Giving up

When my friend and I met at a café near my work, in January, neither of us could remember the last time we’d seen one another.  That wasn't just because we were, let's be honest, having trouble remembering.  

It was the best part of three decades since we'd been at school together.  She lives in the UK now, and was back with her husband and kids for a holiday, to see family.  In the same intervening years I'd made it not so far north, only from Southland to Upper Hutt.  But we'd watched with pleasure, on social media, the unfurling of each other's lives, as old friends of a certain era do.  

Things changed for us last year - for her in March, me in April - when the double lines appeared, even though neither of us really got sick at the time.  We couldn't figure it.  It seemed impossible to understand what happened next.

I was the well one that day in the café. 

In November last year, after months of stasis, of an ebb that slowly and painfully eroded my mental health - a thing I have not been able to talk about, even as I know I probably should - I realised things were getting better. Here’s how I knew. I was working from home like I mostly had for half a year or more, and this day I had to do a trivial task: put a list of things in alphabetical order.

I did it quickly, and I got it right first time. First bloody time. I remember how I sat bolt upright as I looked at the screen, everything in its place, and a goofy smile broke out over my face. That was the moment I realised both how sick I’ve been, and how abandoned I’ve felt as the world has moved on without me.  

I had hung on from April last year until that day in the café by my fingernails, kept afloat by the support of my mahi, the practical kindness of my friends.  I had done what I needed to, to get by; but once I had done it, each day, there was nothing left of me.  There were only dishes in the sink, messages not answered, dirty windows and dust you could smear with a fingertip; the overwhelming giving way to the exhausting, and to a sense of shame.

It was March last year, just before I got sick, when I wrote about the government’s proposal for a New Zealand Income Insurance Scheme. In itself, that’s kind of funny and ironic, at least from my point of view right now. I had stamina and energy and an insouciant batshit humour: I described in detail this policy about caring for people when, through no fault of their own, they lose their jobs.

I poured all that I had into giving a shit about this specific nerdy issue. I wrote how, if the government sees this through, it’ll be a gamechanger for equality, for Aotearoa’s welfare state. I read a 178-page document to make my case. I did that stuff back then.

I was the well one that day in the café.

I felt the pleasure of it, and the guilt. My friend was still, all those months later, as sick as I’d been at my worst. She had a generosity of spirit: felt grateful that, out of her friends in the UK who have it, she was in the best state. I could tell when she talked, her lungs were in the tight angry fists of its grip: something I feel when I’m tired, or I’m stressed, or my faint attempts at exercise go too far.

For all of that, in the months before we met, she had always looked out for me. Although the sicker of the two of us, she always sensed when I was struggling. She messaged me, from the northern hemisphere to the southern. Always the practical Invercargill woman, she gave me a metaphorical boot up the bum. She never gave up on me.

The PM talks about bread-and-butter issues. He says the government has tried to do too much. Now it must cut back: things must be given up. Amongst those things could be the New Zealand Income Insurance Scheme. And I get it. There is a chasm between the ideal, what you thought you were capable of when things were going well, and the real, what life obstinately serves up.

When I wrote about the New Zealand Income Insurance Scheme, it was for a mix of reasons. I wrote with my brain, trained in the policy profession, and its dispassionate sense of inequity that we treat the sick and disabled so differently from the injured. I wrote from my heart, still afraid of being laid off, of all the vagaries of an impersonal economy, of the things I went through in a life before the one I live now.

Things must be given up. But in these months - from between the time I wrote about the New Zealand Income Insurance Scheme and now - well, so much has changed, for me and many of us. I was the well one that day in the café. I rose to my feet to buy the coffees, to fetch my friend a glass of water. I did it because I wanted to, but like we both knew, simply wanting to do a thing is not enough, not when you’re sick.

She’d had to give up her job, while I’d held on to mine. She didn’t say it devastated her: she didn’t need to. I looked down at my long black, and she at her flat white. It was a roll of the dice in some bullshit game we never asked to play. I’d lost, although I felt my fortunes might be about to turn. She’d lost worse, so much worse.

There’s an army of us. You don’t hear much from us - some days it takes everything we’ve got to dry ourselves after the shower. But we’re here: your parent, your sibling, your colleague or friend. We stumble, upright ourselves, try to stay on our feet. Many of us stand on the precipice of losing our jobs, our incomes, our everything. Others have fallen into that void. Without a scheme that cares for people who can’t work, whatever the reason, many more will join them.

In this bread-and-butter world, things must be given up. But I urge you, don’t give up on us.

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