High Hopes

How do?

I am sorry my blog is a bit gloomy but it is how I feel at the moment. I don't know whether it is me or whether other people on IB are feeling the same way but I seem to have this impending feeling of doom more than I have had before. I am not due to to have another IB50 until 2010, it could be next week for all I care because it is going to happen.

Every day I dread the post coming and I say to my Wife was there anything sinister in the post today?. I did get a brown envelope the other day which had me shaking but it was only a letter for an increase in DLA, whoopee!. If they get there way the DWP will take that off me as well. I am sure they will need the money to pay towards some bank bailout.

The government go on about how much they have to save on benefits as if we haven't heard it all before. The money used for benefits is nothing but small change compared to the money paid to bail out the banks!.

Is being on benefits actually supposed to make you feel worse? Is this supposed to be the desired effect?. What it is doing to my mental health at the moment I do not know, some days before I go to voluntary work I often feel sick. I dread it if a car sits outside for more than 15 minutes with them sitting there rabbiting away on the phone and I won't go out. I even walk in the opposite direction when I go to voluntary work so I don't go past that car. I feel like I am going to be the next person featured on "On The Fiddle". Its not a nice feeling, paranoid or what?.

I have been reading the forum of www.benefitsandwork.co.uk and what people are going through and its a nightmare, people who have already failed to qualify for ESA and they have worse conditions than I have. People with ME getting 0 points and expecting to find work. What is happening is people who are have failed medicals are appealing virtually straight away so making more work for the DWP and showing what the new system is doing and the over-zealous doctors at the medicals are doing. People with disabilities have enough problems managing already without a system that punishes them and causes more stress and anxiety.

I just feel like the next brown envelope I get will be the passport to jobseekers allowance. I feel like I am going to go full circle and be back where I started back at the jobcentre. I can't wait to go to a work focused interview just so I can write about the experience on my blog.

Before I had this head injury and all the frustration that goes with it I had high hopes of being a brain surgeon or being the chairman of ICI. Looking back at it now and as I am getting nearer to 40 I often feel like I haven't really achieved anything of any significance as far as work is concerned. This sums it up perfectly how I feel.

All I seem to have to have done is led down blind alleys, got my hopes up and then ended up further back than when I started. Who cares?.

I also feel like the government just want to get as many people off IB and on to JSA and leave it to the Tories to sort out the mess, then at prime ministers question time when David Cameron is PM, labour will be saying well look at how many unemployed people there are and what are you doing about it and all the opposition bench will be jumping round like Stadler & Waldorf.

I voted labour at the last election but now I am so sick [that's ironic] of Gordon Brown and labour even David Cameron sounds appealing. I don't suppose the Tories will make it any easier for disabled people though, labour have implemented Tory ideas with there blessing of course.

I went to my favourite pathways to nowhere provider workinglinks again to do some finding out and get some information, they said though that I would have to be referred to them by the jobcentre. I then picked up forms showing how they can help me fill in application forms and write a cv or even send me on a course. I already know how to fill in an application form or write a CV. I found the experience so disheartening and depressing.

Up to that point I was doing quite well and I was being positive. I did manage to have a conversation with the receptionist, she even remembered me but then some guy came in and the world had to stop for him. He was ranting on about how someone had not returned his call and why someone couldn't speak to him now, why someone could not speak to him even while they were having there lunch and how his mate had driven him 200 miles to get him there, oh yeh mate you're having a giraffe. Those sort of people get on my nerves how they have no consideration for anyone else except themselves.

I could only put up with him ranting and raving for so long and I waited patiently but then my anxiety kicked in and I had to choose between fight or flight and I took up the flight option. Why do I bother?.

No doubt I will get the usual comments on my blog from people who have no experience of actually having a disabilty and how I should just go out and get any job but you can not just get any job. Having a head injury and the results of it can be very complex, nobody knows what's going on in my head and I try to show a glimpse of it on this blog This write-up on this excellent blog is a very good reflection of the ins and out of looking for work

Trying to get a job was difficult enough for disabled people before the recession but it even more difficult now.

If you haven't slashed you wrists by now I have more in the pipeline soon.

see ya

Brainblogger