Ash Ford-McAllister

  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...

  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...

  This post was first published on my company blog, The Productive Pessimist , because the lived experience shown here significantly informs that work. But it also informs who I am as a writer, so it's equally relevant to have a place here, for a different audience. In the past - in jobs, when building connections and relationships, in social media discourse, and yes, in blog posts - I've apologised for "going into all of that"  or "going on about  me".   In several jobs, I've been  made  to apologise - and to feel ashamed - for mentioning personal challenges I was facing.  In my first office-based job, aged 21, on my first day, I was told, directly:  "When you come to work, you leave all your personal shit at the front door of your own house. You're not  you , here; you're the company, and the company doesn't have headaches, the company isn't tired, the company isn't worried about how it's going to pay its rent, the company ...