Click.

"Hello. Is that Miss Dobrin?"

"Umm, yes it is."

"I need to ask you one further question for your assessment."

"How many times did you use needles?"

"Sorry, what?" "Well…twice, but…"

“Right. That's all we need."

Click.

I was driving my top spec company car, wearing my signature stiletto's and a $300 designer dress when the call came. The letters after my name: CEO, MBA.

I tried to get income protection. Twice. But I can't. I'm an ineligible. Uninsurable. Declared too high risk. Irrespective of all I've achieved, how many people I've helped, what I've paid forward, the debts I've repaid. Who I am, today.

On both occasions, 10 years apart, I went through the same gut-punchingly-painful process that led with effusive handshakes and quintessential ocker 'she'll be rights'.

I fill in the questionnaires. Each feels like peeling off the plastic wrapper of a microwave dinner that promotes a Michelin star promise but leaves you feeling ripped off, lied to. Cheated on. Empty.

I bear my physical, mental and emotional history, along with my dignity and pride.

I can't recall experiencing such unconscionable humiliation and gutter-level shame in 20 years. Turns out stigma and discrimination based on the ignorant ideals of insurance companies with a punitive algorithm really does pay off. Just not for me. Or probably any other human who used drugs 'back then' to cope with a life they didn't choose.

After the second go-at-it, 10 years older, supposedly wiser, absolutely gutted. I quit. I was angry. Rage-full. Sickened by a razor-rash-raw rejection and brazen blame.

But here's the most baffling thing: the rage wasn't aimed at the system that rewards "the good" or the insurance company that judges "the bad," or even their personnel. It was aimed at myself. It was my own reflection I was unable to stomach. It was my own truth I struggled to speak. It was my own choices for survival that I chose to berate.

As I walked from that second broker's office, rejection letter in hand, 19 years clean, feeling dirtier than I ever felt using, I reflected on my part in the system and the need to reframe.

This is a game. I've been playing it wrong. The system depends on it. On consensual shame and complicit silence. It relies on humans collecting labels, in boxes that society stamps "damaged goods" and "broken, do-not-use." It is built on and necessitates keeping the have-and-have-not's separate and divided.

We all play this game. Every job interview where we look at the applicant’s socials before meeting them and can't help but scan for red flags. Every first date where we weigh up how much baggage they really have and do I want to share carrying it. Every school gate conversation where we sort parents into 'our kind' or 'not quite mine.'

We've built a world where people who've never needed redemption get to decide if those who do are worthy. Where healing is seen as liability. Where honesty is a luxury only the valued and valuable can afford. Where surviving somehow makes you more than less than.

So here’s something to curiously consider. The “applications” we fill out for each other aren't that different from insurance forms. Are they? Aren’t we all clandestine underwriters, and amateur assessors probing for problems, calculating risk, scanning for reasons to decline. To say no?

Because it’s scary to take risks, right? It’s hard to know who will or won’t be the right fit. It takes courage to take a punt on an unknown. It leaves us vulnerable, exposed, even fragile to know we might get it totally wrong and mightily messy. But that’s life, right?

So next time someone sits in front of you - in an interview, on a date, at the school gate - and their timeline has gaps, their story has shadows, their truth makes you uncomfortable, ask yourself:

Are you looking at damage? Or are you looking at survival?

Are you calculating their risk? Or recognising their resilience?

Are you seeing what they lost? Or appreciating what it took to rebuild?

Because every single one of us is walking around uninsured against something. We just don’t know the true risk and value of it being declared.

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