Elucidating Questions

They don’t tell you how unfulfilling it is to live with chronic illness

They just diagnose you

They don’t tell you that none of the medications that could help are not covered provincially

They just prescribe you them

They don’t tell you PWD doesn’t cover enough to live independently

They just evaluate you and determine your eligibility

They don’t tell you you’ll spend the rest of your life seeing people online who think you’re worth less than they give you

They just do nothing to try to sway public opinion in your favour

They don’t tell you you’ll feel like a burden and other people will reinforce it

They just do the tests to see if you are one

Medication is supposed to help but instead it blows holes in your wallet

PWD is supposed to help but instead it pays thousands below the poverty line

Diagnosis was supposed to help but in a world that diagnoses you and then feeds you to the wolves

What help is it to know what’s wrong with you?

A thousand reasons why this life isn’t fair and not one solution to make it fair

It’s like we internalised the cruelty of nature and felt the need to magnify it

The times I’ve walked past restaurants with enticing smells with less than a dollar in my bank and hunger pangs adding to the cruelty of food I would never eat

Wondering what it’s like to sit in a world full of houses but none of them are for you

Blessed to have a home that may actually be steady for the first time in 15 years

No one told me it would be the home I came from in the first place because I wouldn’t be able to afford rent elsewhere

Aware there’s a certain sick luck in it being there

I just wanted life to be worth living

I wouldn’t be able to answer if you asked me if it is

Some moments I feel like it is

Others I feel dragged down into the moment that is my life after life without chronic illness

There’s no telling what I could do if I hadn’t been stopped in my tracks

Now I’m sponging off the government

It’s really hard to see other disabled creators have the worst things said to them

Because I know people think that about me too

I wish I wasn’t so pressured by other people’s opinions

I wish life was more kind to people

I wish my efforts before I became this way had culminated in me being able to support myself

I wish the fact that I worked myself into this condition counted for something

That I gave so much of myself to my jobs that I now have nothing left to give

But it doesn’t

And no one told me that would be the case