Greetings to all,
Although I am a stranger to this particular place I am not a stranger to depression, anxiety or to online mental health communities. I was diagnosed with this mental illness back in high school and gave up professional treatment after a year or so and now aged 24 I've mostly learned to live with the beast.
I'm among the countless children who ended up going straight from high school to university where I did a science degree majoring in geology and earth sciences. I loved my degree and as I suspect we do with everything in life I learned much more afterwards in my own learning and in retrospect than I was able to appreciate at the time I was there. What I did not love was the work that degree qualified me to do and the social environment that took place in, a lesson I could only have found out the hard way after a 6 month mining exploration contract out at Bathurst.
I've spent several periods of unemployment, although because I've always managed to do *something* at least once every 6 months I've never technically been an unemployment statistic, which goes to show how important a broad education is to us all.
Not really having learned my lesson I'm going back to uni again for another 2 years to do a Master of Teaching degree to then teach science in high schools. I've had a lot of people telling me that teaching is something I'd be good at and enjoy and I look more favorably on the impact that may have on the world than the infectious ideology of wealth worship and class warfare that so many of my friends and colleagues have succumbed to.
I think it impolite to talk about oneself as being one thing or another, or believing in this or that, however for this introduction I will say that I enjoy reading Marx and Engels, Kropotkin and Luxembourg as well as more contemporary academics like Fredrick Jameson, Peter Frase, Mark Fisher and Bill Mitchell (from our very own University of Newcastle!) I also like to dabble in the readings of social psychology, such as Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm.
I'm more than a little nerdy, what with a science degree and remembering by heart geological epochs and dinosaur taxonomy. I don't drink alcohol and only rarely go out. I consider an Attenborough documentary, especially the old ones, a first class night in. When I do go out I'm liable to crossdress, which I feel I can treat much more casually now than I felt during my uni years.
If you've gotten this far I thank you for your diligence,
- Nef.
