It is the job of voc rehab to find you a job. As far as I understand, they can't close your file until you're hired somewhere. Perhaps someone from the US can chime in.

I told you to write to the moderators. Did they reply to you? If your post was as negative as this one, it's not surprising that it didn't go through. But hopefully you've still been reading the posts, even though you haven't been able to participate.


If you don't know what to write about, maybe writing isn't for you. Voc rehab should be able to work out what you're good at and help you to receive training for a job that would allow you to use your skills.

You seem to be caught in a depressed, self-pitying loop. I'm not sure what you expect us to do for you beyond the many suggestions we and the community at r/deaf have given you.

Cool. A couple practical thoughts...

Actual Meetups aren't likely to work "out of the box" for you, but a lot of Meetup groups have backchannels that might be great -- e.g., pretty much all tech Meetups have Slack channels that are more active than the actual Meetup. And you may need to bite the bullet on Facebook for a while. But that's why I'm thinking it might be good to find something where a lot of the activity can be online.

With Zoom -- if you can get them to connect a captioning service, live human captioning will cost between $1 and $3 a minute, and some offer that as a separate interactive transcript. I can send over a list of vendors I know of if you want. You may need to offer to foot the bill. Less accurate automated captioning will probably be less. I'm assuming you can either read the captioning magnified or pipe it to a braille display.

And yeah if any therapist thinks you have depression, you can probably take that back to your primary and trade it for something that might help. Ask the therapist for advice! E.g. a common starter is wellbutrin/buproprion because it has fewer side effects. The lowest extended dose, plus maybe half a quick dose in the evening if you get wear off headaches. Ideally that sort of thing is monitored by a professional, but if your insurance is lousy, a primary will do. And the folks that know you and your history can probably point you to things. Heck, puppies are excellent antidepressants and mostly communicate through licking and biting.

Last last thought: remember we're all miserable right now. Depression diagnoses are apparently something like 3 times normal this year due to social isolation and politics. If you can do something short term to have some social contact, like taking an online class or moving in with a relative, do it. You don't need to fix your whole life this year. With meeting up being so hard with Coronavirus, if you make it through the year not feeling miserable you deserve a medal. So don't beat yourself up for feeling discouraged. Just take some practical steps and move forward.

Oh and there's always the hail mary: you could put a tinder or craigslist or something profile just looking for someone to go for a walk with a deafblind person. I dunno if it would work but I suspect the novelty might bring out someone curious. Hopefully someone fun-curious and not weird-curious.

Ha and a second thought after a last last thought: remember that people in assisted living and physical rehab are going bonkers with boredom and loneliness. New friends don't have to be your age (though with car accidents and such you'll find people of every age in rehab). If you called a few local facilities and offered to volunteer to show up and sit with someone lonely and hold their hand and read them a book or bring a magnetic chess or checkers board, one of them might jump at the chance. And then you would be one on one in a quiet room with someone, not in a crowded bar.