Please Help Keep Me Alive

Hiya, my name is Juliette, and I’m an asylum seeker here in the UK. I’m trying everything to get away from the violence and pain of my past, from my life in my home country, but I need support to be able to actually do that.

It’s been incredible to come here, to be able to feel even the slightest bit of safety for the first time in my life, and to be able to feel like I actually have the right to exist. It’s not really something I’ve felt before. But I'm at a point where I need real material support, to be able to keep going.

I claimed asylum this July, did my first interview, and was luckily not detained. This is just the start of the process, and a particularly long one at that. You don’t have many options to support yourself as an asylum seeker—I’m not allowed to do any kind of paid work until my case has been processed, which can take over two years to happen. As you can imagine, I still have to be able to eat and have somewhere to sleep, which isn’t easy to do when you can’t support yourself.

There are support systems for asylum seekers, but these can be kinda really really fraught. I could be sent out pretty much anywhere in the country, and as a trans woman, we all know that there are really few areas that are safe for us to actually live in, both in terms of our physical and mental health.

So, I have to turn to everyone out here, to ask for help. This is roughly how much I need to be able to live on for a year. I don’t have the words to express my thanks for any kind of help that can be given, it’s kind of been a crazy ride until this point, and I’d be incredibly grateful to be able to keep going.

(Edit on 9 Sept. 2023)

Just wanted to give a bit more context about me, and how I got here.

I've always known that I had to leave if I wanted to be able to exist. Growing up, I got bullied. A lot. I was feminine and soft, an easy target. From the kids around me, to the adults in my life, it was a constant flow of insults and messages about how wrong and sick and sinful my existence is.

Hell, in middle school we were still shown "documentaries" about how the AIDs pandemic was a special punishment for queer folks.

I really don't wanna bring up too much of what home was like. To put it simply, my parents really didn't want me to exist as I am and did a lot to make sure of that.

As soon as I got the chance to, I moved out, and moved to the capital city, cause cities are supposed to be safer. And I ended up having to move back again, after a month. I got attacked twice. Within a week.

For a while after that, I lost myself in work. My grandmother was very involved in the community, and ran a number of projects, and after she passed away, I was the only one around to pick it up, so that was what I did for almost two years. I put aside my gender trouble and my life, and tried to just do good.

But I found that my mind and body just couldn't keep up with all of it, and I folded and left again, going out to two different cities to try and find some kind of safety. But I found that people turned out much the same and after a near third attack I became a recluse and couldn't really handle going out into the world anymore. So I headed back to my home town again.

For a while, I stayed with my sister, and just bit getting misgendered and being deadnamed, though by this point my mental and physical health weren't really doing great.

It wasn't exactly what could be called a life--I was struggling to do anything to take care of myself, out of fear for my life and just being exhausted of street harrasment and just life in general. But at least I kept on.

Then, even this little bit of sanctuary was coming to an end. Shit got complicated. So within two weeks, I got help from friends, and had a ticket to come out here to the UK. A friend let me crash on his couch. So, in a rush, with this tiny chance of things finally changing, I left.