A Day in the Life Do you remember much of secondary school science? Bits and bobs, right? Do you remember the experiment with waves, and what happens when two wave crests combine? In this case it’s know as ‘constructive interference’. The wave crests add together to create a crest the size of the two heights combined. Conversely, when a crest encounters a trough, they add together also, but the trough is now negative, so they essentially subtract.

AD(H)D and Me I don’t think it’s a secret that I suffer from depression and anxiety. I do my best not to perpetuate the stigma of mental illness, so I talk about it a lot, I imagine often to the detriment of my friends’ attention span. I’ve always felt though that the anxiety and depression were symptomatic of something else. There was something ethereal and undefined that orbited my identity, prodding at my mood from time to time and gently knocking me into an eccentric orbit of my own.

I started this post almost two weeks ago when Claire and I were on holiday in Italy. I was having a bit of a ropey early morning, where anxiety had kept me awake, so I dragged myself out of bed and tried to think about what was going on and whether I could exorcise it with a wee bit of writing. My dad was very ill, and his prognosis not good.

Imagine a road. It’s a well travelled road, lots of traffic. It joins two small towns, it doesn’t matter which ones. Now focus on a particular verge on a bend somewhere in the middle. Again, it doesn’t mater where. It’s a grassy verge, quite a lot of space between the kerb and the hedgerow that bounds a field with some anonymous crop growing in it. There’s a small ditch directly adjacent to the hedgerow, you know the sort.

Today, I failed. Yesterday, I also failed. I failed the day before too, as I do every day. Today, like yesterday, I failed to be well enough to work. There are two things wrong with this statement. The first is about class, hierarchy, and the boot-print of generations of exploitation of the working class. From not talking about politics, or wages, to not complaining when you get shit on, to never admitting you’re ill.