waiting for that joyous time...waiting...waiting..

hello everyone,
i feel tired and over burdened with life.

Time now throughout the world seems pressured against the lowliest, the vulnerable and disabled.

time now throughout the world are dreadful wars, beheading, rape and carnage - we just never learn and seem not able to.

time now throughout the world we are actually destroying what we have to live on, eat, breathe and water we drink.

and personally i am tired.
Yes, i know i am elderly now.
there should be this time for the relaxation of cares, the pleasures of reward, for the effort i put into the existence i had.
i taught children, i taught disabled in day centres, i empowered the elderly in the nursing homes and i also brought creative practise to all these groups and more.
I did voluntary work since the age of 18yrs with the elderly, taking them out and going to visit them in some of the worst conditions i have ever seen a human being be expected to end their days.
row upon row of the elderly, a small bedside locker and that holy picture, bottle of holy water and the rosary beads.  In a dark and dank backwater of a backward Irish old hospital they lay waiting, waiting and waiting to die.
we took them out once or twice a year otherwise they never got out.
they lay there, waiting.  and no one cared for them ever.

i showed my talent too and richly rewarded in that small way for a small artist in a tiny country.

i used skills which were honed at a time Ireland was broke and unable to provide me with much.

nonetheless i used the skills i had and i effected change in some peoples lives.

i feel tired now.
i feel i am waiting that wait to die like my poor little ladies i went to see and chat to, trying to cheer them up when their family had abandoned them.
i too have been abandoned, by my family.
they rarely care and i feel the gestures towards me are all but tokenism and a visit a curiosity to see what is happening.
i am quickly forgotten and not much helped.
they move on and i wait around.

my company is the HSE, that dreaded form of the backward hospital in the backward ward.
the dreaded brutal HSE who has taken away the last decade of my life.
meeting the chief disability officer shortly i will have no compunction in telling her this.
ten years, neglect, bullying, torture at the hands of the HSE.

An Taoiseach now is aware of myself and my twin as we struggle in the time of austerity - THEY have put us in this situation.
its not being helped.
if i ring the office of An Taoiseach i hear 'i understand,'  'i understand.'
a retort to the civil servant who isn't unkind but still he sitting there being told to dish out a platitude or something, 'DO YOU UNDERSTAND?"
you feel like breaking his head in two.

its hard to find another to understand but yes, some do and some know the fight i have had and have stayed with me and gone my journey.
there is one who betrayed my trust and confidentiality last week, and i will never forgive her and have told her so.

we have a professional service that is anything but that.
they couldn't, if they tried be professional.
i talk of the university graduates of Occupational Therapists, Physiotherapists, and Psychologists.

"she doesn't have Asperger"  Ann walks and wonders will she find the peace she knows she deserves, she walks with a tiny thing, her loyal friend, ana

"She doesn't have Asperger" snorted the double barrelled psychologist who has met me once!  for half an hour or less and that only to get some services during a team meeting.
wait til i show the disability manager a thing or two.
the denial of who i am by all and sundry.
the utter denial of the struggle of sickness and disability.
let it not go unsaid that my faith too has been sorely tested with the medical consultants both in Ireland and the UK.
they too get a fat wage but don't communicate with their patients and things just go on and if they happen they happen but god help the hapless patient who is ....waiting and waiting...

i loll around waiting and during my waiting i dream of the time that i find joy again in living, for the last blast and not be that trapped individual in the claws of the HSE who deny me even freedom of movement as i haven't even got a wheelchair, so i lie in my home and google all manner of things.

the day i decided to accept that awful social housing unit amongst alcoholics and children who shoot at you.  i was so ill i couldn't even eat the meal the person who gave it to me afterwards and who took this image at the bottom of his garden.  i was losing weight from sickness and no one really cared that much.

moving home to where i belong, to savour my town and land away from this god forsaken village of bitchy people and a group that is so self satisfied that newcomers are gone through with a knife.
If you talk about disability, they slit you in half.
if you organise an art class, they crucify you on the facebook forums.
you cannot win in this hell little shit town.
you are not one of theirs, but maybe that's a good thing.
maybe i should not be.

my lovely twin during her cancer treatment at St. Luke's, a time she found people who really did care, a time she found some joy because she had that connection.  i love her.  lets hope we can work it all out to be together and support each other through thick and thin.

i await the small home with my twin sister if she can bear me or we can work through our differences.
the comfort of my twin for she can give that.

then too when all is too much i will go to the shed at the end of the garden and pretend there is nothing between me and the stars and the silence.
that feeling of a fairy under a mushroom and forget.
noise, people, people and more bloody people.
the destroyers of a persons psyche and mind.
the destroyers of the least able but actually the strongest for you have to be that to do this, go through this and come out the other side.

i will not let greystones, Ireland, the HSE nor the consultants break me.
i shall find a time of joy and i know i will die trying for it.
if not found let it be known that no one could say i never tried, or was lazy in the effort to find that peace.
god be with me then for i shall go and lets hope i go well and not so frightened of it all.

People in my life have a lot to answer for.
sexual abuse by a catholic priest.
severe /profound deafness not detected or helped through school.
mental health system from hell until i saw sense.
hospitals where consultants abuse power and are just awful.
but they wouldn't be if my bank account was strong.
no, for i saw the whiskey bottles walking from their clinics touching Christmas.

i say to people.
can you be nice?
if so will you do it now?
can you help?
if you do will you help now?
can you be half decent to me?
if so can you start and never stop being decent?

or is that too much to ask of a human in my life.
i think it could be.
so be it humans.

this is the fight, the big fight, the day that Cllr. Pat Kavanagh who stabs my twin managed to slip a letter to An Taoiseach, we were banned from the complex, she was let in.  I pray her stealth will be our wealth.  the Cuts kill us so.