Those that know me well know I absolutely detest the idea of “privilege” as it is used in social justice circles. I hate it because it’s divisive, it reduces human beings down to some kind of hierarchy of victimhood and it doesn’t reflect the reality of life, that actually nobody has an easy life.
It’s often used in a way to talk about race or sex, assuming that someone with white skin automatically has an easier life than someone with darker skin or assuming that men automatically have easier lives than women.
Fighting fire with fire doesn’t work
It’s just another form of discrimination and I don’t think you can tackle genuine issues of discrimination by replacing it with more discrimination. I would rather think of people as humans and listen to each individuals own stories, sharing and trying to understand each other as you would be surprised how much people have in common with each other.
Each person has their own blend of experiences, some good and some bad. I agree that some get shorter straws than others in life, I’m not going to pretend that we’re all equal or that equality is even possible or desirable. Equal rights, yes, equal outcomes can only be achieved through tyranny and I’m not a fan of tyranny, no matter how good the intent behind it is.
A little humility goes a long way
Anyway, I want to talk about the times in my life where things could have been very different. I think we should be humble and grateful for the things we do have in life rather than try to compare ourselves against what we assume everyone else has.
Born on a fluffy cloud
Lets start with the fact I was born in a wealthy country, at a time where medicine and science were very advanced. Just surviving childhood alone wasn’t the norm in history. There has not been a great plague, there has not been large scale famine or war on home soil during my lifetime. Sometimes I think that life has almost been too easy for millennials like me so we create our own problems in place of existential threat.
I was born into a family that wanted me. My mum was told she was unlikely to be able to have kids after a previous ectopic pregnancy meant she lost one of her fallopian tubes. I was their miracle. My dad was always part of my life. That makes a huge difference. Both my parents worked, both were nurses. We were not wealthy, sometimes my mum would work a day shift in a nursing home then a night shift as a paediatric infectious diseases nursing sister, exhausting herself just so that we could have a better childhood than she had.
There were piles of presents at Christmas, we had a car, we had holidays in the UK, not every year but most years.
My siblings and I were all born prematurely but we were healthy. Asthma, skin conditions and allergies aside. It’s easy to take these things for granted but some people are not so lucky.
I was also fortunate to be born with a natural inquisitiveness about life and intellect. I’m far from high in the intelligence stakes, but my brain has served me well at times and opened doors that might not be open to everyone. There are also doors that would never be open to me, like sports, despite my love for football.
Play your cards right
Life is about playing the best cards you are given to the fullest. You don’t get to choose those cards but there is no point whining about how unfair life is, just do your best. That’s all you can ask of yourself.
Teenage plight
I had a very tough time with depression and bullying through my teenage years. Weight was a problem from an early age, I was only 5 years old when I was on my first diet. Unfortunately that is a familial trait. I’m not using that as an excuse. It’s still up to me to do something about it, nobody else can fix that for me. Some would say that it’s a privilege to be able to be obese, not poor enough to physically starve to death.
When I was 16, I was fortunate enough that my parents allowed me to have cable TV in my bedroom. It was the beginning of the digital age. I found a service where you could play games and interact with a community, buying virtual flowers, sharing poetry and stories to a communal library.
Discovering the opposite sex
I used that outlet to express myself and suddenly I was getting messages from the opposite sex. I was a very shy kid in person and had it not been for this kind of service opening up a new world to me, I probably would have become what people unkindly call an “incel”, a man that doesn’t have the qualities nor confidence to attract a partner, but someone that yearns to be understood and have that human experience of not only being loved, but more important for men, having someone to give their love to.
I learned a lot about women from that site. I went through one relationship that didn’t work when it crossed over from the fantasy of the online world to real life but then I met a second girl that completely took my heart.
I was 17 things weren’t great at home and I yearned for my own space, a place for my head. I quit my A-levels due to depression, I had no direction, I felt lost. I went to the local social housing office and within months was offered my own flat.
A young lad today would not even be allowed to apply, the government changed the rules and put a minimum age requirement on social housing. I was also able to get Incapacity benefit and housing benefit to support me through that dark period that I wouldn’t qualify for today and even if they were, there is so little social housing now and such a high demand for it that I would have been waiting years. Timing is everything.
I lost my virginity to that girl. I had something to live for. My aunty arranged a temporary job for me, it was just filing and stuffing envelopes but it started to trigger my interest in life again.
Things started to go down hill after a while with the girl. We used to call each other everyday and talked for hours but then I started to sense distance and I felt very lonely and fearful of losing her.
Self harm
I started drinking to self harm. I was never interested in drink before but I went from being teetotal to drinking a 70cl bottle of Smirnoff Export vodka, hoping I’d knock myself unconscious. I’d mix it with taking small overdoses of painkillers, not enough to kill but as a way to release the pain I was feeling inside. I used to press blades against my skin but for some reason I just couldn’t do it, which made me angry at myself for being such a coward.
One day I ended up taking an overdose of aspirin at work, 38 tablets and ended up passing out. I don’t think it was the tablets that did it but the stress.
I ended up in hospital, being forced to swallow liquid charcoal. Afterwards it felt like a relief, like all the pressure building up inside me had popped. I was in shock, it was almost an out of body experience but it was over.
If I had taken that overdose at home or if I had chosen another method like hanging, that might have been where the story ended. Maybe I didn’t really want to die. Maybe I just wanted the pain to go away but it could easily have ended differently.
Shutter island
I spent two weeks under section in hospital. It was an awful experience. I sat in what felt like a cell with the door open and a member of staff sat in staring at me at all times with the fluorescent lights shining. How the hell they expected me to sleep in that situation is beyond me. I got angry. I decided to give them a taste of their own medicine and took my chair out of my cell and sat next to them and stared at them, see how that made them feel.
It was very hard to tell the difference between the patients and staff in that place, other than the ones that would howl like hyenas. I was depressed but I wasn’t crazy and this was no place for an 18 year old. The staff were quite discouraging when I told them I wanted to get back to work. They would tell me work wouldn’t take me back. It just made me more angry.
Anger management
Anger isn’t a bad thing, it depends how you use it. It made me determined to prove them wrong. I was back in work within a few days of being released. I then found out that my girlfriend had Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a form of blood cancer and I felt quite guilty. I didn’t know at the time but when I look back at dates now, it turns out she was also cheating on me with another partner. I don’t blame her, it just wasn’t ever going to work out between us. I was very sensitive, she was very young. I will always be grateful for that first relationship, you never forget your first love but it led to better things for both of us.
Fate?
If it wasn’t for that break up, I’d never have met my wife. She was my agony aunt on that same site I met my previous two girlfriends on. It was nearly a relationship that ended before it begun. Cable & wireless shut down the site very suddenly due to a lot of grooming that was happening on there. Luckily we had exchanged email addresses by then. If it happened sooner, we would have had no way to contact each other.
20 years later and my wife and I are still together. Life has not been easy, it never is, but we’ve been through it all together. How many people out there are lonely and yearn for the kind of stable, loving relationship that I’ve been lucky enough to experience?
Plenty of other women would have given up through the dark times but she hasn’t. She’s seen me at my best, she’s seen me at my worst and she’s still here. Still my rock.
On the job
My temporary job kept getting renewed, 3 weeks at a time, then 3 months. Before it came to an end an opportunity came up for a full time role at the same employer in a call centre. I was still a shy kid. I hated answering the phone even at home but I got the job and I was one of the first people in my training group to start taking calls. The job was an inbound, knowledge based call centre and the training reignited my passion for learning.
I worked a condensed working week, 4 days in and 3 days off and it gave me the opportunity to go back to college and do an access course to get myself into university. It was not easy. By that stage my mum was very ill with depression and I had to give up my flat and move in with her or the doctors wouldn’t release her. I was part time boyfriend, part time carer, part time student and part time working.
It was a lot to juggle but living with mum meant I didn’t have to worry about rent, so it helped me afford to reduce my hours and work allowed me to go part time. It helped that it was an 0800-2000 7 days a week call centre. I worked 10 hours on a Sunday and evening shifts to work around college and I could still just about get by financially. Today that same office isn’t open at weekends. If I joined now, I wouldn’t have been able to afford to go to college. I’d be trapped in a job rather than a career where I was stretching my mind.
Educating Jon
I excelled at college, got all the credits I needed to get to Uni. I lost 10 stone on a special diet and I learnt to drive all at the same time. There was a scary moment. Our college work was kept in a portfolio in college itself, under lock and key but the cabinet was unlocked during lessons.
A student that hardly ever turned up decided to steal my portfolio. Without that evidence of my work, if the invigilators had selected my work for inspection, I could have lost my place at Uni. Luckily the guy wasn’t the brightest. He handed in a couple of pieces of work he stole from my portfolio. Unfortunately, he didn’t check under the cover sheet. One of the pieces was hand written, with my name on it and had been submitted under exam conditions. He was chucked out and I got to go to Uni to study Computer Science.
I sometimes struggle with maths. I’m fine at the basic stuff but not to A Level standard. Most people studying Computer Science are good at maths but what I was really good at was analysis. I got most of my grades through uni by avoiding the maths as much as possible.
It took me seven years to complete a 3 year course. Juggling looking after my mum and uni and work really took its toll and I found myself completely burnt out half way through the second year. I couldn’t concentrate. I was sat in an exam and just about wrote my name. The suicidal thoughts were back with a vengeance. I just couldn’t cope. I took a year interruption to studies then six months in I slipped a disk in my back and ended up in agony, unable to walk.
A pain in the back and side
The doctors just blamed my weight and would try to refuse me pain killers even though they could see I couldn’t even get up the stairs to see them and they had to change rooms. They just blamed my weight. It all came to ahead one morning when my back went into spasm. I ended up on morphine, gas and air in an ambulance screaming in agony. I remember a female doctor examining my prostate, which was completely humiliating.
I ended up in a bed next to Moors Murder victim, Keith Bennett’s mother Winnie Johnson. My mum was busy chatting away with her rather than talking to me. It was very surreal. It took months for me to get back to walking normally again.
At that point I didn’t think I was going to be able to finish Uni. I looked into alternatives, short courses that promised a job at the end of it but Uni granted me another interruption of studies. It was hard. I had to repeat the module I failed and I had to repeat another module that spanned both semesters as it was partially group work. I had to make friends with a new cohort but I somehow got through.
I knew that it was going to be really important to get experience in the industry. I spent more time and effort going to careers fayres, writing tailored CVs and cover letters than I did on most of my uni modules. I applied far and wide and consistently was getting to the second round of interviews.
I got a couple of knockbacks from roles that sounded really interesting but I persisted. One job I applied for were looking for 2 candidates, one role was more about programming, the other more design based. I got a really good vibe about the company, it was a place where many of the permanent staff started as placement students. I didn’t just want a year experience, I wanted a job at the end of it, and this was definitely that kind of place. My skillset better suited the programmer role but they’d already picked the candidate for that but my enthusiasm won the day and I got the role.
Knocking on the door
I spent seven years at that company. They even paid for me to finish my final year part time whilst working full time with them. I’m very grateful for the opportunity they gave me but I also want to point something out. You may well think how lucky I was to have an employer like that, and you are right but it didn’t just happen, luck doesn’t just fall on your lap. It happened because I made it happen. You have to knock on doors, and if you knock on enough of them, one or two might open. If you give up you will never know what could have been. I think I need reminding of that message and how I got where I am from time to time when I feel like giving up.
There are so many other little forks in the road in my life where things could have been different. We like to think that we’re in control of our lives but chance plays such a big role, one wrong turn, one mistake and it could all be very different.
Don’t take anything for granted, it can be taken from you at any moment. Don’t envy those that appear to have more, you don’t know what they went through to get there and you don’t see the pain behind the veneers we all hide behind. Life is too short and it’s too cruel not to be kind to each other and listen to each others stories.
I am nothing special, I haven’t had a particularly difficult life yet still I have a story to share and the more I listen to other people’s stories too, the more humbled and inspired by the strength of everyday ordinary people.
Rant Over 