I left University with a child and spent my every hour of my twenties either in a corporate office or at home with the endless and ever changing list of chores that come with child rearing.
I had friends in better jobs than mine who would discuss the pressures they faced at work. I was envious. I would have loved to be able to get a full night’s sleep, I dreamed of having time to myself at the weekend.
Despite prioritizing nappy changing over graduate schemes I’ve done alright. Most importantly, my daughter has grown to be healthy and happy…
Like many creatives and entrepreneurs living in between working for myself and somebody else, I struggle with a conflict in my personality between the spontaneous energy that lets me run head first into things I am passionate about and the rational aversion to risk that reminds me of the failure rate within everything that exists outside of the cushioned world of corporate nine to fives.
Perhaps it’s a part of being an adult. After all, we see the world through the lens of our experience. We understand that some things are so difficult that we’re almost guaranteed to fail. …
We spend a lot of our time telling our young children what they should be; healthy eaters, fitness fanatics, prolific readers. Once they reach, secondary school kids are told they need to be obsessively career-driven. They are continuously asked, ‘what do you want to be when you’re older?’ often by people who are often in no position to offer career advice.
In reality, most parents eat junk when they’re out of the house, sit in an office all day only to come home and watch TV, haven’t read a book since they finished with Goosebumps in Primary School, and finished…
Mental illness is so personal and so deeply entrenched as a muted discourse that it is still something that we struggle to deal with constructively.
Mental health is getting more attention than ever before, but there remains a stigma attached to the name. Perhaps we can try to be more empathetic, but no matter how hard we try there will always be a barrier to our understanding of the things we can’t see. We might acknowledge the fact that a man with crippling depression needs a hand up just like a man with a broken leg but without an obvious way to step in and help our compassion is limited to a simple verbal acknowledgement.
“That must be hard”
“I’m here for you if you…
Liam Leddy
Parenting and creativity.
