I do get SSI but the bare minimum, whatever that is, because my academic performance was taken into account. The fact that I did complete a college degree, not only complete but pass with flying colors, put some questions into the mindsets of the Social Security office. They only look at what's on paper, not the enormous stress involved to get to that point. After all, if that were the case they'd be handing out paychecks to every college kid who ever pulled an all-nighter or drank gallons of espresso to get through grad school.
It might be helpful to reframe how you are looking at entry-level work, though: instead of thinking of it as somehow beneath you, or as sucking away your creativity, you can look at it as being in service to your eventual goals, allowing you to gain experiences that will help you as a writer, or even just provide you with motivation to build a business or finish a book so you can get out of there. There's no honest work that is beneath anybody, no matter what their IQ, and work, even menial, routine work, if you think about it in the right way, can provide a sense of concrete accomplishment that can be really really helpful in dealing with depression and anxiety.
It's likely I wouldn't get hired anywhere but fast-food or retail with an associate's (rather than a bachelor's), let alone one in liberal arts. I have an uncle who worked at a fast-food place while between jobs (he himself has a PhD), and said he quit the day he got assigned restroom duty.
No one, regardless of education level, wants to pick up dirty T.P. or empty the sanitary napkins container or scrub up after someone who just emptied their whole dinner into the can out the back-door exit.
As stated above, I can't do math either, and can't for the life of me get the learning curve involved in cash registers and discount barcodes and the assembly-line rush of the checkout aisle. People are impatient, and they can't/don't afford the time for a nervous or new kid to learn the system, because their milk is about to spoil, or their newly bought designer handbag ticking fast on its way to
last season's style... (Trust me, I've seen people who do this -- and lots of them -- and boy do I feel sorry for the poor schlub behind the counter. I know if that was me I'd tell the customer to take a chill pill and wait a couple minutes while I process the order. Or go to Gimbel's, their choice.)
I understand what you're saying about the "beneath-you" mentality. I'd rather go to a trade school or skills-enrichment series and learn by doing than by sitting in a 2 1/2 hour seminar taking notes and writing research papers. From which all I ever learned was how to write a research paper. Would I say that prepared me for the workforce? Not unless my career was in academia, building my career off of research papers, or I was the next Kate Turabian and building my own guidelines for how to write them... But my parents are sort of disappointed that I would take "the lazy way out," which I don't see as being lazy at all.
I'm convinced my learning style doesn't meet well with sedentary note-taking and the traditional (primarily American?) degree-in-sequence model that the majority does whether they're suited for it or not. I believe this is the FUD model of compulsory education...
I'm also a big-time Luddite, or at least I'd like to be. I thought of building my writing portfolio by maybe working as a freelancer or a journalist, but I'm wary of things like Facebook and Twitter, and even my threadbare-budget local-yokel town paper is expanding into social media. Another thing people do is blog on their own or write for staffed publications like Huffington Post or Slate (or whatever the smaller versions of these are). Much to my chagrin, I even look to my left and see "The Davidson Institute is on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube!" Which goes along with the modern mantra of "Even your grandma is on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube!" (And her little cat, too!)
It's become a minimum requirement to have an e-mail address, which I do but don't; mine is one of those disposable G-Mail addresses I use just for signing up on forums and never check again. Never mind a regularly accessed address, much less a regularly accessed Facebook or Twitter or whatever these things are, all of which are becoming more and more of a requirement nowadays, as even journalism moves far beyond the standard six o' clock Brinkley broadcast and even beyond the 24/7 TV outlets into a 24/7 conversation with the viewers via the Internet.
Sometimes I think I'm a grouchy, elderly pre-industrial time traveler who pulled a Scott Bakula into the reluctant Millennial incarnation I am today.
