Do you have the ability/opportunity to leave?

thanks for the bump

One of my favourite series of all time is Jean Auel’s Earths Children series, about cavepeople. From the third book on, the protagonist lives in matriarchal, communist societies, free love, everything shared, people can be gay, in throuples, whatever they want. But at the end they discover where babies come from, and the society turns patriarchal and it ends with women clearly about to lose their freedom.

Do things that you actually enjoy and are drawn to, rather than things you’re not enjoying but feel you should. I wish someone had given me this advice 25 years ago.

Because the media has a narrative to push, rather than honestly reporting.

I’ve been on disability benefits for 10 years in total now. After a while, they contacted me and told me that they’d actually been paying me a slightly higher amount than I was entitled to and I’d have to pay it back. So far, the extra had added up to about £2800. I spent 5 years paying back £11 a week. It was totally their own mistake but I had to lose £11 a month for 5 years, and at the time I was only getting £135 a week, so I had to live off £124 a week (and that was the total amount, for rent, utilities and food) for 5 years and got massively in debt because who can live off £124 a week?

Now again, because they wrongfully put me through an appeal that took about a year and a half, I’m massively in debt again from living off credit. I’ll never be debt free because of all this. This is why I have to spend my life begging for help on mutual aid, because the amounts paid on disability are so low (I now get more than £135 a week but still not anywhere near enough) and due to being put through appeals, told to pay money back etc I’m always in debt, so not only am I always paying off debt but the interest accrued from the debt too.

So on top of telling people to work when they clearly can’t, causing them endless stress and bullying them to death they’ve set up a system where claimants can never get out of debt either. I have to spend my life begging for people to buy me food and toothpaste and going without a lot of things. Yet the newspapers make out that disability benefits are a free-for all, so easy to claim and pay massive amounts. I remember one woman on reddit who worked as a nurse and said she only earnt £1700 a month and she could not live off that. But when I said my disability benefits are much lower than that and I couldn’t live off it either she told me disability benefits are too high and should be cut!

My disability benefits are so low, plus all this debt, that the only place I can afford to live is renting a room in an old lady’s house. She’s only renting the room out because her pension is so low that she can’t afford to live without an extra income especially since she is taxed to death, it’s not just that utility bills are astronomical but council tax is ridiculously high despite getting hardly any services for it (our rubbish is collected only twice a month and the roads are full of potholes) but even her pension gets taxed! This is why I had to beg on mutual aid for people to help us buy a washing machine, and why we can’t afford the £160 repairs for the oven. We literally can’t afford to get the oven fixed, can’t cook food unless someone comes through on mutual aid. What kind of life is this?

I recently googled my old school friends and was appalled to find that my best friend from school, who I haven’t seen in 17 years, now works for the DWP as an assessor, and seems to be doing very well out of it, with a flashy new BMW and house.

It won’t, it’s only going to get worse. The doctors say i’m at high risk of having another, worse, stroke. They cut my medication down to try and make it less likely but this means there’s now a higher chance of the cancer coming back. Although mutual aid keeps my hunger pangs away i am very slowly dying of malnutrition as my cancer treatment has given me so many food intolerances and allergies, there are just a few things i can eat without becoming violently ill. Can’t even tolerate supplements any more. The NHS dietician says there is nothing that can be done about it. And I’ll always be struggling to keep my disability benefits. I’ll always have the stress and anxiety of having to beg for help on mutual aid. There is no hope of anything except death one day.

It’s become clear to me that life is designed to be exhausting and stressful. We aren’t even meant to enjoy it, it’s just an endurance challenge.

Thanks for the bump!

Thanks for the bump!

Thanks for the bump!

Thank you. We do have fans at least. I’ve got a mutual aid post going for an oven repair right now, no responses yet. I often fantasise about the ruling class getting the French or Russian treatment. Those people even haunt my dreams. I’ve had a dream about Rachel Reeves screaming at me and one about Boris Johnson telling me to get off benefits and back into work.

Thank you. I too prefer cold weather. Last winter was cold enough that, combined with the fact my landlady can’t afford to heat the house for more than a few hours a day, I got chilblains. And I would still take that over this heat any day. The heat is so oppressive and the air is so thick and muggy I can barely do anything at all.

thanks for the bump

Everyone’s hard up and it seems like it’s only going to get worse.

Thanks for the bump!

It’s just a small electrical fault apparently, the engineer quoted £160, and long-term it will need doing anyway. I just feel kind of numb about everything because life just feels like a neverending volley of challenges that are technically small yet impossible for me to overcome without help. CS Lewis wrote in his book The Screwtape Letters that the way to break a human’s spirit is to give them endless small challenges and frustrations and he’s absolutely right.

I don’t actually have any cash at all to get anything so i don’t think I can get an air fryer but thanks for the suggestion.

I live in the UK so i’m not too worried about bats or wildlife, only spiders. Soon the giant spiders will be out and I’m not looking forward to that, it’ll be a choice between shut the windows and boil to death or leave them open and get giant spiders in here.