Dignity

Forgotten, unwanted and uncared for. This is how I feel every day of my life. It makes me physically sick to see my mum crying over the menace that is the bills. She is the only person in our home who provides for my sister and I. She is a single parent who works two jobs but that is never enough. It never will be.

How can I cling onto hope, have dreams and aspirations when I don’t even know if there will be any food on my plate tonight, or if we’ll have hot water this week, or if we will be evicted for the sixth time. How can I even have a smidgen of positivity that any of this will get better? It feels like I’m just trying to survive. It feels like i'm drowning ever so slowly in despair. My life just always feels so unstable.

But I want to feel security, valued and most importantly dignity. That’s all our mum has ever wanted for us and it pierces her deep into her heart that she can’t give that to us. She feels guilty that she isn’t able to provide enough for us, and I see the prominent weariness on her face, looking like she is almost going to collapse from exhaustion, and I see this agonising glint of panic and anxiety in those tender eyes of hers. It’s heart-breaking to see her like that every day, and I pray that I could take all the anguish way from her. I wish that we didn’t have to live like this.

I've never really had a home, a place to call my haven, a place of safety. I've only known B&B rooms and apartments in 20 floor dreary, damaged and almost dead buildings. They are always this awful grey colour , a colour which perfectly matches the way I feel about my life. We always get evicted after every few months, it always makes me feel this ache, this anxiety, a constant stab in my mental state.

The thing that I hate the most is that every bit of dignity has been stripped away from all three of us. True embarrassment is what I feel as I walk into the food banks, my head held low to avoid the looks of pity that are fixated on me. I get free lunches and school, sometimes it’s one of the only proper meals I get daily.

I never invite my friends to our apartment because I don’t want them to think of me as poor and humiliate me in front of others. I feel utterly ashamed that I have to do all of this. It above all suffocates any sense of my self-worth that I hold on to. To me, dignity is all I really want above everything else.

There are 5 million people just like me and in worse situations in the UK alone. But there is poverty in every corner of the world we live in. It should be a crime for people to go hungry, and it’s shameful on the government’s part that around 3 million children go hungry every day in a country that is bathing in wealth. It’s plain disappointing to know that. The most basic role of a government is to look after the most vulnerable in society and support them. There shouldn’t be a real need for food banks, everyone should be provided food, and should never have to go hungry. So why is it that thousands of pounds are used on unnecessary purposes and hardly any of it is used on issues that really matter, like people living in poverty.

Isn't it just heart breaking to know that nearly half of the humans in our world are living in extreme poverty and that 22,000 children die each day due to this devastating reality?