Hi pals,
I took some time off from my Youtube channel as the algorithm seemed to decide I wasn’t worth showing to anyone again and the time off has been much needed. I took more time off from other jobs and tasks as well as my mum is currently not at work either, and we have been couch potatoes and sunbathing when the weather was too disgustingly hot… but I’m having a moment again where everything just feels a bit pointless.
The more I learn about how my UC works and how having adult social care support works… the more I realise I have little-to-no freedom to try and dig myself out of the benefits hole. See, where things are at right now, I don’t have enough savings or earn enough money to have to pay for adult social care support, and I still get some money from UC even with the savings I have cutting it drastically and making the measly amount I get monthly feel like it was never worth it for all the bother UC have been to me.
But the issue is, if I earn money I lose more UC money which was never enough to exist off of anyway. And the more I earn generally, the more I will have to pay towards adult social care. A lot of the time too, you start having to pay or lose the UC money long before you would actually be comfortable doing that financially. You’re penilised for wanting to get back into work or build something for yourself.
I feel pretty exhausted honestly. I’m trying to look to my future and plan how to look after myself and my mum when she’s aging and too old or disabled herself to work, but I can’t really see it. Let alone if I actually decided I wanted to have kids. I’ve been putting money into a pension for a while now for the first time ever really, I found an old pension scheme I’d been signed up to at one of my shitty short lived jobs in my early 20s and used that. Plus one small bonus I guess of UC is they put money into a state pension for you. But that will be used to pay for social care if I earn too much and I assume they mean this as by the time I am being paid BY the pension and not now whilst I save but no source is clear on that.
And whilst I love my art business and have been really proud of what I’ve learned and what I’m able to do now vs when I started… It has just exhausted me. I don’t make any money off of online sales, I struggle to get my work in shops and to get paid from them because every shop has their own system which is usually no system at all… and markets down in Brighton and honestly London have been horrendous and slowly getting worse for all the years I’ve been a stallholder. It looks like the only way to earn at markets is by travelling far which I physically can’t do without staying the night or weekend, which now is so astronomically expensive, I remember I used to be able to pay for an easy jet hotel room that I’d just sleep in and shower in as a late teenager for £30-£40 a night but now you’re lucky to pay under £100 for any room. And don’t get me started on train fees.
Going to Glasgow zine fair was eye opening in many ways: what a properly organised event looks like, what earning real money at an event looks like, but also how hard it is to travel anywhere for me… all the public transport for the week I was there was totally fucked and I had to pay a lot of money for taxis to get to and from the fair venue which multiplied my travel costs by at least double if not more. Maybe ten times? I paid about £50 for taxis for 2 days where a return train ticket in Scotland was more like £3. Plus the issues coming home and having my access needs disregarded even though I booked assistance for the flight home.
I’ve had some news too that my reoccurring lower back pain could be a degenerative issue (thanks grandad) and I’ve been dealing with this pain on and off for a third of my life at least and no one even mentioned it to me when it was spotted on an MRI 7+ years ago... and no one wanted to redo an MRI to check until I convinced my Takayasu’s rheumatology team to request my local team do it. So that’s something I have to think about now… what happens if this is a permanent thing I have to deal with? What if it gets worse? It prevents me from sitting in a chair for long periods which means I often can’t make artwork, I can’t sit at a desk, I can’t comfortably watch TV or read a book unless I am partially laying down. Is my market work making this worse? I don’t know anything because no one has ever actually spoken to me about this in the medical field.
And to complain again but organisers of markets these days simply do not know what they are doing. I’ve had numerous cases recently of market organisers who either have their priorities elsewhere rather than on creating a successful market for the stallholders, or the organisers showing they are just totally useless when I’m querying about the application process… or lack of one.
One small festival collaborated with a market organiser, the festival is local but the market organiser is from Bournemouth? They prioritised applications from people they have already had at their markets in the past… in Bournemouth. They all got auto-acceptances. But anyone else (who might not feel going to Bournemouth is worth it for a market) has to apply and go through a selection process. The rest of the event also showed to be red flags all round but I’ll keep that to myself to keep it somewhat hard to guess the event unless you’re in my DMs.
Another small festival local to me had zero plans for the market they wanted to put on. They were not providing anything at all, no tables, chairs or gazebos. Payment was 10% of stall earnings. They expected stallholders to set up on the Thursday evening, and come back for three days running. My mum made a good point about this that this was just not possible because leaving a gazebo and table and chair overnight means they will likely get trashed or pinched and I was told in no way was there a protection plan in place for these items. Also no way of getting a table and chairs to the stall if you wanted to at least keep those safe. They expected you to run your stall for all three days of the festival with no start or end time for the sellers, so how would people know to come shop? And if they did come over, wouldn’t it look bad if a bunch of the sellers just didn’t turn up for most of the day? They couldn’t answer my questions so I told them they would need to go and speak to a market organiser before I’d have a stall with them.
Many queer and alternative markets have closed down in Brighton and London so less events for me to attend. The ones that haven’t, like I said, aren’t very invested in running a successful market or haven’t done the research and thinking to make the chances of a successful market even happen. People running markets at the moment are not equipped to run markets and are running them based on vibes it seems. Tables are costing more and more, and so are train fares. I’m not covering my fees most of the time again.
(note: this is not EVERYONE, but it is MOST organisers)
And honestly there’s very few things I like about running a stall at a market. I hate the travel, I hate the set up and lugging a heavy bag around, I hate sitting there all day, I hate that even at quiet markets if I leave my stall that’s when the one person lingering wants to buy something so I feel obliged to stay at my table the whole day with no breaks, I hate having to prepare food and drink for the day because buying out is so damn expensive now plus I can never find anything to eat, I hate the access issues of markets (whether it’s the lights giving me a migraine, the seats giving my a numb arse or making my lower back pain flare, or some markets don’t even provide CHAIRS, etc.), and I hate talking to people who take up so much of my time at the stall and take up space at my stall from buyers when they were never going to buy anything from me in the first place, and I especially hate the people who stand and read my whole zine in front of me and don’t buy anything.
I like meeting new people and talking to different people about their work or interests. It is one of the few chances I get to be somewhat social and I don’t get much social interaction. I like going to new places sort of. I like the validation of people enjoying my work. But that’s where my likes end really.
And running any kind of business is becoming more and more punitive as things go on and more complicated. I now can’t sell in the EU or America because both places have put ridiculous barriers in the way of selling and shipping goods for small businesses. Tax is stupid and makes no sense. And then like I said at the start, if I earn money I lose money in UC. So it mostly doesn’t feel worth it, because why put myself mentally and physically through all of this when I could just not do this and get the same money from UC every month?
I never have the time or energy to do things I really want to do. I had to get an extension on my Arts Council Grant because this year has been hell on earth and not conducive to learning and creating in this way. This year I have hardly read any books and I love to read because I just feel like I don’t have time or I need to be doing something else. And I love making my videos but they take up so much time which I can’t hire support for because I don’t make enough money. One thing all the Youtube hack channels never discuss is also the innate bias in audiences. I could make the same or better content as a non-disabled cis het white man but more people will click on a thumbnail with a man of that general description than they will on my videos, and if they do click they are more likely to leave me bigoted comments or just generally forget their filter and insult me. I dream of a day where I have more genuine connections in the comments of my videos but right now the only comments I really get are hateful ones.
I don’t even know where to begin with my concerns about Gen AI and general security in a post-censorship UK. I don’t understand technology enough to even know how to try to protect myself or my work incase the powers that be decide I’m a t*rrorist for not agreeing with the government like the Filton 4 were. Every time I try to dip my toes into the pool of securing my information, I immediately get spun out and can’t comprehend a word.
I’ve been sitting in research work meetings that are not inspiring and bring me no joy because they pay £25+ per hour but my knowledge is not listened to and the research studies being funded are not about topics I feel passionate about and it’s just more of the same and the same and the same (usually dementia, mental health and cancer research). And I cannot access funding because I am not in a job role with a contract within certain industries, and I am not planning to do a masters or a PhD.
Oh and GOD I still have all my Bachelors student debt hanging over my head, if I earn too much I have to start paying that back which I can’t afford on top of everything else.
And I just think wow… If I wanted to plan and create a safety net for future me and future my mum, it just feels impossible without getting myself in a worse position right now which I have no real ability to get myself out of without a miracle. I’d need to jump a few tax brackets I think to be able to look after myself properly, and to look after my mum in her old age, how would I pay all the right bills and taxes?
And how would I afford the inheritance tax on MY OWN HOUSE when my mum eventually dies?
I just wonder… shall I stop working on Artie is Arty? I don’t really want to. But I am so drained and just feel like I am getting and going nowhere.
I try not to worry too far ahead because our world changes so much constantly and you can’t plan for 20 years in the future, but I just want to try and make a cushion for myself for when I do get there. A safety net, some padding.
But the people in charge do everything to keep you down. Because these are problems not unique to me or to disabled people, not really. Anyone who ends up on UC doesn’t really want to work the kinds of jobs that UC makes you apply for every week, but even then many of them require too many hours at not enough pay to live. There’s no incentive to come off benefits because working is just as bad or WORSE. And that’s if there are even any jobs out there because it really doesn’t feel like it and they definitely don’t hire disabled people or people who often end up on benefits in general because we are considered a liability or uneducated.
They’ll monitor your bank accounts like they’re going to start monitoring our phone in the guise of best interests. For the children. For the working class. It’s never for the greater good of people generally. It’s always ‘how can we extract everything from you and make you think it’s someone else’s fault?’
And I’m just so tired.
artie carden 
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