I am writing this daily blog about my family and I being homeless as a means of working through my emotions about this and so I can take the lessons learned from it. And if I help someone along the way, that will make me very happy.
I missed posting yesterday because I was busy playing Peggy Mitchell all day and didn’t get time to write. For anyone reading from the UK, you will likely know who I mean. Anyone reading outside the UK, Peggy Mitchell was a character in a British soap opera based in the East End of London. She was a pub landlady and was often heard to screech ‘Get outta my pub!’ when anyone upset her, which was often. We are currently living above our friend’s pub in the neighbouring village to where we used to live and he is unfortunately poorly with Covid currently. So, I have taken on the temporary role of pub landlady. It was hard work yesterday, but good fun given I know the locals who visit the pub well, and we had some laughs and some chats. By the end of the day, though, I was shattered and didn’t feel up to writing.
There were high points yesterday, and I tried to carry on with my ‘the universe will provide’ and ‘everything is good’ approach to life, but it’s hard. Especially when you find out that there are no sickness benefits available to you, apparently, so your financial position is not going to improve any time soon unless a miracle happens or you return to your previous job and keep everything crossed it doesn’t do damage to your heart. That’s where I’m at. And miracles appear to be thin on the ground at the moment. I honestly don’t know what else to do. There was supposedly an option of working with my husband due to a vacancy arising, but my father-in-law has now shot that one down and it doesn’t look as though it’s going to happen.
It also makes it really difficult to not question what the eff is going on when it is broadcast all over the media (and confirmed by the department concerned) that the government is paying £600 taxi fares so (and I hate this term) illegal immigrants can access a GP when I can’t afford the fuel to take me to my cardio rehab sessions because there is no sickness benefit for me, apparently. From a system I paid the highest tax rate into for over 20 years. Make that make sense, please. I don’t want to get onto the anti-immigration bandwagon, I really don’t, but when you know people who are struggling, yourself included, and can’t find housing but you find out there are 98 unoccupied houses in your Local Authority area – but no one seems to be able to access them, it makes you wonder, why. Why are we disposable to our government? That’s how I feel today.
So, rock meet hard place for me. I truly thought things in my life were going to turn around, yet they seem to be getting ever worse. It’s been two years now, this inexorable slide downward and just when you think there is nowhere further down you can go, somehow you manage to find it. Yesterday’s news from the DWP was a real body blow, to be honest. I am genuinely unsure how people manage to defraud the benefits system when it is impenetrable at best as far as I am concerned. I have to find a way of getting off benefits altogether, of securing employment to provide a sufficient income. I just don’t know which direction to turn in that regard except for my previous job.
As much as I want to write full-time, that simply isn’t an option realistically. And that’s where I am also have problems, technical ones this time. The final book of my trilogy will not upload properly as a paperback, and again I am stuck. I have tried every single different way to do it, read the guidelines and still…nothing. I’m going to take it down and try to reload it, see if that works. But it just feels at the moment as though every time I think there’s a chink of light, it is quickly extinguished.
Lying awake, unable to sleep because of everything rumbling through my brain in relation to all of this, I have wondered if I’m cursed. Those are the sort of thoughts that go through your mind at 3am. There are also the dark thoughts of how your family would be better off without you because you’ve done nothing but drag them into an abyss, thoughts you try to keep at bay during the day so you don’t do something stupid. Thoughts where you can’t believe that this is it, but you’re faced with the reality that you keep on trying to move forward and just nothing seems to work.
I’m trying to work through these emotions, to feel them and release them. Maybe that’s what I am supposed to do, to feel the anguish that this is bringing and then release it. Perhaps that’s how I move on. Perhaps trying to be relentlessly positive and see the silver lining isn’t the best way forward all the time because it’s hiding the hurt I feel inside. And I do feel hurt. I feel let down by a lot of people if I’m honest, the safety net they have promised me would be there in the past that they have then ripped away has been very hurtful. I don’t offer to help someone if I don’t mean it, but I’ve had lots of meaningless offers of help which I’ve had to come to terms with. Even the request for someone to look after our dog for a couple of days (given we have looked after theirs in the past) was met with a resolute ‘no’. Perhaps that’s what I need to do, feel the hurt, something I have to confess I have never been good at preferring to bury it instead, and release it to move on. I don’t know what that looks like but I will give it a try. And perhaps then I will have some idea of how to move forward.
Maybe then I will soar. I will thrive. I will find success.
Louisa Simpson 