The Government is still planning to go ahead with the cuts to Personal Independence Payments and disability benefits, reining in the workshy disabled, living it up on their £73.90 a week.

Never mind that you have to pass intrusive and humiliating assessments to get these benefits. Never mind that you might actually be ill, or that jobs that you could do don’t exist. They don’t want the burden of the workshy disabled people on the welfare state; you’re a scrounger, that’s the story they tell.

It’s not easy to live with that story. A story about people like me, women like me. On benefits. On PIP.

PIP gets the headlines but this is about changes to a lot of payments. They will be taking payments away from a lot of people, and if you’re on the receiving end, you know what it’s really about. It’s making it about ‘them’ and ‘us.’ The deserving and undeserving. It’s about sowing social division to justify political ends. The story is about making me a scapegoat for the country’s financial woes.

It’s not an easy story to ignore. The one where I’m not like you, just doing my best to get on in life, but instead a burden on my family, on the welfare state, and on society as a whole. The one where I’m a liar or a cheat, squandering your hard-earned taxes on custard and cake.

I hear these stories all the time. From the man in the blue van shouting, ‘Get a fucking job’ as news stories blasted that I’m a workshy scrounger, sat at the traffic lights waiting to cross the road in my wheelchair. From the builders, wondering how sick disabled people are if they’re out protesting against the cuts. From the woman in the library who wonders if ‘they’ (she doesn’t mean me, I’m the deserving poor, apparently) should be given special vouchers so they don’t squander their benefits on stuff they don’t need.

It’s hard not to feel small, other, ashamed. It’s hard not to feel scared, or scrutinised, or rush to parade the intimacies of my illness to justify being treated with basic dignity and respect.

For the longest time, I swallowed these stories until they made me sick. But I’m already sick.

For the sake of my health, vomiting up their tales, I refuse to be defined by anyone else’s story, to make myself appear human among their lies.

If you can’t see that already, then there is little hope for either of us.