I am a sick and disabled woman and I am dependent on disability benefits.

I will not justify why I receive PIP. I will not explain to you the expenditure that I incur as a direct result of my chronic ill health. I will not list the things I have to spend more money on because of my disability.  

It is hard to resist the urge to tell you the intimacies of being sick but I will not parade my illness and disability to justify being treated with basic dignity and respect.  

I will tell you about the humiliating and intrusive forms I must fill in. Forms that take hours to complete, causing fatigue and untold stress and anxiety. Not anxious that I might have filled out the form wrong and be denied benefit, though there is an element of that, but anxious at seeing myself, my life, reduced to such basic indignity.

I will share that once those forms have sat in the benefits system for up to a year, leaving me with constant low-level worry about how I am going to live, I will be called for an assessment.

Sometimes this is done at home, other times in an office block. More than once, I’ve been sent to buildings that are not wheelchair accessible, even though I use a wheelchair. Like a trick question I am quizzed about why I can’t climb three flights of stairs before I am allocated a wheelchair-accessible site.

In the medical assessment, which is not medically based, I answer questions about my day-to-day life. How often I can do certain things? What stops me from doing others?

(I just typed out my answers to some of these questions and then deleted them, because why should I have to justify and expose myself to be treated with dignity.)

I have been asked if I can lift a box above my head.

 I have been asked how long it takes me to shower, to use the toilet.

I have been asked about incontinence and told to stand with my eyes closed and touch my nose.

In nearly all of it I am assumed to be a liar, assumed to be malingering, assumed to be on the scrounge. Only once have I had a truly compassionate interview where the person not only understood my condition but didn’t start from a baseline that I was taking the piss.

I will not tell you the psychological impact of living in a world where you are assumed to be a liar and a cheat. I will not tell you the impact of being judged as worthless to society because I cannot work.

I will tell you about the times I have been shouted at in the street, the man who threw a rock at me, calling me a ‘fucking scrounger.’ The woman who spat at me for ‘taking all the benefits.’

Despite what the media and now a Labour government would have you believe, it is incredibly hard to be allocated disability benefits.  I’ve spoken to lots of people about benefits over the years and I’ve never met anyone who loves being on benefits. I’ve never met anyone faking it, or laying it on thick.

Instead, I’ve met people who are deeply ashamed of needing benefits. I’ve met people who’d love their old life back, the one where they weren’t sick. Where they had a job and a life, able to do all of the things asked about in the assessment form.  

I’ve met people who are terrified of the assessments. Whose entire financial existence is predicated on answering the questions on a form accurately and truthfully; Not exaggerating, nor that blanket ‘I’m fine,’ which protects any sense of self-worth and dignity under the scrutinising gaze of others.

How have we reached the stage where the sick and disabled, some of the most vulnerable and financially insecure sections of the population are the villains of the piece?

When did it become acceptable to assume that people were liars cheats and scroungers? When did hate, towards disabled people, poor people, people of colour, Muslims, asylum seekers, trans people, gay people, people on benefits, become so entrenched that governments seek to pander to such bigotry?

This hate says more about those doing the hating than it does about those they despise. What it says is that if you found yourself in a difficult situation, if you found yourself sick or disabled or unable to work, you would cheat and lie and de-fraud.  If we judge people by our own standards you might want to take a good look in the mirror.

So no, I will not justify why I receive PIP, to make myself seem human in your eyes.

If you can’t already see that, then there is little hope for either of us.