Hiya, I've decided that it's time to restart posting on my blog. Had to stop mid 2011 due to worsening mental health and I was worried that I'd post something that would trigger someone, so I stopped posting.

The last year or so has been hard one for me both mentally and physically. Really struggled with the seemingly endless reassessments for employment and support allowance and as each of my renewals ended up at beween 90 and 100 pages  of text and information, medical reports etc each, writing so many of them in a year really took it out of my body physically. Add to that my DLA renewal that was due around March and that was about 180 pages before the medical reports were added......

 Luckily I found out in September that my DLA renew went through ok and I found out at around the same time that I had been moved from the work group to the support group of esa. I was moved about 2 months after my last renewal went through and then I was still in the work group. I received a few hundred quid backdated money so that, added to the random timing makes me think there was an audit and I'd been in the wrong group since day one.....

But being told that I won't have to renew my esa till 2015 and my  dla will run till my application of that new PIP benefit scheduled also for the end of 2015, has made me mentally calm down a lot. Id continually been on edge waiting for my next esa50 form to drop through the door as I was getting them every 4-6months since 2009..... And writing a book 3 times a year is a very hard and quite frankly a terrifying prospect, especially as you have only a month to do it and you couldn't really write answers in advance as the questions subtly change, presumably to catch out those who prepare in advance.

Being constantly on edge and feeling like i was constantly being examined made my mental health nose dive so much that i lost my battle with the self harming and had thoughts of just ending it all as i was really struggling but luckily my move to the support group came at the last minute and stopped all that. Still have relatively mild desires to self harm but ive got it under much better control now, bar the odd episode or 2 when I'm triggered.

So im able to post and deal with life again without finding it so much of a struggle. I've also got most of my confidence back so im able to defend myself when bullied and used like a doormat by people, although the only way ive been taken seriously in some situations is to swear and curse with a very assertive tone. Being a small girl in a wheelchair and looking very young for my age (and also looking surprisingly innocent and naive.... Which im really not! :-D ) doesn't make it easy to be taken seriously by some men...... Particularly those older men who lived most of their life in a world where women were second to men and all visibly disabled people were institutionalised and basically imprisoned away from the public eye.

But that's not the world we live in now and i refuse to take any crap from those bullies and users anymore!!!!!

The feisty, independent, confident and stubbornly determined and defiant Fi is well on her way to being back! And once im back and firing on all cylinders im gonna do my damnedest to not let myself slip away so easily! :-D

Best stop now, its after 2am and ive got my little 3 hours a week job tomorrow so i need to try and sleep...... Which is gonna be hard cuz ive just remembered ive forgotten to take my meds. Crap! Was wondering why i was hurting so much! Ah well....... Lol!

As its been so long since i last posted I'll post a brief piece on my medical history and info about my main conditions in my next few posts :-) .

Off to bed i go! :-D

Night all,
Fi