Benefits Dilema
The benefits people are hunting me down again and I'm not quite sure what to do about it this time.
When I first got incapacity benefit a couple of years ago, I got letter informing me that I had to attend a meeting with my 'personal work advisor'. Not really being terribly well versed in the ways of the Department for work and pensions (DWP), I went...on my own...with no idea what I was getting myself into. Needless to say the whole thing proved pretty traumatic. The stupid cow of a woman who was 'interviewing' (read: interrogating) me kept pressing and pushing me to the point where I was in tears and so confused I was didn't know what was happening. To make matters worse she kept insisting that I should be seeing a specialist like her other CFS client who was 'getting back into work'. Towards the end of the hour long interview I was so exhausted and desperate to get away that I ended up agreeing to things that were far beyond my capabilities to do. I cried all the way home on the bus and then all afternoon. A couple of days later a later came through stating that I'd agreed to undertake job related training/courses and asking me to sign it. Mum went crazy and wrote a letter back telling my 'personal work advisor' that I could barely function doing day to day tasks let alone undertake job related training and that she was so angry at how I'd been pushed into all of this.
After that I never went to another one of these meetings, ringing everytime a letter came through and stating that I was too ill to attend, which was completely truthful. After a while they left me alone. Now that we've moved I've been getting regular letters through from my new 'personal work advisor' trying to get me to come in for an interview. I've rung her a couple of times and tried to explain the situation, ie. that I'm just not up to dealing with an interview. I doubt I could manage it, let alone without making my health suffer as a result, something I'm not prepared to do. Anyway the problem is that this 'personal work advisor' is proving very insistant. the other day I got another letter through telling me that if I don't go my benefit will be stopped, yadda, yadda. Yet this time it was accompanied by a generic letter saying that all the things that happened to me last time wont happen.
eg. "If you do come and talk to us about the possibility of working, your benefits will not be affected and you will not be forced to take any actions you do not feel ready for"
The part of me fed up with being hassled and worried that if I don't go I could lose my benefits, thinks maybe I should go for as long as I can stand and explain that I'm so far away from being ready to go back to work it's laughable (even though I wish it weren't). However the more DWP savvy part of me knows that this is most likely an attempt to get me off the governments incapacity benefit statistics. Plus I know for a fact if they sense they can push you, they will. I also know that ME/CFS is such a missunderstood illness that I will never be able to explain satisfactorily to them why what they are proposing is too far beyond me. In short I worried that going will allow them to grab hold of me with claws that wont let go, but by not going I may be digging an even bigger hole for myself in the form of losing benefits.
I think I will ring up yet AGAIN and explain one more time why I cannot go in and that it is pointless anyway, because unless they can restore my health to near fullness, nothing they can suggest will be of help/use. I am just so damn fed up of having to constantly get these people off my back. It must be the most thankless job.
Plus when I'm finally restored to health, the first thing I'm going to do is to take a gap year and travel. I need to get out there, see things, do things, grow up, experience everything that has been impossible these last four years.
Also just because this day is shaping up so well, I think a sick child in the flower shop may have given me a virus...great!! I think I shall go to bed...I'll leave ringing up the benefits people for another day.