You must function just enough to justify not functioning.
Write. Laugh. Hope.
Welcome to the bureaucracy of disbelief.
Where your worth is measured by how convincingly broken you are—
but not too broken, or they’ll say you’re exaggerating.
You fill out forms while in pain.
You attend evaluations while dissociating.
You explain your trauma with a smile—because if you cry, you’re “unstable”…
but if you don’t, you must be “fine.”
They want evidence.
Of suffering.
Of stillness.
Of why you can’t contribute to the machine that ground you down in the first place.
And if your illness is invisible?
You better have visible exhaustion
visible shame
visible proof that you are not faking your own collapse.
They deny you for walking to the mailbox.
They question your diagnosis because you posted a smile last week.
They ask if you can work from home
as if healing from home wasn’t already unpaid labor.
Because this isn’t about help.
It’s about gatekeeping survival
until you’re too tired to keep asking.
And still—
you get up.
you fight.
you prove, again and again, that you are not a liar—
when all you ever wanted
was to rest
without guilt.
Write. Laugh. Hope.
Because when surviving the system becomes your job,
your truth becomes your only paycheck.
