[Sunny Clouds]

I get my PIP (albeit only standard rate) for care.  But it's mostly mobility I need it for and such little as it is, spend it on.

However, I have been trying to rack my brains about who could help me with something and it for me just summed up the gap between needing and getting, based on reality.

I have paperwork to do and forms to fill.  I have an HMRC tax return to do that's driving me bonkers because it's dysfunctional.  For example, it keeps amending the postcode to a random one in another area.  It did that last year as well and all I can do is to type into the extra info box.

But I'm also doing my fruit over PIP and a couple of other things.  So what I'd really like, what would really help is someone to sit with me and listen as I rant and make soothing comments but not tacky platitudes.

Once a friend might have done it and I'd have given them a nice  Christmas present or something.  But most of the friends that would once have done it are now too demented or otherwise disabled or incapacitated to do it.  I can't for the life of me think who might do it.  If one of my friends had a teenage or student son/daughter who'd do it, I'd pay a respectable rate, bearing in mind it's not all the time.

It just sums up the gap between theory and reality.

Mind you, I've lost count of the number of non-disabled people I've told in the past in relation to both AA and DLA that in order to get them you need to need more help than they'll pay for.  It's one of the surreal aspects of them.

[Fiz]

I would so love someone with an understanding of mental health issues come and help me organise my bedroom. I have no idea where to find such a person so I totally get where you are coming from.

I get nothing for mobility in my PIP award despite the pain that walking causes me, what I really need for both my physical and mental health is to have the use of a car so that I could get to a shop, the post office or church and could also visit friends and family. Instead I'm housebound, intensely lonely and increasingly wondering if I have a life worth living.

[JLR2]

Where to start?  That's a bit of a question for me right now. What's been said about loneliness is so true I hadn't really realised quite the way I, for some or other daft reason, have ended up as I am when there are so many suffering because of various governments looking to, for political advantage, muck about with employment figures little heeding the real impact on the lives of those affected.

Through a series of unplanned and unconnected events I have managed, actually 'managed' isn't the right word as I've not been in control and therefore hardly managing anything, to be sitting here with my wee notebook typing away at 03.55hrs in my recently mortgaged hoose with my paid off car in the garden outside the window in front of me and my boarding tickets printed off for my flight to Berlin next month. It struck me as I was reading both the postings from yourself Fiz and Sunny that without the friend in Berlin I would, as you might have guessed, not be flying anywhere rather I would be sat here looking at an empty room waiting for the daylight to eventually reach the Highlands.

It was I now believe the effect of loneliness made real for me when I felt as I did when a friend with whom I used to play a few games of pool with died suddenly. Though hardly a close friend, apart from a couple of visits to my home in the years I knew the guy we only really met in the pub. What brought the effect that guy's too early passing from life home to me so hard was my having been so keen to show off the way I had set up a dart board with little spot lights fitted from the ceiling onto the board but it never came to be as I learnt of his death. It took this to happen to have me realise just how empty my life is.

I'm wandering all off track in what it is I'm trying to say, sorry. Because of the fears I have of folk deciding I look too healthy, in other words not writhing in agony just because I draw breath, deciding just because they see me able to drive my car or push a shopping trolley that I must be faking things I tend now to live alone. My family are in Glasgow and my friends are here on Ouch and my friends in Berlin apart from you the only others in my life are the political punters on the telly whom I regularly have a good argument with as I rant and rage at them, most recently Jo Coburn on the Daily Politics as she just would not shut her mouth long enough to let the woman whom she had asked a question of answer before interrupting with another question. I mean Jo Coburn would be a nightmare Atos assessor asking 20 questions in 30 seconds and expecting someone, anyone to be able to answer.

Take away my friend in Berlin and my access to my friends here on Ouch Too I doubt I'd last long as the nature of what life I'd be facing would become all too clear. Loneliness is a real health hazard, I think someone likened it to someone smoking 30 fags a day, I already smoked anyway so that's me had it then I guess.

I have recently been referred to a new group where I live by a clinical psychologist and I've call their number to tell them of my interest in the help they are hoping to provide in the service they are bring to where I live. At the moment they are just gathering the names of those interested in the service and once they have collected all the info they need they'll get back to me about dates of meetings and the like.

Time I brought the pot of coffee I started making before I hit the keyboards. Ta-ra the noo

[huhn]

i feel lonely, but nobody understands and says , that  I have  5 children, but that are children, so without internet where I am only talking with the walls and pots. the other thing is, its really  difficult to sort things out, I am on  my end,  every morning my  small ones, 13 and 18 leave a mine field, and after sorting half of it out I am dead exhausted and nobody  understands . it is impossible to get somebody to help and my nice psychologist moved to a new  job and his replacement did not give me a new appointment. ok, I stop with moaning. but where nice to have more help for people with problems and I feel  people get more and more isolated. a helping hand and a good word are sometimes more helpful then money.

[AndMac]

I have a team of two cleaners come in for an hour a week, but I really need someone soon to sit down with me,  and go through things that need to be physically sorted into 'sling or keep' with me. Clothes, books, CDs, paperwork, the contents of cupboards and drawers, storage boxes, etc.

 The snag being that this activity will lose me money in earnings, as I won't be able to pay full attention to my job if I am doing that.

I had someone lined up, but she isn't fully well, and after letting me down about five times in succession, she agreed to put things on ice. The money is sat here, waiting to pay someone.

A lot of the books, CDs etc, might raise a few bob at a car boot sale, so I did wonder if someone wanting to raise money for charity might want to go through things with me. 

[auntieCtheM]

Have you thought of going into your local charity shop and asking them if they are interested in helping you out?

[AndMac]

Thank you. Good idea.
That might be possible, as it stands, the shop I help most often would probably turn me down, out of hand, it's hard enough persuading their drivers to pick up the charity bags from my dining room, when they do a house collection.

 However, one of the smaller charity shops might help.
 I can think of one which would be kindly disposed to help.

My place isn't that cluttered, genuinely, but I could still get rid of stuff and doing so would make my life easier.

[Sunny Clouds]

It's of no help to you now, but one of the things I've been thinking of doing in the future is setting up a little business (not dependent on a steady income because I'd draw on an occupational pension and maybe still have PIP) sorting/organising/decluttering.

I want to mainly aim at small to medium businesses that need someone to go in and do something about their filing room etc. on a piecework contract basis (i.e. price per room sorted).  However, I'd also like to do it to people's homes.

My late mother was a hoarder.  You know the sort you see on telly?  I decluttered the family home.  When I moved in, I said to an old friend who came to help me sort out my study that I wished I'd taken before and after pictures because my mother had been a hoarder.  Her immediate response was "Your mother was a hoarder?!"  "I'm not like my mother!" "Well if you don't stop now, you will be!" 

I hadn't spotted that I'd gone further down the path of hoarding than I thought.  I then turned it upside down and used my 'hoarding' urge, which for me is 'have the full set' type urge into a 'fill the bin to the brim' urge.

I've done filing room and store room and type situations in the past, in both military and civvy contexts.  A bit more practice and I could turn it into a business at prices to suit needs.

But sadly, that's for the future.  My immediate practice, though, will be to try to declutter the  house of an old friend who's being overtaken by dementia and has lost the ability to sort stuff.  In the past she's let me blitz her paperwork, so I'm hoping she'll let me blitz her flat. 

[Sunny Clouds]

I'm just thinking how funny it is that for me, I've done amazing amounts of decluttering, which has required so much decision-making, yet right now, I'm frozen decision-wise, and simple bits of paperwork can leave me so terribly rabbit-in-headlights even though I have the technical competence to do it.  An aspect of mental things that doesn't get mentioned much in the media.

[KizzyKazaer]

De-cluttering is so satisfying - would be great if you could make it a professional interest, Sunny!  It took having a new kitchen installed (by my housing association) to kick my butt into some real serious sortage - and once I started, it kind of snowballed:  even the loft got a clear-out 

..yet right now, I'm frozen decision-wise, and simple bits of paperwork can leave me so terribly rabbit-in-headlights even though I have the technical competence to do it.

Do you mean paperwork that might come through the post for everyday things like insurance?  That sort of stuff leaves me feeling like you do and sometimes I will put mail aside until in the proper mood to open it!

On the original topic about wanting to use PIP on certain things that may not be available anyway - have often thought it would be nice to hire someone to take me places, to be a travelling companion to spend a morning or a day with, in another town or to the coast or something.  But where to get this perhaps fictional individual, who would also have to have a basic understanding of mental health issues... the CMHT couldn't come up with anything so haven't really explored it further.   

What I do use some of the extra money for are things I didn't even 'allow' myself while working full-time - like ready M & S meals and other tasty treats.  This is in line with what was on the claim form about not being motivated to cook, should I ever feel 'guilty' about it...

[Sunny Clouds]

Paperwork = probate.

[KizzyKazaer]

Ah, right.  Sounds like the kind of thing I'd happily shove under a chair cushion 'for a rainy day'