If They Lived Like Us

[Content Warning: Medical abuse and negligence, benefits assessments, suicide, disability discrimination]

For those who have slept in corridor beds.

For those who have screamed into the NHS waiting list abyss.

For those who have torn themselves apart for their benefit reviews.

For those who were promised care and handed cruelty.

For those whose lives are considered a burden.

For those who died without ever receiving a kind word.

For those who survived, but at the cost of their body, their dignity, their dreams.

For those who were punished for needing help.

For those who learned to say “I’m fine” just to be left alone.

For those whose stories never made it past the triage desk.

For those who disappeared quietly.

For those still here, afraid.

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If They Lived Like Us

An imagining: if those who built our suffering were forced to live inside it

Let them wake up tomorrow unable to move.

Not gently, not temporarily,

but suddenly, utterly,

limbs heavy with pain,

organs flickering,

memory full of smoke.

Let them lie there in the same pyjamas for three weeks,

no food, no answer,

because the carers didn’t come

and the call centre closed early

and the GP can’t help

and the council lost the referral

and the social worker changed jobs

and the funding panel said no

and the access team doesn’t cover Tuesdays.

Let them dial a number 43 times in one morning.

Let them cry when the line finally connects,

only to be told:

“You need to try harder to meet your obligations.”

Let them sit in their own urine while a letter arrives 

telling them their needs are “inconsistent with descriptors.”

Let them try to prove it.

Let them stand in a grey room,

fluorescent lights buzzing like flies around a corpse, and be asked:

“Why haven’t you killed yourself yet?”

Let them roll up their sleeves to show their 

scars to a stranger holding a measuring tape. 

Let them describe their rape, their psychosis,

their incontinence,

their hunger, 

their pain,

in bullet points and boxes.

Let them be told to pick up a pound coin 

and undo a button.

Let them be forced to crawl across the floor.

Let them be asked if they can “make a simple meal” 

as if microwaving pasta is a proxy for having a life worth living.

Let them open their medical records like a confession booth,

laying bare every therapy note,

every test,

every physical exam,

every psychiatric report,

every failed attempt at being okay.

Let them feel the fingers of the state

reaching into their body,

gripping their memories,

probing their most sacred wounds,

and calling it an assessment.

Let them trade their dignity

for a few hundred pounds a month

and the chance not to be evicted.

Let them learn that pain must be performed,

that trauma must be legible,

that privacy is a luxury, 

survival a subscription service.

That they must undress their soul 

to prove they are suffering enough to deserve to live.

That every private thing must be displayed, 

dissected, 

held up against a spreadsheet,

while they try not to shatter in full view.

Let them leave that room

feeling filleted,

then be told to wait twelve weeks

for a decision

that might never come.

Let them be referred to CBT to “reprogramme” their brain, 

wired by a childhood of unrecognised abuse 

which no service will allow them to speak.

Let them wait 16 months to be told:

“You’re too complex for this service.”

Let them be sectioned for trying to die

and discharged that same day 

for making too much eye contact.

Let them watch every person they love 

collapse under the weight of their care.

Let them lie awake at night, 

simmering in guilt and shame, 

wondering which of their loved ones 

will break first.

Let them be a carer and still be broken.

Let them hold someone else’s grief 

while their own bones scream.

Let them try to speak their needs and be told,

“But you’re the capable one.”

Let them ache with guilt for not being 

able to give their loved one enough,

and ache with resentment that their 

loved one cannot give back either.

Let them drag themselves back from 

the edge, alone, to be told: 

“Clearly you never needed help”

Let them be handed a pain scale 

and a clipboard 

instead of a blanket.

Let them count their dead friends on both hands,

running out of fingers,

before they run out of grief.

Let them learn to speak in anniversaries,

in memorials,

in inquest findings,

in the language of absence.

Let them carry names like open wounds,

fresh every year.

Let them be brave

and be punished for it.

Let them lose everything -

income, mobility, home, dignity, trust, humanity, 

and be told:

“You don't look disabled to me.”

Let them sit across from someone in a lanyard, 

the smell of hand gel and printer ink thick in the air.

Let them plead, with trembling voice 

and the last of their energy…

“I am not okay.”

“I can’t keep going.”

“Please help me.”

Let them beg for their life.

And let the professional nod.

Let them nod.

Let them say, “We understand.”

And then let them deny it anyway.

Let them watch the cold calculation in the eyes of someone 

who knows what they are withholding - 

who knows exactly what the consequences will be - 

but chooses, calmly, bureaucratically, 

to let the damage unfold. 

Perhaps even with a smirk, 

a tiny glint of pleasure at their pain.

Let them feel the floor drop.

Let them know that their pain was seen, 

weighed, and dismissed.

Let them learn that their death is cheaper than 

their care.

That their life never had worth.

Let them carry that moment forever:

the cruelty of refusal,

the calculation of their cost,

the way compassion is drained out of policy 

until nothing human remains.

Let them rot.

Not metaphorically.

Let them lie in the same clothes for months,

stained with sweat, blood, and despair,

because the water is too far,

the pain too loud,

the exhaustion all consuming.

Let their skin break open.

Let the sores bloom on their thighs,

their hips, their back,

and still no one come.

Let them go hungry.

Not fasting, not detoxing -

starving.

Let them open the fridge to air

and shut it again.

Let them eat dry cereal with their hands

until even that runs out.

Let them not step outside for a year.

Let the world forget their face.

Let the seasons pass through the window

like strangers.

Let only the walls hear their cries.

And then,

let them see themselves on the front page.

Let the paper say:

“FRAUDSTERS.”

“SCROUNGERS.”

“CHEATS.”

“THE REAL DRAIN ON THE ECONOMY.”

Let the public cheer along,

never knowing the taste of rot in their own mouths.

Let them scream into the void:

“You do not know me.”

And be answered with silence,

or worse, laughter.

Let them carry that shame

like a second skin,

stitched on by every politician,

every journalist,

every neighbour who turned away.

Let them learn that invisibility is not mercy.

It is death

by another name.

Let them know us, finally.

Let them wear our bodies like borrowed coats.

Let them beg the machine for mercy,

and get a leaflet in response.

And then,

maybe

they will build something gentler.

Not because they are kind,

but because they are afraid.

Afraid to ever live in the world they built for "people like us".

Wren