Writing is hard.
Partly because my fibromyalgia steals the physical energy to type and makes typing physically painful. Partly because the tiredness makes my brain struggle to form sentences and paragraphs.
Mainly though?
The problem is that I’m afraid of my laptop.
I associate my laptop and typing with the DWP.
It’s not even the same laptop.
It’s over a year since I’ve had to type up answers to an invasive disability benefits form.
But the association between typing, laptops and the terror and humiliation of dealing with the DWP is still there, It’s still strong.
And it keeps me away from writing.
I’m a writer and I need to be able to get past this fear – my fanfiction, original fiction, poetry and blog posts won’t write themselves. And they can’t be written on my phone – I’ve already had problems with repetitive strain injuries in my thumbs from tweeting.
And I can’t write by hand – fibromyalgia has made that all but impossible.
I don’t really have a clear conclusion or purpose to this post. I’m just upset because I can see how and why I’ve developed a panic response to using my laptop and it’s just so unfair.
Like so many others, I have a fear now of brown envelopes, of phone calls, of Job Centres… I hyperventilate if I hear the music the DWP uses as hold music on their phone line and I’ve just sat never to people calling them for me, I’ve never called them myself.
Yes this is all because I’m mentally ill and traumatised and was before the DWP became part of my life – but it’s also because they are actively hostile, abusive, callous, gaslighting and traumatising. They ruin people’s lives and health and they don’t care because they just want to deny people the money they need to live.
And that’s why I’m struggling to write. The DWP made me afraid of typing.
yetanotherlefty 