Today I am scared. Properly scared, like a grown up. I say this because I am physically and emotionally cowardly and have as such been scared frequently throughout my life. Most of the things I have been afraid of either never happened or weren't as bad as I feared, or were bad but were then over.

This new fear is different for me because it is not a specific event. I am worried about money. I am worried that there is not enough money and that a Conservative government lurching ineptly towards Brexit will only make that worse. Stuff will become more expensive, employers will be less regulated, and help for the financially fragile will be cut and cut and cut.

What worries me more about this adult fear is that I do not feel like an adult. I am aware that nobody really feels like an adult, adulthood is sort an illusion. When I was learning to drive, there came a point where everything sort of clicked. Coordinating the pedals and the steering and the mirrors all seemed quite straightforward, rather than completely impossible.

That doesn't happen with becoming a grownup. Being a grownup is more like learning to drive a car, and then being given a carriage and a different pair of horses every day. The surfaces you drive on vary and the rules are not displayed on signs but instead worked out as you go along based on either the group around you or the single most dominant if there is one. But even by that standard I feel like a child, ill-equipped for the adult world, and entirely unprepared to cope with a looming crisis.

The trouble is that I remind myself of child me. I look quite a lot like him and I have the same name. That may sound glib, but my point is that I sometimes feel like Tom Hanks in Big   – just a child walking around in an adult's body. And because people address me the same way as they did when I was five, the line can feel very thin sometimes. I understand now why Prince kept changing his name.

Enough of this levity: my point is a serious one. Two months ago, before our Universal Credit came in, we had to go a little overdrawn. Last month was the same story. I managed to explain to myself that these were explainable, isolated cases, but this month it has happened again, only this month we are more overdrawn.

So things in my head start to spiral. I have talked before about the difference between the reality of a scenario and your emotional response to it. I don't think this situation is as bad as my fear would suggest, but the greater the emotional response, the more likely you are to act on it, rather than sense or reason.

Ouch: that sounds melodramatic. Here's a calmer assessment: large political and economic events had easily suggest a world dominated by a small number of alarmingly unhinged people. At an individual, being jobless and short on cash leaves you short of control or options. When you find yourself in the middle of all this, it's very easy to feel powerless. And some people, plenty of people, have done reckless and dangerous things to make them feel more powerful. A more equal dispersal of power and greater engagement of mass populations seems to me the long-term answer. But in the short term, the easy thing we can all do is talk. When you're feel scared or small or powerless or wish your parents would make it all better, tell other people. They feel it too, sometimes. And that's ok.

Benjaminpmoore

09.04.18 Front Page

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