[55/365] PIP
Feb. 24th, 2022 08:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistIf they send you the PIP letters in large print, the decision itself ends up just below the fold. I fumbled it in my sudden frenzy, my future hanging in the balance until I could clumsily unfold the pieces of paper and read the crucial bit.
I'll get PIP for another three years. I don't have to appeal at all. Considering that mere days ago there were newspaper stories about how many people have been wrongly denied PIP (78,390 of 182,880 have been reversed in the past year), I keep going through loops of being relieved, then angry that this has to come as a relief, that chagrined that I am angry instead of grateful because so many disabled people aren't as lucky as me, then angry that I get to expect nothing and that my instinct is to compare myself to other disabled people instead of to the world we should all be living in where no one has to fight for scraps like this.
It's been known among my fellow crips for years, definitely since before the last time I did this which I guess was 2015, that having to appeal was just part of the process, something as inevitable and expected as the form and assessment that came before the decision.
Finding out how long my PIP has been awarded for was the next worry and I found it buried on a later page. And I never did see anything telling me whether I got standard or enhanced rate for either - - or whether these categories even exist; I assume they still do and the DWP just benefits from people not knowing this -- I was quickly presented with a breakdown of the points I got and I immediately recognized that it was juuust enough to give me the standard rate. Eight "points," parceled out two at a time, means there are plenty of categories where I've been told "you can do $thing unaided" when I blatantly can't and I distinctly remember telling the person so and providing examples.
They've changed the questions -- now it's more about tasks and aids than about impairment itself -- so there's no direct repeat of my oft-anecdoted ESA decision from 2009: "you have no difficulty seeing," there's nothing that's quite as devastating as that. Reading through the repetitions of "you can do $thing unaided" did still feel poisonous. "Don't read the comments," I told myself and for all it superficially seems like a non sequitur, they feel the same underneath: no good can come of this, you'll only upset and frustrate yourself and there's nothing you can do, you cannot change these people.
I'll get PIP for another three years. I don't have to appeal at all. Considering that mere days ago there were newspaper stories about how many people have been wrongly denied PIP (78,390 of 182,880 have been reversed in the past year), I keep going through loops of being relieved, then angry that this has to come as a relief, that chagrined that I am angry instead of grateful because so many disabled people aren't as lucky as me, then angry that I get to expect nothing and that my instinct is to compare myself to other disabled people instead of to the world we should all be living in where no one has to fight for scraps like this.
It's been known among my fellow crips for years, definitely since before the last time I did this which I guess was 2015, that having to appeal was just part of the process, something as inevitable and expected as the form and assessment that came before the decision.
Finding out how long my PIP has been awarded for was the next worry and I found it buried on a later page. And I never did see anything telling me whether I got standard or enhanced rate for either - - or whether these categories even exist; I assume they still do and the DWP just benefits from people not knowing this -- I was quickly presented with a breakdown of the points I got and I immediately recognized that it was juuust enough to give me the standard rate. Eight "points," parceled out two at a time, means there are plenty of categories where I've been told "you can do $thing unaided" when I blatantly can't and I distinctly remember telling the person so and providing examples.
They've changed the questions -- now it's more about tasks and aids than about impairment itself -- so there's no direct repeat of my oft-anecdoted ESA decision from 2009: "you have no difficulty seeing," there's nothing that's quite as devastating as that. Reading through the repetitions of "you can do $thing unaided" did still feel poisonous. "Don't read the comments," I told myself and for all it superficially seems like a non sequitur, they feel the same underneath: no good can come of this, you'll only upset and frustrate yourself and there's nothing you can do, you cannot change these people.