Thats what this government and its disciples tells you when you are in a bad place. When you are unemployed after a long and successful career and have worked hard for everything you have, even though to some it is not much at all. If you don’t find a job within a few weeks or months after being laid off, whatever the reason, you clearly aren’t trying hard enough.

Then you have to sign on when the money runs out and the fun really begins. Because you are claiming benefits you are now a ‘scrounger’ despite the fact you have never claimed benefits in your life. You cant afford even basic things like keeping the lights on or heating your house. Buying a loaf of bread becomes an exercise in staring at the shelf hoping that the price will change magically before your eyes. You are short by 3p for the aforementioned loaf and you are too ashamed to ask the man behind the counter to let you off the tiny amount that now seems the size of a mortgage and is between you and a meal for 3 or 4 days.

You are probably reading this from your desk at work, or your sofa at home on a day off and thinking “this doesn’t happen, its a myth designed for a good read” Well, dear readers it isnt a myth and I’ll you why. It happened to me.

Ten months ago i was made redundant from a job i loved and had been in for over 5 years. The world fell from under my feet and I found myself at home applying for benefits as well as jobs for the first time in my life. That in itself was a task i never wish to repeat. Forms and forms and forms that never seemed to end asking the most personal of details all designed to get you ‘help’ when you need it the most. No wonder the most vulnerable in society struggle to get help when they need it if they have to go through that quagmire of forms. Its an eye opener that you half wish everyone had to go through at least once to see what it is really like while on the other hand hoping no one ever has to endure it. The perfect conundrum.

With the help of my local Conservative councillor i got mine sorted fairly quickly and was able to get on with the main task of looking for a job knowing that for the time being at least, my roof over my head was safe. Ah yes, job hunting. How that has changed from the days when we circled a job in the paper and phoned about a vacancy. Now its cold recruitment agencies who often advertise jobs that don’t even exist. For the real jobs I had a hit rate of about 1 in 30 in terms of a response rate to the advert in the first place. By response I meant a real person emailing me back to say that I was being considered. Most of the time you hear nothing at all or just a courtesy stock email saying either “your application is in progress” or “sorry, other candidates more closely matched the profile”. It’s cold and impersonal and adds to the ever growing sense of isolation you start to feel as the days and weeks turn into months.

The bi-weekly humiliation of signing on at the local job centre interspersed with the occasional meeting with an ‘advisor’ is a whole new level of abuse and angst. The first person you see at the JC is the security guard. In my case these were odious unpleasant men with no interpersonal skills whatsoever. I was banned from taking my coffee into the JC as it was a health risk, my electronic cigarette is a fire risk despite it not being alight and when I saw someone who had threatened me previously and asked for somewhere else to sit I was told to go and hide around the corner of the street. Don’t even think about challenging them when something goes wrong either. My benefits were stopped because my adviser incorrectly told me that I did not need to reapply for them after 6 months of claiming. As a result my housing and council tax benefit stopped as well as my job seekers allowance. I was left destitute and had to be referred, by a friend, to a food bank in order to survive. When i was left standing in tears at the job centre the security guard threatened to throw me out because I was ‘causing a disturbance’. I was standing stock still in shock crying yet this was deemed a threat and they didn’t want it on their doorstep. Only a kind person on the DWP phone line saved me and sorted it out some weeks later. Those weeks were the hardest I have ever had to live through. I went for days without food an drank only water or left over juice. Friends ultimately sent me food parcels when I finally admitted how bad it was. The shame was something I never want to experience ever again

But lets also talk about how the Job Centre refuse to help you find work which surely is there primary purpose? They set parameters for you to seek work and off you go. FOr a while at least. Sure, they will tolerate you looking for a similar job to your old one for about 3 months, but then they get bored of you coming in to see them and they change the goal posts. You have to apply for everything that is available. And i mean everything. They demand that you apply for shop work despite being so vastly over qualified that you don’t even get past the initial recruitment stage. If you dont get interviews they demand to know why. They accuse you of not looking hard enough for work. If you present them with a spreadsheet with over 30 job applications a day, they accuse you of lying about your search saying ‘no one applies for that many jobs a day’. Well I did and I refused to give up hope. They then sent me to Work Programme.

Oh yes, the dear old work programme we hear so much about. I was referred to them after only 3 months of unemployment. I was hopeful that they would be able to help me get back into work a lot faster as they had experience of the job market in its more recent form than i did. How wrong I was and so easily deceived. My first day with them was as debilitating as going to the Job Centre. I was sat in a room with others being given a lecture about personal hygiene after filling in 28 different forms. Yes 28 forms. I took photos of them all on my phone to prove it and tweeted them. Most of the information asked for was repeated on each form and it was akin to be stuck in Dante’s 7th circle of hell answering the same questions one by one. I amused myself by numbering each form and when a repeat question came up put a note saying ‘refer to form xx for details’ in order to stop the brain rot. After a meeting with an ‘advisor’ who admitted within 10 minutes of my sitting down that “we are not geared up to help highly skilled people like yourself” i left the building feeling even more despondent than before. I did not hear from the Work Programme again for another 3 months. They asked me to go in for ‘tea and biscuits’. Now I knew what being parked felt like.

You’d think that being unemployed and having so much time on your hands would be great. You can go out and do lots of other stuff when not searching for jobs right? WRONG. You cant for two reasons. 1) If you do the Work Programme phone you up and demand to know why you aren’t looking for work. They phoned me at 7.45 one evening when i was at a football match demanding to know why i wasn’t looking for work. Apparently you have no social life when you are unemployed are aren’t entitled to one. 2) The job centre tells you you have to be available to work 7 days a week from 8am to 8pm non negotiable. Anything less and you will be sanctioned. I subsequently found out that this was wrong and I should not have been told this but it still didn’t stop me panicking and looking over my shoulder every time i left the house which wasn’t often as i was too scared.

Then there is the reaction from other people to your situation. Don’t be fooled folks. When you are working you are a valued member of society like anyone else, but when you lose your job you are relegated to the ranks of 3rd class citizen or less. You are put in the same bracket as those painted as scum of the earth by the right wing press of the Daily Mail and regular people look down their noses at you. You also find out who your real friends are. I used to visit my local shop across the road. Initially sympathetic to my being made redundant, as time went on, he became increasingly hostile to my not being able to find work. The ‘good morning, how are you?’ was replaced with a curt ‘have you found a job yet?’. I would shuffle away feeling worthless and try not to cry. Others did the same compounded my worthlessness. Faceless people in the internet who I had never met spent hours of their own free time calling me feckless, a scrounger, benefit cheat, lazy and all manner of insults. Apparently you should take any job offered despite the fact that its salary may not pay your bills or enable you to buy food. You should not spend you benefit money on a bar of chocolate but worst of all you should not spend ‘their’ money on anything that they disagree with. Their money.

The Daily Mail myth about unemployed folks is alive and well and rampant. People assume that ‘it is better to be working than not’ but that simply isn’t the case. One local LibDem Councillor where i live said this to me. I explained that as a single person living alone I could not afford to take a low paid job, pay my bills and eat all at the same time. She just couldn’t see what I was saying to her. Being alone makes it ten times harder when you are the sole bread winner in the house and get the absolute basic benefits to survive on. Having kids and being a single mother would have made me better off! So to compound the issue of feeling worthless because you don’t have a job, you also feel like you’ve failed in society because you are single and have no kids. Its a no win situation designed to make you feel your absolute worst.

My life went on in this revolving door of abuse, humiliation and poverty for just over 10 months before I got lucky. I have in the past week landed the job of my life. It has given me a huge salary increase on my previous role and my first real chance to live without worry about my bills for years, but it has also given me something else. The opportunity to try and make sure that no one else has to go through what I did for 10 months. When I am financially settled again, I am going to give a monthly amount to local food banks and other charities helping those in need so that they can help people who need it the most. I refuse to stand by and see others treated in this way in the 21st century. We are supposed to be social creatures yet I have seen the worst in humanity in the last 10 months. I have seen such awful acts of selfishness as to make me despair yet I have also seen amazing acts of kindness. People who sent me a small cheque to buy food, people who sent money for petrol so I could get to interviews, people who sent food for me and for Lilah, people who paid for my car each month so I did not lose it, people who helped me pay my gas bill so i could keep warm over winter. Yes I had some amazing help and without them I would be dead right now. Thats not an exaggeration at all but a simple statement of fact. When I lay under my 4 blankets at 3am wondering if things were ever going to change and simply staring at the ceiling, those people kept me going and alive. Those who were supposed to care like my family were nowhere to be found but that says so much to me that it is the final validation I needed that i made the right choice in leaving them behind. I found out who my real friends are and they are so precious to me that words here cannot even begin to explain how much I love them and respect them for being human beings.

So my final paragraph of this long and rambling missive is dedicated to the following people. Chris, Julie, David, Carole, Serena, Jiggly, Martin, Aylesbury – all of you were and are the shining lights in my world. Thank you.

ps – if you are unemployed and think this is never going to end, please take some heart from this post. It will get better I promise you. It might take longer than you thought but it will get better. Trust me on this. I lived it and came out the other side.

That makes me sound cold and callous right? I won’t be mourning the passing of a wife, a mother, someone’s relation? No I am sorry I can’t. I am sat here this evening, having had the television on what seems like a sycophantic loop session all day, feeling utterly ambivalent to the death of Margaret Thatcher.  Am I jubilant that she is dead? No. Am i sad that she is dead. Thats a no too. What do I feel about her passing. Absolutely nothing.

Margaret Thatcher for me embodies the absolute worst attributes of the tory party. She battered the poor and working classes in this country into the ground sending riot police in to finish the job when her policies weren’t enough. She showed total disdain for anyone not agreeing Continue reading →

Im not someone who accepts help readily. Various events in my life have meant that I have had to deal with whatever life throws at me on my own and until eight months ago, I have managed to do that and carry on with my life. Not any more. I am stuck in a gothic horror hell that I can simply see no way out of.

Eight months ago I lost my job through redundancy at a leading hearing loss charity and everything went steadily down hill from there onwards. I found another job relatively quickly but it was clear within days that my new employer was a total nightmare and my working life soon became pure torture.

I have Bipolar disorder. Through a life of tough challenges Continue reading →

I have never wanted to kill myself as much as i do tonight. There is only one reason I cannot bring myself to do it. I am a coward. I just dont have the gut to do it properly and yet i wish, more than anything else in the world that I did. That way all of the lies and threats would stop once and for all.

For some people, twitter is school playground. The second they go online they take on an air of invincibility and use the power of anonymity to wreak havoc on the lives of others through bullying behaviours. How do I know this? It’s simple. It is a sustained campaign of behaviour from some twitter users that has brought me to this place where i would rather be dead than alive.

A long long time ago, I questioned a user called Skip_licker on his use of the word retard. He didnt like it and blocked me and i blocked him. Since that time has has maintained some kind of delusion that I am stalking him. Far from it. He and the people on twitter that he surrounds himself with scare me and upset me. They will take power from knowing that but it is the truth. Why do they upset and scare me? I have bipolar disorder. A disorder that has slowly brewed since my childhood due to the oppressive actions of a father for whom nothing was ever good enough and a sister who resented my relationship with him so much that she worked relentlessly to destroy it. Seven years ago she succeeded and i have had no contact with my family since then.

Did she take the victory and walk away to her perfect family life? No. Like Skip Licker and his friends she kept on and on and on at me accusing me of all manner of things. They want my death so that they can stamp on my body in jubilation. I am convinced that nothing less will satisfy them.

They prod very day calling me mental, loon, fucktard, spastic and every other derogatory word you can think of to describe someone with a mental health issue while on the other hand saying i should get help because i need it. I do get help for my disorder but thats none of their business anyway right?

With a startling amount of arrogance they have this week assumed that i am the only person on twitter who finds them offensive. An anonymous user appeared called captainbastard1 and latterly captainbasterd1 who sent a stream of disgusting abusive tweets to skip licker and his fiancé Political fun. They assumed it was me regardless of the fact that i wasnt even near my phone or Mac when the tweets appeared. Political fun claimed she had my IP address to prove it. Others called her nonsense out but she stuck firm to the believe that the ‘spidey loon’ was stalking her fiancé. Whoever this person, the captain was, i am unclear as to whether he realised what trouble he had caused for me. It wasn’t long before skip and his woman got more and more aggressive and others joined in. It became nothing less than a mob mentality.

Even my sister decided to join in. She used my real name and told ‘me’ to go and take my medicine. Then the ‘captain’ went even further. They created a pastebin page, something i had never even heard of until yesterday, and posted the usernames of many of those who had bullied me in the past. They titled it ‘people who have visited and posted on peadophile pages’ or something similar.

The sky fell in. People in twitter i have never met started making comments again about my mental state and saying i should be sued. One of the Sir Olly C said that if he met me again he would ‘punch my teeth through my face’ – i was/am petrified of these people.

My protestations that i was not responsible for the page and the accounts fell on deaf ears. Now people that i have come to count on as friends are doubting me and think that i am guilty. I am in pieces.

Twitter is my lifeline. I have no friends apart from Chris who often runs here at all hours of the day and night and keeps me on an even keel. Julie, Carole, Jugglypuff, Matt, Neil, Gildas, all true and honest friends who have kept me afloat these past few months while life has been bad. Now life is ten times worse. I have no means to talk to my friends when things go wrong. No people to tell me it will be alright when i cant see a way out of the darkness. I cannot bear to think that somewhere these people are sat at home thinking that i have lied to them and hoodwinked them. I have not. BUt what are they supposed to believe in the face of such overwhelming barrages against me? I know if the show were on the other foot i too would be suspicious.

Whoever has done this to me wants my destruction and nothing more. I, for my part, want a quiet life. I do NOT want this drama. I want to talk rubbish on twitter and post pictures of my silly dog and my dinner. I want to share my photographs. I want to talk about football. I want to sit here and read books about dead kings and queens and go out and take photographs. I don’t want to be hounded and bullied and scared every single day by faceless people on the internet who have nothing better to do and hate me with a passion.

Do i feel sorry for myself at this moment? Yes. I feel like shit. I feel like I am to blame for this because i got upset by them. I feel like I am worthless and a piece of shit on the heel of humanity that needs to be exterminated. Is that being dramatic? No its being honest. Right now I would be happy if someone shot me through the head and ended it. Fact. Do i want to feel like this? No i do not.

If any of those that have done this to me read this, i hope you are happy. You HAVE destroyed me. I have nothing. I have no job, no friends, no money and no life. I exist and that is all. I just wanted to talk to my friends and yet you wanted to take that away from me. You won.

All I can say is this. I did not set up fake accounts to troll people. I did not make up websites to brand people peadophiles. Anyone who knows me would know that i find that beyond contempt.

But i don expect you to believe me. It seems no one does and that, I am told is my own fault. As i said. You have won. I sit here alone and thats how it will be. Alone. I hope you are pleased with your efforts. You bullied an innocent person into enforced solitude.

When I lost my job just over 5 months ago I wasn’t sure that life could get any worse. I couldn’t have been more wrong if I had tried. 1400 job applications, 9 interviews and no offers later I have been reduced to a state of absolutely poverty, something I never anticipated.

Living on benefits is bad enough. How anyone expects you to survive on £71 a weeks is beyond me but, and I say this with respect, at least if you have kids or are married you get a little bit more help or have someone to depend on when it gets too much to bear. I have no one. I’m single and live alone and in the eyes of the sate that puts me at the bottom of the social pile in terms of help and respect.

May last job paid me £35k a year. When I lost it, with only a weeks notice, I was left in total financial meltdown. It’s gotten steadily worse and I can’t stop it. The inevitable path is that I will be bankrupted for the second time in my life before Xmas. Not something I trout would happen again.

What doesn’t help is large corporate companies who don’t care about your situation. They are all too happy to take the money when you works but if you lose your job, they lose interest and lean on you hard. In my case it has been British Gas.

Wen I l moved into this flat three years ago I was stunned that British Gas decided my bills were nearly double what I was paying for a one bedroom flat. I challenged them on it to be told that they had estimated my bill for the first year and that it had been too low! They then out my bills up even higher for the following year. Halfway through they started to demand even more money and I again queried this. They used the same argument that they had been estimating my bills and I had again not paid enough so my bill would have to increase. I had no choice but to turn the central heating off as it was too expensive. I was ow paying over £140 gas and electricity for a one bedroom flat compared to £80 for a one bedroom house.

It got worse after I lost my job. Once again British Gas decided I wasn’t paying enough and they wanted to raise my direct debit again. I was stunned and demanded that they come and read the meter as I couldn’t believe I was paying so much. They read the meter last weekend. Guess what? They now say I have used more than they estimated and my bill has now risen to £104 for electricity and £242 for Gas. I have no way of paying it and have explained this via lengthy DMs on twitter. Their answer? “We will it in a ore payment meter.” They don’t understand that if they do this, with no money coming and my overdraft fast running out and incurring charges, I have no money to it into the meter. This leaves me with no power. No heating, no ability to cook, wash or do anything we all take for granted. I can’t even turn my computer on to search for work. I am held to ransom by a global corporate company who does not care that I am sick and unemployed. They kick you when your down and try and finish you off. Could I switch providers? No for two reasons. The first I that as I owe money I can’t move. The second is that I have ow been told by 4 other suppliers that they do provide services where I live. This means British Gas have a monopoly here and I a stuck with them.

Tonight I have walked around the house and unplugged every single electrical device in the house. I have switched off the cooker and turned the as off. The boiler (a new combi boiler my landlord had installed which is now more expensive than the 30 year old system I used to have) is also switched off at the source. Now I walk around my house with a candle lantern I bought at a boat show five years ago. It is my only source of light as I write this.

This is not some Victorian horror story or overreaction on my part. It is how I am now forced to live. I wrap myself in blankets knowing that winter hasn’t even gotten started yet and this is mild compared to what’s coming. I know that my job hunt is going to be harder without my computer and I can’t afford petrol to get to Guildford to attend the work programme I am forced to go despite them admitting they can’t help me as I am too highly skilled.

I no longer want to be a burden on friends who have bought me food and other things to keep me going. It’s not how any civilised human being should be forced to live. I am independent person just trying to get by it every time intake a step forward I get knocked back by six. It is debilitating the effort to even get out of beds getting harder every day. I really don’t know how much longer I can go on.

The awful truth is that when you lose your job like this, the world carries on without you. People live their lives and go on. People you once talked to no longer call or visit, they pretend it isn’t happening because they can’t deal with how sad you are all the time and how nothing good is happening in your life. The prefer their nirvana and their happiness and don’t want to admit that there are people like me living a life that would be more suited to Victorian times than 2012.

I love history. I never wanted to live like my ancestors tho. I certainly never wanted to suffer like this so utterly alone and miserable. It’s not what I wanted or worked for.

I spent a nice day away from the unemployment blues (which are firmly back again now sadly) taking photos in the lovely surrey countryside yesterday. On the way back we cam across this lovely church on a private estate that was open to the public. It’s not often that you get a whole church to yourself with no one around but this was one of those times. We were able to take pictures inside without any distractions or other people about and it really was a wonderful place. Continue reading →