August 20, 2023
My daughter, returning to university in a few weeks, is trying to choose a new duvet and makes the mistake of asking for my advice. Our neurodivergence makes decisions more difficult and creates anxiety around change, so deciding on new bedding might appear straightforward but instead, we tie one another up in knots of perpetual […]
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August 13, 2023
Someone said to me recently, “I think I’m suffering from some sort of weird depression.” I was intrigued by the use of the word “weird” because, when they described how they were feeling it just sounded like depression, nothing weird about it. When you look up the definition of depression in a dictionary, you find […]
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August 6, 2023
One day, my therapist asked, “Where does your self-esteem come from?” I looked out through the window into his lush green garden and at the woodlands beyond, wishing myself in amongst the trees. I didn’t know where my self-esteem came from, I just knew that I wasn’t generating much of it from anywhere. There were […]
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July 30, 2023
Some years ago, in the midst of an argument, my wife said to me, “There’s more to running a house than making dinner.” She was right, there’s no denying it. I felt shame being perceived as such a domestic “one-trick pony”, but it also resonated in a different way, as something I rely on to […]
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July 23, 2023
I’m playing “Bananagrams” with my daughter and, in what now feels like a rash move fuelled by early game bravado I have “dumped” too many of my opening letters and find myself with a swathe of tiles in front of me and unable to make anything of them. Serenely fashioning “Paradoxical” on the table, my […]
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