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Life, In Stages

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  I had a revelation today. I'm currently reading a book - Managing Complexity , by Robin Wood - which was published in the year 2000. My first thought: Where the heck did that time go? Why haven't I achieved much in a quarter of a century?! My second thought was the revelation: 25 years ago, I was 13. I had five years   before I would even be a legal adult.  It would be two years before I got my first "proper" part-time job (as opposed to earning pocket money doing gardening, car washing, and dog-walking for the predominantly elderly neighbours in the street I grew up in.)  In those twenty-five years, this is what I have achieved: . I've worked in youthwork, retail, business development, finance, marketing, project management and leadership in the non-profit space. . I've survived two major psychotic episodes, and learned to manage schizophrenia alongside the challenges of working full time, and living independently. . I've survived violent abuse, and hom...
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UK Welfare Reforms: An Ambitious Disabled Person's Response to Changes

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  So...we (apparently) enter a new (if likely to be very prolonged) phase of Brand GB's "Business as Usual." That's a good  thing, to my mind - Britain's attitude towards its disabled citizens hasn't really shifted since the Victorian era; we're "unfortunates", the "deserving poor", and the State's duty was to find us "occupation" if it could (think basket weaving and piano tuning for the 19th century blind - I wouldn't mind weaving baskets, honestly, but so few people have their own piano these days, that career option is out, because I'd be expected to travel considerable distances to make enough to keep the lights on, and the wolf from the door of my personal life)  and simply doling out "alms" (handouts with a heavy dollop of pity and assumption of incompetence) when there simply wasn't the need for the kind of work we could be trained to do. Over 200years later? Yeah...it's long past time for...
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Why Can't Gen Z Handle Adult Interactions?

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"When I was 15, I was black-out drunk in a field while my parents thought I was at a friend's sleepover...My 15 year old can't even order a coffee unless it's through an app!" "I remember all-night raves, where you talked to loads of people...my kids can't even respond to a simple question without looking like startled rabbits." These kinds of comments are everywhere. Quite apart from why  a grown adult thinks it's any kind of flex to admit to underage drinking and a potentially lethal lack of risk awareness, and ignoring the fact that not every elder millennial did  get blackout drunk in the middle of nowhere, there does seem to be a real issue with a large percentage of Gen Z - again, as with everything, not all  Gen Z - having a hard time dealing with casual adult interactions. So, what's going on? 1. Some people just aren't built with verbal communication in mind. It's not "anxiety" or a "disorder"; their commu...
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Men: Mindsets, Goals, and Being An Outsider (Again!)

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This morning, I thought I'd engage with one of the email prompts I get, on a fairly regular basis, from James Boardman 's online coaching business - I read his book, It's a State of Mind , a few years ago, then, more recently, came across the opportunity to sign up for a free PDF of his book Remember the Mission  - I was fully aware that the "free PDF" was just a hook to build an email list for his income-generating courses, but that's fine; typically, people running courses as their business throw in enough occasional freebies to make it worth my while dealing with the constant "Pay me money you don't have, so I can tell you why you're struggling with your finances, health, and motivation!" emails. (Heads up: if you can afford £99 for a course, you are either not  actually struggling with your finances, or your belief that you need someone else to tell you how to handle adulthood is the reason  you're struggling with your finances...) To...
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Holocaust Memorial Day

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  When the Auschwitz-Birkenau liberation  ended the Jewish Holocaust of World War Two, it didn't bring liberation for everyone. Gay men were not  recognised as victims of the Nazi regime , and, in fact, were mostly removed from Auschwitz to regular prisons in their home countries, to continue to serve a "normal" sentence for the "crime" of homoseuxuality. As anyone who has experienced gaslighting  from a parent, a partner, or a business colleague, knows very well, being told that an experience you have directly had "isn't really" that experience does at least as much damage as the experience itself.  Going through the trauma of Auschwitz - which, for gay men who didn't die in the camps, included chemical and physical castration, practices which are known to lead to suicidal depression in cisgender men - only to be told "You weren't actually victims of this regime; yes, they were bad people, but, when it comes to you , specifically, the...
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