Bureacracy

As I'm sure I've said before, I can't cope with the benefits system. This maze of red tape is beyond my cognitive abilities. I know, I know, I'm writing right now, surely that requires fairly good cognitive abilities? But you don't see how long it takes me to craft coherent sentences; you don't see how many breaks I have to take; you don't see me fumbling for words and leaving them blank to come back to them later; you don't see me staring into space, not lost in thought but just...lost, unable to fully form thoughts in my head, let alone translate them to the page; you don't see me breaking down and bursting into tears, overwhelmed and defeated. You don't see all the times I try, fail, and give up.

...You do see me rambling and getting pretty far off the point. I can't handle bureacracy. I can't do formal writing, I stumble over the words and then worry that it's not good enough or polite enough or what-have-you. This probably isn't helped by the times when I try to write formally and people look over my shoulder and tell me I'm doing it wrong. I can't talk properly face-to-face or over the telephone either, assuming I can get over my anxiety enough to try in the first place. I stumble, I forget things, I get things wrong, I rush my speech and forgo politeness in an effort to get it over with as soon as possible. I blank on the answers to the simplest of questions (just try asking me my name when I'm nervous). I have trouble distinguishing sounds, so if there's any background noise it runs together with what people are saying into one big mess of sound that makes no sense, so I can't work out what people are saying and then get embarrassed asking them to repeat themselves five times in a row. I'm not assertive in any way, shape or form; bureaucrats offer up nonsensical and contradictory words in a tone that suggests there's no arguing with them and that they are always right...and so I don't argue, and I take them at their word. And later when I regain my senses and my cognitive abilities I realise I've been played for a fool again.

I get overwhelmed by it all, and I give up. And I avoid it and forget about it and kind of just hope everything will sort itself out. That's pretty stupid and naive of me, but unfortunately not that uncommon. Chronically sick people and the mentally ill are just not equipped to deal with this system, and it's those people who most need to fight with it.