Thursday 26 January 2012

I am bloody good enough, and OW!

I write this, through tears, my back screaming because though recently it has been wanting to do things that are impossible with the human spine I am currently only able to be somewhere between approx a 60- 140 degree angle. I have a thumping headache, my head is swimming, I can't even have the TV sound on because the volume is hurting too much. I am finding it a job to swallow and I have stigmata pain in both my hands. Also, for every 5 seconds or so I am getting about 4-5 twinges in my muscles/nerves.

I am scared. I am back on my crutch nearly full time when I leave the house and I am exhausted all the time, not including the level of exhausted I am when I've been out. I am now on quite a few meds and still feeling crap, I know this is only a wobble brought on by some kind of virus but it freaks me out, I want to do so many things.
Then I go online, the only place I feel I have any impact, the only place I can be equal and "normal" I come into contact with the Telegraph and The Sun (c/o political scrapbook) stories, they scare the hell out of me, they make me want to curl up and die.

They make me feel as if everything I am trying my absolute best to do is never enough, my working relentlessly while being unfit for work at finishing my OU degree, my volunteering to try to gain experience and strength etc. is all for nothing. As if nothing I will ever do will be enough in the eyes of the world at large.

I get it you know? I know; I know that some of you view me as a piece of dirt, as a scrounger. However I know better, I know that I am a human being, I know I desperately want to get better, but MS is progressive. I want to get the strength I had prior to my recent attack back but that may never happen. It has taken me years to accept this is how my life is and I still don't entirely, it doesn't really help when the rest of the world fails to accept it too.
I still feel "maybe if you just tried harder", I still feel like I should try, relentlessly for approval but I'll never get it. Maybe I should just accept that some people will always view me as workshy and a scrounger.

However, I look at this from outside and you know what I see? I see someone who has been abused, I see someone who feels as if this is what they deserve and the part of me that has studied health and diversity and social policy and a wee bit of psychology looks at the little scared me and despairs.

This is a ridiculous state of affairs! It's holocaust memorial day, a reminder of what hate of what you do not understand or tolerate can lead to, a reminder of what hateful governments can do to their own people. More than 70 years later can we still be doing this to people, segmenting into those that are deserving and "moral" and those who deficient in some way? Now people must fight to be seen as rightfully disabled, as ill enough, and morally upright citizens, and enough for "the tax payer", that we must strive so hard for recognition or are scrounging and therefore a cancer on society.

There is, after all, a thing called "National Insurance" (also, more than 70 years old, as is the NHS) people forget, that this pays for the welfare state, we pay for it, we all pay for it. we all are one, we are one people, yet somehow the government is instilling hate in the hearts of the paranoid. We are all being "taken for a ride" by these "scroungers".

You know what? Fuck it, I have rights in this country, that's why I love Britain, rights that my grandparents fought for, rights that every citizen is rightfully entitled to, and this does not have to do with justifying my right to have a meagre struggle of a bloody existence, it has to do with compassion, with understanding, with healing the sick, with supporting the poor, with legislating the private sector so that people do not have to live in squalid conditions, or are not left disabled by faulty bloody breast implants, or left without income, so that nobody should die in poverty.

It's the country I always thought I lived in, it's the country I fight to live in every, single day. Where ignorance isn't fought with ignorance, where distrust isn't fought with more distrust, and where people who already have a pretty bloody crappy lot in life are allowed to have a bit of actual dignity, not having to join the very real analogue of a workhouse just to eat, where people are provided with the help they need to go to the bloody toilet, or wash their bits!

If you do not want to live in this country, please tell me why the hell not, tell me, why, living with daily pain striving to get through (not even starting on the mental health issues), struggling to eventually get out of the benefit hole I am in of sickness and social immobility is not bloody good enough for you, do that or kindly bugger off.


1 comment:

  1. Well said. We're all bloody good enough and one day the eejits will understand that x

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