Warwick Smith/Stuff
Boon was diagnosed with Friedreich's Ataxia when he was 17. As the disease progressed it made walking and talking increasingly harder, and also affected his hearing.
That’s where my people were: the creatives and the outspoken. But it was the welfare system, in part, that eventually forced me to leave.
I worked for as long as I could as an administrator at the Ministry of Health, between 2015 and 2017, before my mental health became too bad to continue.
At the time my degenerative neurological condition was progressing. A trusted friend in the disability community visited me a few weeks later and found that I’d been living off savings because I couldn’t face going back to Work and Income.