I think I’m feeling grim lately over having had to explain to someone recently how bad it is when you need to rely on systems like disability and snap and so on for survival. In my experience the people directly interfacing with the public in these roles are…not good at that. They are pointedly unkind. They have missed no opportunity to insult me for having a university degree and being disabled. It is degrading and I’m pretty sure it’s working as intended. If I had an option I would walk away, but I can’t, because I need to eat and I need to live. But I’m sure plenty of people who need the help do walk away. And I wonder what happens to them.
It’s like the complex, sometimes award-winning, life changing things I’ve done and made and accomplished in my life mean nothing. It’s not enough to sustain a life. My education means nothing. Any contributions I may have made to society do not matter anymore, because I’m poor and disabled. And that’s the system. It is this way because someone wanted it to be this way. Someone calculated how to exact cruelty on a soul-crushed population under the guise of “preventing fraud” or some utter bullshit and here we are.
I am tired all the time and it takes so much effort just to get a basic amount of (inadequate) rest. I am tired of living with the background noise of “ope, snap’s turned off again,” a day before grocery shopping, again and again. We got it back but once again it’s a case where someone literally did not click a button two months ago and it took three or four phone calls to get here. I’m tired. I’m tired. I want to live in a house that’s not full of rats and mold and leaks. They just didn’t click a button. There’s no consequences.
I feel like I used to be a person and I don’t know what I am anymore. Not in a “tying my worth to my work” way necessarily, but even the things I’m proudest of don’t count for anything in the grand scheme. And it hurts.
