My experience
When people talk about the cost-of-living crisis, you initially think about prices going up in shops, fuel bills rising, people struggling and having to give up a lot of things. And all that is true. But for me, because of my ongoing and chronic mental health issues, I’ve been deemed unfit to hold down a job for many years. So, I’ve had to learn to live frugally within a restricted budget and to eke things out. That’s just my normal. The biggest impact for me since the cost-of-living crisis began is that I feel more isolated now, because of how it's affected public services. Places like my local Leisure Centre that I used to go to for a bit of social interaction, have closed down now. So, since the cost-of-living crisis, I have become more reclusive. I’ve lost a feeling of connectedness with my community and even my street. It continues to have a huge impact on my mental health, and I feel a huge sense of despair. Sometimes I also don't want to leave the house because I don’t feel safe due to escalating levels of violence especially towards women. It’s not going away. It's escalating, and it's absolutely terrifying. So, when I hear on the news that crime figures have supposedly dropped, but that crimes towards women aren’t even included in these figures, I find it sickening. It makes me feel like women like me don’t matter. I might read pretty words in reports, but I don’t seem to ever see any changes. I also struggle every day to be treated with respect and to be understood, especially because you can’t see my disability. People always ask, “what do you do?” and because I don’t have a job, I often get ‘that look’. It’s very stigmatizing. I might not have a job, but I do try my best to live my life as well as I can, and I try to think of others and help them. However, organisations that are supposed to help me, often don’t, because they have inflexible systems and are not geared up to respond to women’s issues. For instance, I’ve only just recently been diagnosed with ADHD after being wrongly diagnosed for my whole life. Just about all the studies on ADHD have been done on men and boys so they don’t recognise it in women. We are labelled as problematic or hysterical. Similarly, there’s a reluctance to acknowledge that the root cause of my complex PTSD has been gender-based violence which just invalidates the level of violence that I’ve experienced throughout my life and still am continuing to experience. Trying to keep myself safe is a real worry when you hear about the cuts to the recruitment of police officers across the Country. You worry that if you do phone them if you have an issue, will they come out and will anything be done? And I'm always scared about getting pulled in by DWP, especially because they are saying they want half a million people up and down the country off disability benefits and into work. I'm living in fear constantly. What would help? I think that what would help people like me most with the cost-of-living crisis is building up the infrastructure in our communities. Because of the poor public transport, there's communities that are cut off from one another. Social venues are closing. Everything's on its knees. There’s very little to call a community spirit and people like me are losing hope, feeling isolated, scared, and vulnerable. Like there’s no safety net. Although private houses are being built, these are unaffordable for ordinary folk, and they are not building any community hub to bring people together. This kind of disconnection is dangerous. We also really need spaces for intersectional women from all backgrounds that we can go to feel safe, to support each other to feel like we have self-worth and dignity. Women only spaces are important, because in my experience of going to groups, it’s often hard to find a voice, and to feel safe in mixed spaces. Some men feel threatened and get angry when women speak out, or when they hear discussions around women holding power, having money and being seen in society as equal to men. This leaves women like me feeling intimidated and unsafe, and like we don’t want to go back there, even though we might really need the support on offer. Although the extra money that I’ve received for the cost-of-living crisis has helped, you can’t make everything better with money. For me what’s more important is a sense of having a place in society, having a place in my community, a feeling that I’m safe, I’m seen and that I matter. It’s more important to know that I will be treated with respect when going to the Health Centre, that I won’t have to fight for the recognition of the issues that I have, and that I won’t be seen as a mad, bad and dangerous person, just because I have struggles with my mental health. We're all human. We're all trying to get by. We all matter. And if we’re going to really help women and girls like us, we should come together and connect. Not just words, but in a way that makes real changes happen. Comments are closed.
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