The Work Capability Assessment

They asked me to describe my worst day. In a beige room. To a stranger with a clipboard. While a clock ticked on the wall like a timer on my dignity.

The Work Capability Assessment. Designed, apparently, to determine whether you’re too sick or too broken or too mentally destroyed to participate fully in the labour market. In practice it’s a stranger asking you intimate questions about your worst moments while typing your answers into a form that will be scored by someone who has never met you.

How often do you leave the house.
Can you manage personal hygiene.
Do you have thoughts of self-harm.
Can you travel independently.

Each question a small humiliation wrapped in clinical language. Each answer a piece of me handed over to a system that will weigh it against a threshold I can’t see and return a verdict I can’t appeal.

I told them about the bedroom. The months I spent hiding. The man downstairs. The depression that didn’t cry because crying takes energy and I had none. I told them about the shower. The 3am. The eating disorder. The flinching.

The woman typed. Nodded. Typed more. Didn’t look up.

I wanted to say: I built websites for a living. I taught myself to code. I am intelligent and capable and on a good day I could do more before 10am than most people do all week.

But they don’t assess good days. They assess worst days. And on my worst day I can’t leave the bedroom and the shower is the only place I cry and the mirror is an enemy and food is a negotiation I sometimes lose and the idea of sitting in an office with other humans making small talk feels like being asked to climb Everest in slippers.

I got the assessment. Eventually. After the initial decision was wrong and I had to request a reconsideration and write a letter that was polite and factual and legally grounded while every sentence cost me something I can’t get back.

The system worked. In the end. After I fought it. After I made myself smaller one more time so that a form could contain me.

But the cost of proving you’re broken is that you have to be broken in front of strangers.

And that, it turns out, breaks you a little bit more.