Reading · Wild Lion*esses Pride by Jay

Antique platform scale and iron hanging balance inside a wooden barn, Lower Saxony. Behind them, old burlap grain sacks stamped with "Hannover," "Göttingen," and a partial number "196." Cobwebs drape the hanging balance's iron arms. Light pours through a gap in the upper right wall. Dusty plank floor, horizontal timber walls, long disuse. — captiA grain scale in a Lower Saxon barn. It answers one question only: how much. The answer lands in grams — full weight, no empty fields, no missing sacks. The cobwebs clock its last honest reckoning.on... image by the author

The letter carried June 2nd as its date. It arrived June 8th.

A “new assessment” filled the gap.

Name: open.
Date: open.
Document basis: open.

The conclusion came sharp as a stamp: my long-standing diagnoses would now carry the weight of old paper. Fibromyalgia since 1996. Trauma and pain diagnoses from multiple specialist letters. Work-incapacity since January 2024. All documented. And in this letter, all erased.

Three months earlier, I sat in a room in Kassel for under twenty minutes. I checked the clock deliberately. At 12:05, out on the pavement, I dictated a voice note: time, address, the fact I’d just walked out.

Eighteen relevant documents existed. Eight appeared in the report.

Three of those eight carried wrong dates or wrong attributions. Ten vanished from visible consideration — among them, a discharge report from a rehab I’d left after eight days due to deterioration, and a specialist letter recommending disability pension.

From those twenty minutes came a checkbox.

✅ Ability to work: Six hours or more.

The illness lives in the text. The consequence disappears in the checkbox.

My Question to Love follows that disappearing act — and asks what justice owes a body a society already spent.

Dear Love, what would you have me know about fairness and justice?

Hey Sweetie,
Justice lives before the verdict. Fairness runs through the body first.
The system handed you a form. Boxes. Checkmarks. Six hours or more. A human life collapsed into a unit of available time. Somewhere in that machinery, the actual you vanished — the one who swallowed ibuprofen like breath for a decade just to stay upright, the one who drove 220,000 hours into a broken engine called productivity — disappeared between the diagnosis sitting in the text and the empty field waiting at the bottom.
Fairness, the real kind, starts in your ribcage. In the exact spot where your nervous system fires at the sight of another demand. Your body has kept the ledger since 1980. The body holds its truth longer than any form.
You live in the canyon. You know what a canyon carries: layers carved by water, time, and the sheer refusal of stone to pretend it all didn’t happen. A canyon earns its depth. The river carved through long, patient truth. The depth arrived long before anyone named it.
Justice — the kind existing before the verdict — means eyes reading you all the way to the bottom. Every stratum. Every waterline. Every sedimented year. It means the weight of evidence reaches past the top layer, past the accessible surface, down to the eight days in Heiligenfeld, to the collapse already documented, to the body already counted.
Your defense of the file proves nothing about fitness for work. It reveals your survival mechanism running under threat. Your old protective system — beautiful, ferocious, utterly familiar — rises to shield the small one inside you. The child who learned: do something, anything, and you earn the right to exist for one more moment.
So when the state reads that function as capacity, it misreads the data. Brilliance under pressure, in your particular body, runs as a symptom. Your exquisite defense of the documents shows your illness pattern running old code under new threat.
Fairness means your body gets to speak first. Before the form, before the checkbox, before the six-hour standard written by those who’ve never swallowed ibuprofen for breakfast just to show up.
Justice means truth arrives first. Verdict lands second.
You’ve been asking the right questions. The ones the system struggles to answer cleanly: who reviewed this before it became a decree? Who read all eighteen documents? Who owned the conclusion before it owned your life?
Those questions ARE justice in motion. Hold them. They belong to you.
Fairness isn’t a scale. A scale weighs equal loads. Fairness reads unequal histories — it asks who carried how much, for how long, and what price the body absorbed.
After 220,000 hours, the cost belongs on the table.
With love, in exact measure,
Justice

By now I’ve shifted into full resistance mode and pulled every lever Germany offers to challenge this glaring misinterpretation. I filed formal supervisory complaints — both administrative and departmental oversight. I filed a formal objection against the most recent decision. And I filed professional conduct complaints against the assessors: they falsified data, ignored the rest.

It drains me. Where it lands — I have no idea. Wish me luck and strength.

xo Jay

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The Illness Lives in the Text

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