23 | January | 2012 | Two Rooms Plus Utilities

I can’t get myself moving today, not physically but mentally. My mind just want to coast not take in or even bother to process the simplest of things. My TV is on and I have been trying to play one of the games on my PC, but this numb fuzzy feeling is filling every spare cell. I’m feeling unbelievably lazy. No desire to move an empty coffee mug or even fill it up again, just a relaxed nothing. I suppose this is one of the few luxurious that unemployment allows you. There is no pressure other than to read through the job adds and apply for some. So far this month I have applied for 21 and had 11 refusals, at least this month they are actually telling me I haven’t got the job. I couldn’t believe that in December only 3 refusals for the 30 applications. So OK, I like no one else likes to get refusals, but I do like everyone else, like to know that I actually exist.

I have to get active, being forced into doing nothing is something that I never thought anyone would manage to make me do. This isn’t me. I’m not a lazy person. I’m not someone you find lying on the settee to watch TV, I’m the one who sits up on the edge trying to keep my back straight. I was the person who ran round the house before going to work making sure there were no dishes in the sink, ashtrays were empty and ‘Home and Gardens’ could have done a photo shoot at any second. Why, I’m not sure, may-be because that was how my home was as a child. But there was and is just me, not my mother and the 3 ladies who came round to the house twice each week to help her. Adam does what he feels needs done and he will never be the houseproud person I was and still at heart am. I’ve learned to live with spots of dust and things in the wrong place, but I’ve never been as bad as this. I’m kidding myself saying that it’s just today, it happens more and more these days and I don’t like it, I don’t want to like it.

How do you find the focus that working gives you, when there is no work? It’s not just the having a wage, it’s having structure with a purpose, centered activities and the planning of everything else round it. All I can center on now seems to be the 12 hrs of sleep my body demands. That leaves 12 more that are filling themselves with drifting and I’m scared by the vision in front of me of the day when even my PC vanishes and all I’ll see is the TV. I’ve seen it in others and now I can glimpse it in me. When I drift it masks the pain, as drifting needs no motion or effort, but it a strategy that doesn’t appeal.

There are those days when you feel that everything is designed to not go quite the way you want? I don’t think that I ask a lot out of life. My home, my husband, my children, a job and may be a few good days of health every now and then.

Last summer I thought that I had everything I wanted and I was happy accepting each day as it came. Then I was hit by redundancy. If I had been fit enough to get out there and hit the agencies and businesses I know that I would have been working again by Christmas. Here I am 5 months on sitting at my PC as always, but writing this, applying for jobs and playing games, not working. If I was lucky enough to have bank full of money then, I could I suppose get used to this, but I don’t, and I don’t want to!

To add to everything I found out a few days ago that I probably had a case against my last employers to take them to tribunal. It was so tempting! The thought that I might get a few year wages really appealed. It would have been enough to pay off the rest of our mortgage and have a little left over. I had spoken to someone I used to work with and they confirmed several things that confirmed my suspicions and 2 Lawyers told me to go ahead with it. I thought about it all yesterday, even filling in the form to start the ball rolling. When I woke this morning I was really close to stopping it there. I was looking for something to push me further in that direction or make me push the send button on the form.

It is hard enough trying to get a job without another negative point against me, luckily I got the shove I needed. Teressa, my daughter, had emailed me questioning if it was the right thing to do. She will be pleased to know that I agree! No employer want someone who has taken a firm to tribunal. So right or wrong my lawyer contact has ended. Even when you know you are in the right it somehow is still wrong? I love life!

That sorted I set out on my normal search for work, I really am getting fed up hearing how great my CV is but still no job. It is always the same, sorry but this job isn’t possible from home. I wouldn’t be applying if I really thought it wasn’t possible. I can prove that I can do it, just let me show you! I think this really is the cruelest part of MS, not the pain, not the fatigue, not the mobility problems or the isolation it has enforced on me, it’s no one having an open mind to see what I have already done and what I can do in the future.

I started this post 4 days ago but I really haven’t been feeling that great and I just didn’t have the energy to return to it. I think the effects of my Dad dieing, the job situation have taken its toll on me, my MS kicked back hard. I try not to tell people about how I feel, so many o them take the slightest comment as an excuse to try and wrap me in cotton wool. I like you, need to live. I like you, get kicked from time to time. I like you, have the right to feel ill without it being something hugely wrong. I unlike you have MS, so what, I’m still able like you to do a lot of things.