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Do You Need To Work At Home?
The Disabled and The Caregivers Don't Have A Choice
By Amy Motheral © 2003
It's hard to know what our life will be like in 10 or 20 years. We can
imagine and we can daydream. We can schedule and we can plan. But life can
be so unpredictable and things can change so rapidly. An illness one day
and a disability the next. Suddenly your life changes and the things you
took for granted yesterday are the very things you long for today. Illness
and disability can change so many things. But it doesn't change our basic
need to survive.
Do we really know how we would react if suddenly we were
faced with the need to earn a living from home? That's what so many people
are facing. More than 20 percent of the American population has a
disability. Many disabled people are able to work outside the home but
there are many more that in order to earn a living must work from home.
There are many caregivers that are faced with such a need.
Knowing that the responsibility of caring for an ill
spouse or child or parent and providing for them is all on your shoulders,
it can be very stressful.
Working from home is the only solution. Finding a viable
source of income that would enable you to provide for your family and care
for you is the only choice.
Where do you begin? It's often difficult to know where to
start on the long journey on your "work at home" search. The
best place to begin is by reading and networking with others that are
working from home and talking with others that are dealing with similar
illness or caregiving issues. You learned about the illness and disability
in your life and you can learn how to be successful working at home.
The first thing to do is define what successful means to
you. Success means different things to different people.
Don't be afraid to learn something
new. In order to work
at home you may have to learn a new skill. The key to any successful
venture is to be well educated.
But working at home doesn't mean you have to learn
something new. Perhaps there are hobbies or interests that can be turned
into something profitable. Many work at home mothers have started a
business based on their talents with sewing or cooking or by using their
hobbies as basis for a business such as scrap-booking and creating gift
baskets.
The most important lesson an illness or disability teaches
is that life is not how long you live it but how you live
it. Each and every disabled person or caregiver I've ever talked with said
the same thing. They all said that no longer do they take life for
granted. They all agreed that being happy and living life to its fullest
is the greatest sign of success.
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