Strip Lighting

There is a particular kind of humiliation reserved for people who have to prove they deserve to eat.

It lives under strip lighting. In buildings with plastic chairs and laminated signs and that smell. You know the one. Cheap cleaning products and anxiety and the faint, persistent undertone of people trying not to cry.

I sat in that chair and I cried anyway.

The woman across the desk was younger than me. She had a lanyard and a script and a look on her face that was trying very hard to be neutral. I don’t blame her. She was doing her job. But her job that day was asking me questions about my income while I sat there with mascara on my cheeks and a voice that kept cracking and a story I couldn’t tell because the forms don’t have a box for “my husband controlled every penny and now I can’t afford bread.”

They have boxes for earnings. For savings. For whether you own a property or have a partner or are available for work.

They don’t have a box for: I built websites for a living but he made me feel so small I forgot I could do anything at all.

They don’t have a box for: I’m not lazy. I’m traumatised. There’s a difference but you’d need a bigger form.

The appointment took forty minutes. I left with a reference number and a sick feeling and the knowledge that in six to eight weeks, if everything was processed correctly, I would receive just enough money to not quite manage.

I walked to the car and sat there for ten minutes before I could drive.

Because here’s the thing about financial abuse. It doesn’t end when you leave. It follows you. Into the Jobcentre. Into the supermarket. Into the school WhatsApp group when they ask for the trip money and you have to type “can I pay in instalments” and pretend that’s normal.

He was at home. In the house. With the mortgage he paid with the money he controlled. Eating food he could afford. Sleeping in a bed I’d made every day for thirteen years.

And I was under strip lighting, proving I existed, with a reference number and a pocket full of nothing.

That’s what leaving looks like. Not the suitcase. Not the slamming door. The plastic chair and the lanyard and the six to eight weeks.