Well then. Tomorrow both I and my hair turn 38, and quite by serendipity I have around this same time come to the end of a very long, arduous and boring journey. A story I feel compelled to inflict upon you now.
Normally I don't go into specifics about my own life, and I prefer to keep this blog for more profound and informative posts, an attempt at sharing what wisdom I have gestated over the many horrific decades of my life... which is why there is so little content here lolololol.
But just this once, here is your origin story for The Founder, as I used to be known on the webernets, and how he came to be this fine disfigure of a man you see before you today. Specifically, this is the story of how my disabilities and their mental illness side salad brought me from barely functioning, to kinda functioning, to essentially living in squalor, and eventually to having enough of my ducks in a row that I can finally afford to think about actually living.
THE SPAWNING
Born in the UK slums to a financially struggling and largely oval-shaped family, it became clear from a young age that I wasn't quite like the other kids. You may have heard stories about great minds of eras past who did extraordinary things like inventing a new kind of calculus or privatising cancer as infants, and then there's me, the savant who precisely ordered his lego blocks by size and colour, cross-referenced with function, up his nose.
Largely mute but hardly quiet, I invented a sophisticated language of mind-numbing screams and thrown toys to direct my parents in their tortured attempts at raising me, unfortunately they never quite deciphered it, and eventually they were forced to have me assessed in what passed for the medical system of the time. The conclusion was that I was Dyspraxic (a complex biological category that roughly translates as "boy's fucked up") and likely autistic.
In those days not much was known about things like autism, and treatments ranged from medical grade methamphetamine to hanging them upside-down in a bag and beating them with sticks with the word "love" written on the side. My parents settled for the innovative approach of constantly yelling at me and making it clear I was the reason their lives sucked until I learned to stay in my room and not bother them with my spiralling mental health, while they yelled each other into an infidelity-fuelled divorce and spontaneous lesbianism.
I became more and more withdrawn from the penal colony the world calls "school" until eventually I had to be assigned various aid programs to help me function because I was essentially doing nothing, a prescient glimpse of my future I lacked the irony-comprehension to understand at the time. Nevertheless, I struggled through and collapsed at the finish line at age 16, going on to unsuccessfully pursue a college degree in art, and then, by the grace of Zeus, to succeed in getting that extremely useful qualification. It's hanging on the wall right now next to the gold star I got for being special in primary school. Honestly I think the latter has been more useful, career-wise.
It had been clear to me and most everyone who knew me at this point that I wasn't headed to a shining future as a stock broker. Truth be told, despite seeming fairly functional mentally, I doubt I would have been able to handle cleaning toilets. I just lack something, something central to the human condition that almost everyone else seems to have.
Behind every single action a person takes ultimately must exist a spark that incepts that action, and for whatever reason, in almost all circumstances, that spark is missing from me. Not motivation, not desire, not even the sense of urgency that triggers your adrenaline and forces immediate action. Something more elemental than all of that just doesn't exist in my brain. You can learn more on that in the "My Fault" blog I posted a handful of posts and a couple decades back, but suffice to say, the way I lived, and sadly still do live my life is... not healthy.
Fortunately, my mother had succeeded in getting me on the disability benefits that existed when I was young. A process I hadn't enjoyed, as I remember distinctly having to sit there while she told them how dysfunctional I was, lacking the higher reasoning to understand that it was for my own good. A process I nearly derailed, when she told them I had been hurting myself, and I angrily chirped up telling her that wasn't true. ...it was true.
And so, now a young adult, as I proudly limped out into the world and dug out a nice hovel to live in, I had some degree of financial security. Of course, to any normal person, it would have seemed worse than a slave wage, but it was all I knew. I didn't think I was well off by any means, however, compared to what was to come... I was. That was a lot of wasses in that sentence. It seems weird. Was. Was. Is was really a word? It's lost all meaning. ANYWAY.
THE ASSESSMENT
Eventually I got a letter in the mail telling me I was due to take a mandatory medical assessment to determine my continued unfitness for work. A delightful little task, wherein someone being drip-fed just barely enough money to survive is expected to make a journey their neurological conditions make very difficult to attempt to convince someone else that their permanent disabilities are still there and they are consequently still sufficiently useless to qualify for society's pity.
I've probably talked about this in prior posts, so I will be brief now. Here's how it went. I arrived on time and was kept waiting for what felt like 2 hours. Eventually I was directed into a room with a bored looking doctor who very ironically had no interest in maintaining eye contact with the autistic kid. I felt more like part of the furniture. He asked me basic questions, name, birthday etc, then handed me a computer keyboard and asked if I could hold it. Suffice to say, I was confused, but scared, so I did as I was told. He sent me on my way inside of 2 minutes.
Some weeks later I received a letter saying, and these words have never quite left the inside of my skull upon which they were scored as I read it, "after our 45 minute thorough assessment we have determined you are fit to work".
You know that feeling you get sometimes when you're nodding off to sleep and suddenly you feel like you're falling? Like the floor just gave way and for an instant you are made of pure panic? In that moment, the planet gave way. It was event #1 in what would become my new existence. The following years are a bit of a blur, I was still falling, and crashed through various appeals that went nowhere (more in the My Fault post again) and a few jobcenter appointments, which eventually landed me in a serious mess.
THE MESS
I do not lie. This is one thing most who come to know me quickly learn, and sometimes even learn to appreciate, although the adjustment can be prickly. In this situation I was forced to lie. Not only lie, commit to, in writing, and live according to a lie, in order to survive. So many commas. With my disability safety nets removed I had to "sign on", AKA the dole; unemployment benefits. To do so, I had to sign a pledge that says I am fit to work. The system under which I had no choice but to live, had compelled me to tell a lie to survive. And in doing so, to accept all future responsibility for any fallout I may suffer.
Remember when I said my disability benefits were essentially a slave wage? Well, cut that in half. Now add in more stress than this adolescent who is barely more functional than a plushie has ever experienced in their life. Maybe to an NT (neurotypical) person it wouldn't seem so bad. Obligations to apply for x number of jobs per week, to attend interviews whenever they were arranged, to attend a constant, dizzying array of "work courses" designed to condescend to us like the reason we're not in work is because we haven't been trained in how to compose a CV (resume) for the 20th time.
That building became a Democlesean sword hanging over my head... a perpetual threat to make me homeless and starving. Every week, as my JSA appointment was looming, I knew that this could be the day I get a bad adviser, a snotty old school thinker, a temp who doesn't know what they're doing. This could be the week I say the wrong thing, trigger some red flag subroutine programmed into their corporate brains that makes them unravel my entire life. It's life having a gun to your head every day all day.
And it happened. Several times. You ask an innocent question and you see their face turn... like they become a stranger to themselves, You see RuinLife.exe booting up behind their eyes. Oh you expressed interest in this? Well now it is your new purpose, you will do this or your benefits are gone. The new advisers were the worst... rose-eyed and keen to impress their superiors, they don't know you, they take one look at you and decide they have figured out what you need, and suddenly you have a pile of unmeetable obligations thrust upon you. You're just a stepping stone to their career advancement.
I was "sanctioned" numerous times, which is where they take away your slave wage, usually as punishment for them making a mistake, the wrong appointment time sent out, them having the wrong file up when they see you and thinking you're not following your commitments. Then you have to request an appeal which gets automatically denied, and then appeal that, and eventually, if you're lucky, as I was a couple times, you find yourself in a courthouse with a nice judge who looks at the paperwork and notes how ridiculous it is that things got this far.
Many were not so lucky. I've heard tales of chronically physically disabled people (still considered fit to work of course, because the system is broken) who mentioned off hand they volunteer in a local charity shop once a week to help their community, and suddenly their unemployment benefits are stopped, their work criteria are updated so they must now apply for retail positions since they proved they can do it, they are forced to bring daily notes to the jobcenter declaring every single instance of the £0.00 they make per hour of their volunteer job before their benefits will be resumed. Like, seriously, one misplaced word, and these people have the power and will to absolutely ruin your life.
I even remember one day as I was doing my mandatory job searching on their inhouse computers (so they can more vulturishly oversee your every action) there was this old man sat staring blankly at his monitor. He had never used a computer before in his life. He didn't have a clue how to operate it. It might as well have been a nuclear power station for all he understood it. I had to coach him quickly in how to operate it, because I knew they didn't care, and would punish him for not doing his job search. It was like being in a prison. Those days were genuinely terrifying.
But not to worry, it's about to get worse!
THE ROOMMATE
So, one of my oldest and dearest friends was, around this time, trying to turn his own life around. He too had been living in squalor, having escaped the gang (well, perhaps mafia would be more apropos) culture in his home country of Lithuania following some traumatising events, and now, while essentially homeless and starving, he was being faced with military draft. For those rare few of you who aren't Lithuanian (you minorities make me sick) you probably don't understand the implications of this, but those who live there do. Their military is notorious for being a hellhole, like being a GITMO prisoner but as a career. He had to get out of there.
And so he came to the most well-off, privileged person he knows. Well, at least he came to someone he knew he could trust. He begged me to let him move in with me in the UK. I would essentially be saving his life, and he would be eternally grateful. What choice did I really have?
So, he came to this country and eventually found his way to my hovel. He had next to nothing with him, just an old keypad cellphone upon which he was so used to typing it was genuinely unnerving to watch his hand vibrate like The Flash as he texted, and a rucksack. He moved in, and around that exact same time, the Government decided that it was time to crack down on all those naughty people gaming the system for freebies, you know, the ones everyone are convinced exists but no one ever sees. And according to them, the best way to do this was to punish everyone. Overnight the obligations placed me tripled, the threat of making a single mistake grew exponentially, and... well...
Remember when I said my jobseekers benefit was like half of a slave wage? Well, cut that in half. Now add another mouth to feed.
I thought I had known living in squalor. Then suddenly I was spending hours outdoors looking for dropped pennies on the floor so that I could afford to buy rice from the reduced section at the local supermarket. We were both doing the best we could to survive. I actually learned a lot from him, being very antisocial and hermit-like myself, I never went out much, but now I had to, as he taught me where to look to go foraging for wild blackberries and apples, we made a few laps a week near a neighbour's cherry tree to look for dropped fruit. He taught me various Slavic budget food dishes... the things those people can do with potatoes.
Don't get me wrong, this wasn't an improvement over before he got here, it was survival. We were both in a state of crisis. To make matters worse, he had brought a bunch of debts with him, and Lithuania is not one of those countries that goes "oh he moved, never mind I guess I'll forget this", it's one of those countries that's like "I will fucking extradite you just to make you tell me face to face you can't afford to pay me". Because of the spiralling situation, I was finding myself in debt too.
I had always been very careful to never let that happen, but when you basically have no money, no amount of budgeting can help you pay your bills. The bank I was with at the time also decided to pile on, doing one of those legally ambiguous "you have no money so we charged you a fee... oh someone just charged you a fee and you have no money, we will charge you a fee for that. Oh look, someone charged you a fee, let's charge you a fee for that" moves, sending me hurtling into thousands of pounds worth of debt in the space of a few weeks.
So now I'm on a nothing income, with extra bills, an extra mouth to feed who can't apply for jobseekers himself because he's an alien (not the space kind... well, yes actually but that's irrelevant) and suddenly the kinda debts that usually only investment bankers have to deal with. FUN TIMES. And I would like to remind you that all of this happened to me because I had a brain that simply could not handle doing traditional work. I mean, I lived in a pigsty and lived off of instant noodles and wild foliage. I literally couldn't function as an adult. This lifestyle that can only be described as punitive, was because I was born defective. That's what I did to deserve all of this.
This is where things improve a little. Eventually Mr. Roommate decides he like money, and finds himself a job. This brings an actual income stream into our uncivil partnership. I wouldn't go so far as to say we were doing well at this point, it was a mcdonald's job, and boy I could write a whole other post about the horrors of that corporation just from how I saw them treat him. Changing his shift times daily from middle of the night to early morning, constantly expecting more and more productivity from them, it was like chinese torture. But we were surviving.
OH NO IT GETS BAD AGAIN
This is getting a little off topic, so let's steer back on course. My roommate lived with me for about ten years, which seems super weird in hindsight, it feels like a flash in the pan but it was actually a whole ass era of my life. In that time we had all kinds of ups and downs, him getting fired, me getting sanctioned, trying to claw back, him getting a better job, society realising they were basically abusing people on benefits and deciding to add a bit more money back to jobseekers.
Eventually we were both living in a comfortable, albeit in no way even working class lifestyle. I had come to depend on him and that extra money, we had improved our internet service, adjusted to being able to acquire food that didn't grow from weeds, and so on. But as is the way of things, at least for normal people, his life pulled him forwards. He met a girl online, saved up, and left to go be with her. There was no malice in this, but keep in mind, his presence had effectively propped my life up on stilts, and two of them were about to walk out from under it.
I remember the last day he was here, just before he was due to leave, I asked him to help me dispose of my old bedframe. A distressed, rusty old self-assembly cheapo one I had kept long past its shelf life, held together with string and strategically placed furniture because I couldn't afford a replacement. The metaphor for my life had very deliberately given up the ghost and become unusable at the most ironic time possible, and after my friend was gone I wouldn't have been able to carry it to the tip by myself. So I asked for a hand. And after it was gone, so, in short order, was he.
My front door closed to a kind of silence I hadn't known in a decade. Within a few lonely, quiet minutes of him leaving, I could only retreat to my cave and think about the future. Knowing I had lost my safety net, and now lived with debts I had never before imagined, bills and expenses twice what I had been able to handle alone. Even my dog, who had essentially been like a daughter in my heart and my only real reason to go on living, had recently died. Maybe I should be ashamed to admit this, I don't really know, but as I sat there in the putrid junkyard that was my bedroom, kneeling in a bedless cavity in the trash, I cried. Not because my future was uncertain; but because it was certain. Because I had peaked.
Remember when I said those parts of my life were traumatic and terrifying, and essentially chipped away at my mental health? Well, cut that mental health in half. The last 9 years of destitution had been the high point of a life that now had nowhere to go but roll sadly back down the hill it had finally climbed. The next couple of years would lead to one of two things. Either I would find a way to turn things around, or I would end up on the streets, and shortly thereafter... well, no longer on the streets.
I needed help, the kind I had been putting off seeking for a long time, because I didn't want to admit to the world what a sad, needy loser I was.
THE SAD, NEEDY LOSER
It was time to try to get back on disability benefits, a prospect I had tentatively faced a couple times over the years, but suffice to say, when you have mental disabilities that make doing ANYTHING incredibly hard, it doesn't take much arm twisting to get you to give up on an endeavour. And even sufficer to say, when someone whose job is to give legal advice to vulnerable people laughs in your face when you ask about getting started on seeking disability, that arm is more than sufficiently twisted.
But this time I had no choice. My back was to the wall, and in situations like that, at a certain cost in sanity, I can sometimes force myself to take action. So this time I powered through all the marble faces telling me I had no chance, and sat myself down with someone could tell me exactly what to do and how to do it. First order of business - I needed a "fit note", an ironically named document issued by my doctor declaring that in her medical opinion, based on my medical records, I was not fit for work.
Truth be told the timeline here is a little jumbled, because some of this happened during my earlier attempts at getting on disability, and a lot of it was a long term process with a lot of moving parts and a lot of me giving up for years at a time while my life gradually spiralled more and more out of control. But for the simplicity of storytelling, the chain of events went roughly thus:
Me asking for fit note; her saying she doesn't understand what that is. Arm twisted. Give up on attempt.
Me asking for fit note and explaining clearly what it is and that whether she fucking understands it or not there is a system in place for this so just fucking do it already. Her saying she needs to "get to know me" better, that she didn't feel she can judge my condition... despite having been my doctor for like 20 years. Arm twisted; give up.
Me finally telling her look fine I will make multiple pointless appointments per week where I will sit down and still be autistic thereby wasting your time and doing stuff my brain makes very hard for me to do, and you can "get to know" my disability, whatever the fuck that means. Her then telling me she needs to see proof of my disabilities to be able to judge the situation, and scrolling through my medical records on her computer to learn more about my childhood diagnosis.
My diagnosis was gone. No longer in my medical records. No proof anyone ever said to anyone else that I had so much as a mild learning difficulty. My case for disability was now weaker than when I had dishonestly declared MYSELF fit to work. Arm broken.
I mean... what do you even DO when the records fail you? When the system you are having to depend on even just to navigate the system itself has just forgotten you? Where do you go? The actual facts of the situation had apparently changed, and you're already fighting for your life just trying to ask a damn GP for help. Was it malicious? Is this a way the "man" used to try to keep people from getting financial help? Had some lazy fucker just turned two pages over at the same time by accident when digitizing my paper records?
Did it even matter? The message was well-received, and the message was the world telling me "I don't want you".
So, not only was I still in the same position, I also had to start from scratch. I needed to be diagnosed... again. At this point it's like I'm hanging onto the edge of a cliff my by fingernails and the fucker I'm begging for help is kicking my hands. I'm already this close to just giving up and taking the easy way out, and life is making it very clear that I wouldn't be missed.
Fortunately for me, where life failed to put in me that precious spark that motivates action, it did happen to leave a nice dollop of seething rage. Something one accumulates in a life filled with endless frustration and disillusionment. I can't go on living out of my own self-interest, but if I hate you enough, I will survive out of sheer spite. And as it turned out, that spite gave me just enough impetus to make one final run at my fate. And I stress most stressedly, this was definitely the last sprint I had in me.
Now, as it turns out, you can't just BE assessed for autism. No no, life would be much too simple. No what you have to do is say the right series of specific phrases at your doctor like you're feeding commands into an outmoded DOS system. My first few attempts failed, my doctor (a new and improved one fortunately) kept angling for me to say the right things that would allow him to give me help, and grimacing when I didn't say exactly what he needed to hear.
The dance was very subtextual, but not subtle, he made it clear to me what was happening. You're not supposed to self-diagnose, they tell you, but then they also expect you to be able to distil with clinical precision the exact nature and depth of a plethora of mental symptoms from a soup of otherwise benign personality traits. I have to know and describe what's wrong with me to professional standards while also not looking like I am trying to fake it. It's essentially a performance, doing an exact impression of the truth with no human deviation from the textbook. My audience was my gatekeeper to the land of diagnosis, and I had not answered his riddles three.
This led me to seeking therapy, something I at least had the means to request through my doctor, well justified by my rampant depression and anxiety, which made for comfortable bedfellows to my neurological defects. She did help me a lot in terms of finding coping mechanisms and such, but the greatest favour she did me was to recommend an autism and ADHD assessment come the end of our sessions, as she, like my doctor, had the authority to do that, and unlike my doctor, wasn't beholden to a system being pressured from on high to make life miserable for anyone seeking help.
Seeing that pearl on the horizon as we worked through every session made it much easier to bear the weight of mounting debts and poor nutrition. In addition to that, having this much assistance opened doors to more assistance. Social workers and care organizations got involved, as much as I hated being seen as the invalid I am, it was time to accept offers of help wherever they showed up.
And then, finally, after years of work, it was time.
ASSESSMENT 2: THE REASSESSENING
I was assessed separately for ADHD and Autism, and to my great fortune, was seen by people who cared about their jobs and were not trying to meet a quota of failed diagnosis attempts set by government supervillains to keep sick people out of benefits. They both knew what my deal was with a glance, and worked very hard to give me all the documentation I would need to begin the process of applying for state assistance.
Around this time, my relationship with my jobcenter was worsening. I was being batted back and forth between more of these tedious work training courses and various other flaming turd hoops to jump through, when gradually I became aware of whispers of "work trials" on the horizon. What is a work trial, I hear you ask? What are you doing in my home, I answer. And also this is what that is:
It goes without saying that you can't just make people work for free, even to "earn" their benefits. Well, it doesn't go without saying, it had to be said. Work labour laws had to be put in place to prevent it, because that's literally slavery. But, TECHNICALLY, there's nothing illegal about hiring ANOTHER company to make welfare recipients do "work training", and giving them carte blanche to add whatever stipulations they decide as criteria for completing the course, including... working for free.
So, the job center can't say to me, "hey, you wanna keep getting this insanely small quantity of free money, go work a normal person job that would normally pay you, like, 800 times that amount". But the job center CAN say "hey, you wanna keep getting this money, you have to comply with your obligations, such as doing work training courses to make absolutely sure you know how to write a CV", and then that work training course can say "hey, so we get to decide what counts as you doing this course, and we cut a deal with a bunch of soulless corporations and we've decided that it's good work training for you to work for free".
And boom, bob's your uncle's neice, now you're a slave. Now you, someone who is in this position because you physically can't work, are being handed all the responsibilities and duties of a full time 9 to 5, with none of that money stuff you hear about.
I had managed to stave this off a few times in the past, and laws and rules would change as people with consciences tried to stem this abhorrent practice, while people without would keep finding new ways to rebrand it and bring it back in. I had escaped literal slavery by the skin of my teeth multiple times, and now, yet again, it was looming larger than ever before.
By the way, if anyone out there is currently looking for work and wondering why it's so hard to find any, ask yourself what you would do if you were a corporation that could either legitimately hire people and pay them a normal wage, or keep receiving an endless glut of free workers sent over by job training courses that you can use up and throw away like crumpled coke cans. There's irony for you. These soulless bureaucrats in their pitiless attempts at forcing everyone into work, are creating a scenario where all the work is being done and still no one has any fucking jobs. Go figure, right?
An overhaul of the benefits system was on the way, and that usually means cutting benefits or making it so unbearable to be on benefits that you give up and brave the streets, because they don't see the end goal as getting people into work, they just see it as stopping people from claiming benefits. The worrying glares I received from many of the faces I had come to know well at my jobcenter all pointed to an oncoming storm, this new "improved" version of the benefits systems, streamlined into what they would call "universal credit", would hit the impoverished like a righteous tidal wave, cleansing the nation of its shameful problem of having human beings who are allowed to both be alive and also not very functional. Work trials were inevitably going to be a part of that.
So I'm back in crisis mode, the clock is devouring its diminishing supply of ticks like a starving pacman, and I have to attempt to get on disability benefits before the whole system blows up on me. At least if I do that, maybe I can be grandfathered into the new system with the privileges they no doubt seek to strip away from newer applicants. I have my diagnoses, an achievement that moved me more than I ever expected. There are two systems I can apply to, one called PIP (Personal Independent Payment), which is separate from the normal government systems, and the disability version of Universal Credit, which I am expecting to be an Orwellian horror. I have been advised that already having PIP can make your UC application stronger, and if nothing else it is a kinder system, and with that support maybe I can still survive even if UC totally screws me.
So, I had arranged my deck, and now I had to play it.
ASSESSMENT 3: THIS TIME IT'S ASSESSONAL
My energy levels are falling and it turns out making a semi-jokey blog post about the emotional rollercoaster that has been your entire turgid life isn't as fun as it sounds. So, let's go with the cliff notes. My dad went with me to my first assessment with PIP. He told them my life story from his point of view. He cried. He said he wanted my life to be better. I haven't seen him like that since his own father died. I realised in that moment that maybe I'm not just looking for an unscratched spot on the ass of the world to stick my bloodsucker into... maybe I do really need.... maybe deserve help?
I didn't know I had imposter syndrome until someone ripped off my mask and revealed a genuinely hurt and traumatised little boy who never got to be a kid and will never get to be an adult. It was at that moment I felt decades of other people's judgements and opinions come oozing out of my head like pus from a diseased wound. All that time, I had, on some level, felt like a fraud. And when I tried and failed, I just saw it as my own fault. But what does it mean for it to be your fault you failed, if you really tried?
The assessment was successful. I was forced to see myself through the eyes of someone who can speak with authority on the fact that I needed help to survive. Although it took a dog's age, eventually I qualified and started receiving my PIP payments. The amount of cash was lower than I even started with back at the start of all this mess, but it made my jobseeker payments look like a handful of empty sweet wrappers and a few pebbles by comparison. Even if I had to stay on jobseekers, with the help of PIP, I now had the means to MAYBE survive a little longer.
Then, eventually, after a great deal more highly redundant work, came my UC assessment. This was the one I had been dreading. A fear tempered only slightly by hearing that the people making these assessments were independently hired. Perhaps less stench of agenda, then, than I had expected to cloud the interview. It went well. My first hint of that was when they didn't need to go into great detail about any of the more physical health problems I have, which are plenty (as would they be for you, if you've been living in a dump and counting pebbles your whole life), which indicates they thought my neurological issues alone were enough.
I got the decision a few days ago, and shortly thereafter, a small first payment, backdated to the day I applied. Even the heartless government, after seeing all the evidence I accumulated since starting at square one, eventually had to admit that clearly, I am in need of some small mercy.
Gone were the obligations, gone were the constant lessons on how to compose a fucking CV, done with the work trials. The weekly appointments, that sword perpetually waiting to drop, now a rusted relic on the wall. I have, and I say this tentatively, as some part of my brain will now forever be anticipating the drop of that other shoe, reached the point I set out to reach all those years ago.
I am back at square one. And what a lovely square it is. I can live, not as comfortably as anyone who works, but maybe that's fair. I would work to earn if I could, and it's not my fault I can't, but it still seems wrong for me to make as much as someone who has to put their back into it while I am afforded the luxury to recline on mine. An image all too often conjured in the frothing minds of those who think everyone on benefits are just lazy, entitled brats resting on the laurels of their participation trophies.
Well, you decide. Granting me the benefit of doubt as to my honesty, you have seen my story from my perspective. Does it sound to you like an especially privileged experience? Do you picture my days as wallowing in a mudpit of luxury while naked cherubs piss money onto my head? Or do you think I went through some measure of hell, to get to where I am now? Of all the changes I have experienced these last months, I think the biggest one is that, right there. An internal change. No longer viewing myself as a parasite, no longer hating myself for consuming the shoe-string budget life had permitted me. No longer feeling like I am taking something that doesn't belong to me.
One of my heroes, after whom this blog post's name is mischievously patterned, has taught me that no matter how bad your trauma, or how heavy your burden... you can get better. You can do better, you can BE better. And wherever you may be on that journey... you DESERVE better. You are enough. It's 11.34pm right now. I turn 38 in 26 minutes. But I already received my birthday present. An achievement I worked my whole ass ass off for. I have rediscovered myself at 37, and what I discovered is that it's okay not to be okay, and it's okay to WANT to be okay. You're allowed to try, you're allowed to fail, and you're even allowed to succeed.
I'm not a parasite. I may be defective but I still have a lot to offer, in whatever ways I can. And I am not robbing the world by taking my space within it as I find my way.
Maybe I don't deserve this. But I sure fucking earned it.
