The Productive Pessimist

  I don't normally do personal deep dives on this blog, which is, after all, my professional presence as The Productive Pessimist Ltd. In the past - in jobs, when building connections and relationships, in social media discourse, and yes, in blog posts - I've apologised for "going into all of that"  or "going on about me".  In several jobs, I've been made  to apologise - and to feel ashamed - for mentioning personal challenges I was facing.  In my first office-based job, aged 21, on my first day, I was told, directly: "When you come to work, you leave all your personal shit at the front door of your own house. You're not you , here; you're the company, and the company doesn't have headaches, the company isn't tired, the company isn't worried about how it's going to pay its rent, the company doesn't have family members or friends who die, that it gets sad about. You're being paid to be the company for 10 hours a day, f...

  What the heck do you  even know about what I'm  going through?! A very good question - there are a lot of people who get their "understanding of mental health challenges" from pop psychology books, or a two-hour online course, no contact with the real world needed. That's not where my understanding comes from. I was diagnosed with schizophrenia following a serious (and violent) psychotic break in 2007.   I've been on high-dose antipsychotics (Lamotrigine and Quetiapine combo - which followed a Risperidone prescription, which turned out to be absolutely disastrous for me.) I've recently been able to transition to benzodiazepines, which I use alongside naturopathic condition management, which in my case includes real-food vitamin profiling and elemental therapy, with journalling as a mindfulness technique. At the moment, my symptoms are primarily slightly disordered thinking, occasional paranoid psychotic thoughts (mostly around helicopters...which...no idea...

  "It's not pie! More for other people doesn't mean less for you!" This was the howl of social media's self-declared #neurodivergence, #disability communities in the late twenty-teens and into the twenty-twenties. It sounded almost convincing, a worthy rallying call that everyone who wanted to be On The Right Side of History should immediately get behind. And if you dared  to hesitate to get behind the statement, if you so much as thought  that it maybe didn't sound quite  right - well, you were privileged , you were guilty of ableism , you just wanted disabled people to not exist!  If you were  disabled yourself, and had some reservations about the pie-ness of inclusion, then you were "everything that's wrong with the world!" But - as so often happens - those who were hesitant have been proved right.  It turns out that, as many disabled people with observable, high-impact impairments, who need  workplace accommodations - and, most importantly, w...