New Reality

[nym_wibbly]

I'm struggling to process my new reality, free of the welfare system's constant hoop-jumping. I knew it was killing me, but I don't think I realised exactly how much of my life I spent making decisions based on how likely they were to leave me unable to jump through a hoop on demand. Failing to jump the hoops loses you money, so I couldn't afford to make myself so ill I couldn't show up and perform. I couldn't bet my bread and butter on a risky move. That's the reality of the Work Related Activity Group for a lot of people, I suspect. Don't get me wrong, the help on offer is valuable and - if one was unemployed without health issues or an attitude problem, or had a time-limited medical problem - ought to get you back into work or productive training without much trouble. The thing is, there's no flexibility. If showing up to tick a box on a computer once a fortnight means you can't take on a volunteer role or start a little job... tough. You have to prioritise that "I showed up on demand" over the realities of living a life. I haven't been able to do that since 2008, when the then-Labour government introduced the welfare changes that brought these interventions. I get the mindset behind them - nobody should be abandoned on welfare without any hope of progressing in their life. But the thing is, nobody is. It's the people who get kicked out of the welfare system for non-compliance, or who are too afraid or unwell to apply, that our society abandons. I'm in the Support Group, now, but if and when I'm ready to use it, I can access exactly the same job-seeking and training assistance that I could last week, while I was in the Work Related Activity Group. The difference is, I won't be wasting energy I don't have meeting arbitrary targets that have nothing to do with my personal barriers to work, and everything to do with society's assumptions about attitude/motivation in unemployment or disability.

Every few hours, I make a choice - something small, something that a healthy person probably wouldn't even register as a choice. I no longer have to ask myself, "will this keep me from managing to attend my next appointment/class in a fit state to be viewed as compliant?" It's going to take a few months to unlearn that, I think. Meanwhile, I'm trying to avoid the temptation to go mad with either my new freedom or my new, slightly higher, income. I'm going to take a few weeks and see how the lack of hoop-jumping affects my energy levels, get the last little bit of my weekly course behind me, then... I dunno. I'm hoping I might have the energy for a tiny little job of some sort. That's the irony of the current welfare system - the spare energy that I might, just possibly, have been able to use to hold down a pitifully modest little job was all going into the DWP's box-ticking exercises. And that was driving me insane. Possibly quite literally. Now I can find out if my available energy is up to doing something that's actually useful - that actually gets me closer to being a productive member of society again. And if it turns out that I'm not well enough, I won't get punished for stopping the activity and looking after my health instead. "Compliance" is no longer my main objective in life. Progress is.

Comments

[nostalgia]

This is a good post.

[nym_wibbly]

:)