“It gets better”, is a well known phrase, particularly around youth depression and suicide prevention. For many people it does get better, for some of us, it doesn’t. That’s why the title of this blog post is what it is. The asterisk is simple. It means “Terms and Conditions Apply”. In other words, what looks good on the surface, has greater repercussions than you might think.

Now I’m not here to attack anyone, or any organisation that uses the phrase “It Gets Better”. Nor am I saying woe is me, because it doesn’t work on me. All I’m saying is that using the phrase doesn’t actually make things better.

I’ve thought about this post for a long time now, what to write, if I should write it, if I should write anything. Right now I’m severely depressed, and for me, that’s some of the clearest time for me to think. When people see me in my “happy/normal” cycle, I feel the most delusional.

Come with me on a journey, while I think outside of the box a little here, to try and explain why things don’t get better. To do so, think of yourself as a lemon.

As a lemon, you’re asked to give a bit of juice, because it will make someone’s fish and chips a bit tastier. You get told that by giving up a little bit, in the long run you win. But people keep squeezing you, for more and more juice, all the time saying it will get better. For them it does, they have nice tasty fish and chips. But for you, you’re just being squeezed more and more. Finally whey of have nothing left to give, you’re told “See how happy you have made people? See it does get better.” But the very people saying that are ignoring the fact you are nothing by a total mess, from which you will never recover.

At the moment, I feel like this. It’s not just a moment that has lasted for a day or two, it’s a moment that has lasted for thirty years. Sure there are times when it appears things are getting better, but that is really just the calm before the storm. It doesn’t get better. Other people may look at the surface, see the things they like, and tell me how great things are, but it’s not. Every day is a struggle, because from the moment I wake up each day, all I am thinking is “Oh great, I woke up. That means another day of having move squeezed out of me.”

I was raised on the belief that if you work hard, you’ll get rewarded. It’s horse shit. The harder I work, the reward I get is to have to work harder, to reach the expectations of others. When I rebel because I simply have no more to give, I’m punished for not trying hard enough. Sound defeatist? Yeah, it may sound that way, but it’s not. It’s actually a little known thing called “reality”.

Most people are blinded to reality. They have their support structures around them. They have their like minded people around them, and so they are blinded to the fact that while something works for them, it doesn’t work for everyone. Why does it work for them? Well that’s simple. It’s because there are people like me who make things happen, yet get no reward for the effort. Instead our reward is the expectation (implied or not) that things just have to get done.

Now I’m not expecting to be given everything in life, and have my cake too. All I ask is that I not go backwards. For the amount of effort I put in, I get that much reward at the end of it. It would be a much nicer thing than existence being futile. To break even. To know that what I have achieved is mine. If that was to happen, then it would get better.

So next time you tell someone “It Gets Better”, remember one thing. It may get better for you, because you have told them that, but the reality is very different indeed for the person you say it to.

I’m a cricket tragic. I seriously would spend everyday of my life playing it if I could. Sure I lack ability these days, if I had any, but I still love it.

In my junior days, my coach had these four rules. I remembered them after training tonight, so why not share them. It’s also an excuse to actually post something to this blog after such a long time. I’ve bed busy with work, but things will settle down soon.

1. We train for two hours, and games are twice as long as that. If we don’t concentrate at training we will never do it on the field. When waiting to bowl, don’t stand around talking about things, work on getting the batsman out. If you want to talk about what you did during the week, do it after training. When padding up to bat, do it quickly, as you may only have three minutes to do it in a game.

2. When batting, you will face about 30 balls. Your first priority is to always protect your wicket, and not go out. Work on getting behind the ball, and get to know what style of bowling the bowlers have. When you start to consistently put bat on ball, then look to play your shots, along the ground. If you don’t go out, then in the last half dozen, have a real swing.

3. When bowling, you will bowl about 6 balls to each batsman. Think of it as an over, and make the batsman play every ball. When you bowl badly, you are wasting everyone’s time. Work out how to get that batsman out during that over. Always make sure you know where you are in the bowling order, so the batsman isn’t waiting while the bowlers sort out who is bowling next. Always aim for the wickets and not the batsman. If you injure one of our players at training, they will not be there to play on the weekend.

4. When fielding, treat every ball like it is a match. Get the throws into the wicket keeper. Talk and encourage the other fielders. Back each other up, and back up the throws at each end. Train the way you play. There are only ten good balls in a game and they are the ones where you get wickets. The next ball could be one of those balls, so always be ready.

So I’m I’m a town that I didn’t plan to be in, for a reason that I wish I had avoided, waiting for things to happen, so I can at least get to where I am going. Welcome to Whyalla.

It all was going along nicely when I drove off this morning, but five minutes down the road, and a kangaroo decided it wanted to be grilled, but instead of choosing a barbecue, it chose the front of my car. Thankfully not too much damage, but enough for a panel beater to make a lot of money, and my insurance company to shake their finger at me.

After checking for damage, I could see most of it was minor stuff, so I got out the roll of 100 miles an hour tape, patched things up and got going. My only concern was the couple of drops, and by that I mean two or three, of coolant I could see. I looked around for a hole, but couldn’t obviously see anything, and I even went as far as to check with a torch, even though it was bright and sunny. My guess was it had come out of the overflow, caused by the big bang, theory as it was.

With the kangaroo checked for deadness, and to see if it had a Joey in it’s pouch, or even better a golden ticket, off I drove…, for a short time.

Before you panic though, this is my standard practice whenever anything out of the ordinary happens. It’s my way of making sure I did check everything correctly, and there are no issues, that I may have missed while the adrenaline was going through my system. It was at this point I could see more coolant. Yep, I had a leak in the radiator, but from where? Well after more searching, I found a small error in the top of the radiator. Not an all hell is breaking loose situation, but enough to be a concern.

I kept checking and checking but couldn’t see any more issues arising the car was running fine, there was no heat in the radiator, so I decided to limp through the next 200km to Port Augusta to see about getting a fix.

While on the way to Port Augusta, I had Mrs. Green Cow check online for where to get things fixed, and it turned out that Port Augusta lacks the very places I was looking for. So onward to Whyalla I went.

Now Whyalla is one of those towns that has sort of always been on my “to do” list. I don’t know why, it is just one of those places, so in a way this was a good excuse to go there. It wasn’t until I found out that a new radiator was required, and that I was lucky to get as far as I did, because the seam on the top was splitting apart, that I realised I would be here for the night. That’s because parts need to come in overnight, for either the radiator place, or for the dealership of the type of car I drive, that also happens to be in town. Grrrr.

So what about Whyalla? Well for the parts I have seen, I would have to say, nice place. It’s a quite place, friendly locals, very clean, a good little town. I like the street art about the history of the place. All the buses seem to go to a place called “Route”, but in different ways, depending on the number they have listed, and apart from the two pigeons that are trying to do a live version of the film Eyes Wide Shut outside my window, I’m enjoying the relaxing day off.

But tomorrow it’s back on the road, and hopefully no more animals crossing, and on to the new life in Perth. Goodbye Whyalla, I’m glad to have been in you.

So what does the title of this post mean? I’d like to know myself, because even though I wrote it, I has no idea what it says. Welcome to my world of dyslexia.

Why do I blog? Well my dyslexia plays a big part in that, because blogging helps me to practice to get words correct, to get sentence structure correct, and it helps me to find a bot of order in the minefield that is a problem for me.

It’s not a big problem, I function fairly well, and at times the mistakes I make are comical in hindsight, but it does take a lot out of me.

So what is dyslexia? Well you can google that one, but for me, the way the words appear to be, isn’t always the case, and at times the information my brain is putting out, doesn’t always match what ends up on the page.

Now this isn’t that much of an issue for me, I can read back over what I have written, and as long as it wasn’t too long again, I can usually work out what I was trying to say, and correct it. But over the years I’ve been called dumb, and stupid, and slow and all those kind of things, simply because things didn’t match in a way others see them.

Let me guess, you want an example. Well that’s really difficult for me to do, because thanks to autocorrect, and misspelt words being underlined, I pick things up rather quickly in most cases. But there are things like mixing up February and November. Yes I know the two are very different months, but I still mix and match as it suits my brain. When I write something ending in “ing” I usually write “ign” and I do the same when writing by hand. So when I write sing, it becomes sign. I also mix up the order of the “u” and the “t” in a lot of words.

When reading, I can skip whole words, paragraphs, or even half words, and then reconstruct what did stick, into an entirely different meaning. This can cause issues when I later try to link things together. It doesn’t mean I can’t learn, it just means that at times, it takes a bit for the real links to appear to me, and then it all makes sense.

Probably the biggest issue for me is phone numbers. If someone tries to give me a number quickly, I blank out after the first few numbers. If I am writing it down, there is usually a mix of letters, numbers, and squiggly lines, which makes no sense at all.

All this adds up to people thinking I have zoned out at times, when really, I’m just trying to make sense of everything in my head, and I need to focus on that. Dyslexia doesn’t mean I am dumb, it just means I see things a bit differently, and that’s not always a bad thing.