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I asked not too long ago for people to contribute to a Question & Answer thing. Thank you everybody who offered up interesting and probing questions for my little Q&A. And thank you to those who offered terrible or inane questions as well. I won’t embarrass anybody by telling you all who asked what. Why […]

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I posted the following on my Facebook page this morning. I used to be racist. I used to be homophobic. I used to be sexist and misogynistic. I made jokes about slavery and the Holocaust. I have apologised for my previous attitudes and have been able to progress and evolve into the person I am […]

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There seems to have been a lot of confusion over the last few years, focused around just what free speech actually is. According to Wikipedia, “freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or community to articulate one’s opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or sanction.” However, a lot of […]

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We’ve all done it: read a news headline or maybe even the first paragraph, and immediately assumed it tells the entire story. We got angry, seethed inwardly then raged publicly. Maybe we shared the story on Facebook or Twitter and made clear our feelings. Within an hour you’ve got a hundred comments about the appalling […]

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“What do you do?” Now that’s a question I’ve been hearing a lot lately. I’ve recently been using Meetup; a website/app designed for people to create groups in order to meet other people and make friends. So I’ve been attending some ‘meetups’ and meeting people. Now, I really dislike initiating small talk. I’m okay if […]

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I remember when I first told my closest friends that I had started on a course of antidepressants. A couple of them had some knowledge and understanding of depression told me it’s a long road to recovery. But the less informed among them asked if I’m ‘happy now’ for ‘feeling any better.’

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I read, a couple of months ago, the views of a fellow ‘depression sufferer.’ She was going to be giving a talk locally about mental health, so I did a little bit of background reading before deciding on whether I would go along to listen. What I read, despite being supposedly the thoughts of somebody […]

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I was inspired to write this by Ana’s post Mask, in @bitter sweet diary. We all wear masks: to hide behind; to pretend we are someone else – for comedic, dramatic or other purposes; to live another life. We paint over damaged walls, to mask the cracks. We say words we do not believe, to […]