About

My Twitter bio says that I am a “mentally interesting queer with [an] awkward career”, which seems pretty accurate. I’m a serial blogger: I’ve started at least ten, five of which turned into longish-term affairs, and all on the subject of (my) mental health. My most recent quasi-anonymous identity was as a large armoured mammal which had undergone a process in which its organic material had been replaced by minerals, IYKWIM 😉

Offline, I’m in my early 30s, live in northern England, and have a very lovely and supportive wife. The ‘awkward career’ refers to the fact that I work in a healthcare setting, often with people experiencing mental health problems, sometimes quite similar to my own.

Previous blogs have been used to write about specific mental health problems: an eating disorder, self harm, depression, anxiety, PTSD, and a host of phobias which morph every few years. This time I wanted to write more privately about the experiences I feel caused these difficulties. I use the word cause deliberately; there was a time when I found a bioessentialist approach comforting, and would have said the only cause was an unfortunate genetic predisposition. Repeated mental health crises and reading research into attachment and trauma eventually made me realise I was only hanging on to that idea because accepting that I had been abused, and that this was why I found life so bloody hard, felt incredibly threatening. So this blog is primarily about being a survivor of emotional abuse, but there are several other life events – bullying at school, being raped in my teens, and a nasty experience in hospital a few years back in particular – that I might end up talking about too, under the general umbrella of traumatic crap.

I’m hoping to make a bit more sense of things through writing, and maybe to get to know others in similar situations 🙂