found me an extremely good group home to live in. The basic tenet of the founders was that mentally ill people did best with structure so we had regular chores, regular structured groups twice a week, planned outings, everybody had to take turns cooking for the entire house including staff. We had business meetings and scheduled times to take turns shopping for grocery’s.
Everybody had to have a daily activity. We were expected to leave the house by 9:00 am and they locked the doors so no one could get back in until 3:00 pm. Some people went to school, others had jobs. I’m sorry I’m making this so long but I’m trying to illustrate something.
Anyways to get to the chase, the agency that ran the house also had a vocational program and that was my daytime activity. The program held about 10-12 people who met in this big house and the ultimate goal was to go there and with training and classes to eventually become employed. It served a dual purpose as a place to socialize and do something productive with your day.
So I got thrown in there with all these other people and as usual I was odd man out and was on the outside of a few cliques and I only talked to a couple of people and the popular people didn’t say one word to me for 9 months though we were all crammed together in this building four days a week.
But a couple of things happened. I wanted to keep a low profile but we all had to take turns doing two things. Doing yardwork in the community or doing mailing projects for the post office. Those were the main activities of the program. So to do yardwork we all loaded a van with yardwork equipment like a lawnmower, rakes, brooms, clippers etc. and we all piled inside and hit a few houses.
The counselors were in charge but they designated one client to be supervisor of the 4 or 5 man crew. I never really desired to be supervisor but a counselor pushed me into it.
That was my first step. My next step a short while later was running some old cash register the program leaders drug up from somewhere. The program informally sold stuff for lunches like sandwiches or yogurt or soup etc. and the staff picked people to run the cash register. Again, I had no desire to do that and I didn’t think I could even do it if I wanted to but a counselor kind of railroaded me into doing it.
I’ll repeat: I was nothing special, I didn’t stand out, I had no goals or any plans but then the staff created a position just for me and no one else; it was being groundkeeper for the building the vocational program was held in. I was responsible for the upkeep of the landscaping and they just let me do the work alone. I had no desire for that either, lol.
But they thought I would be great at it so I did it. Next step which a counselor volunteered me for was taking a bus to the main office building of the agency to do really light janitorial work for about $30.00 a month. They rotated people in and out every three months but I did such a good job that they kept me there 6 months. It wasn’t hard, emptying a few wastebaskets, vacuuming, cleaning a unisex restroom, cleaning a couple tables.
Again, I would never have volunteered or sought out these things but my main point is that the counselors saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself and they thought I could do these things and they picked me out of 11 or 12 of the other clients to this.
My last step to becoming employed was huge. The agency had arrangements with a few businesses in the community to place clients there for a short span of time. There was a restaurant and this other place that was a small family owned business to rent out hot tubs. This was the eighties and hot tubs were huge and very popular and my future boss and his wife built a business literally from the ground up.
They owned a two story building and they sectioned the inside with 9 private rooms with a hot tub in each and some had saunas too. Each room had a bed, a shower, piped in music, plants, a phone. Anybody could rent one for like $5.75 an hour.
It was perfectly legitimate and very upscale and clean. To be honest, most of the clientele were couples and to be even more honest, most of the couples were having sex in the rooms. But it was a genuine place to just enjoy soaking in a hot tub in a luxurious private room with no distractions. But my counselor got me placed there as a maintenance person. I was 9 months out of the hospital at the time.
I had been diagnosed just two years before and I was 22 years old. But out of 12 other clients, they picked me and one other guy to work there. So I started there and my job was to take care of the building. That meant cleaning, painting, scrubbing, fixing things, maintaining equipment, maintaining the hot tubs etc.
The owners were a young couple and they were cool. The husband had a bad temper and could be an as*hole at times but he was alright. The wife was super cute and liked me. But the whole idea was to rotate new clients in every three months to work there. But the owners liked me and the other guy so much that I ended staying there 4 years! But yeah, that was 1985 and the start of my employment and I’ve worked ever since at various jobs and I’m 58 now.
But I would never have thought I could do stuff like that but other people saw my potential which I couldn’t see in myself. As the years went by after that place, I usually find my own jobs and some have been where the job was connected to a mental health agency but most of my jobs I applied for and got hired just like any regular guy off the street.
I believe everybody has potential you just need to bring it out whether someone helps you figure it out or you stumble on to it yourself.