The Missing Piece Was Stability
I have always been an anxious person, but there is something I understand more clearly now. My anxiety has not continued because I have failed to grow, failed to reflect, failed to study, or failed to do the therapeutic work. I have done those things in abundance. I have aged, raised a family, lived abroad, run a business, gained experience, been through therapy, and I am now studying at postgraduate level. But one part of my life has remained unresolved since I was made redundant: a stable income. That missing piece matters more than I think many people understand.
Before 2010, my life was not perfect, but my world felt broader. I was more aware of what was around me. I noticed the seasons. I could sit in the garden and feel part of the day, rather than separate from it. I could go out, meet friends, plan a holiday, remember birthdays, write cards, enjoy ordinary moments and feel more connected to my own life without the same constant pressure sitting underneath everything. Those things may sound small, but they are not small when they slowly disappear.
Looking back, I do not think it was simply about having more money, although that would have helped. It was about having more mental space. Stable income gave my life a basic structure. It allowed me to relax in ways I have struggled to do ever since, and it gave my mind permission to notice other things.
Having ADHD means that focus and executive function are never resources I could take for granted, but stable income gave them the conditions they needed to work. When I had that foundation, I got more done and felt more in control of my own thinking, not because I was a different person, but because my brain was not simultaneously trying to manage background threat and get on with life. Since losing that stability, even ordinary tasks at home can feel beyond reach some days. That is not laziness or decline; it is what happens when a brain that already works harder to stay organised is also carrying unresolved financial fear with nowhere to put it down.
This is what long-term financial insecurity does. It changes how you experience time, space and possibility. It makes rest feel unsafe, makes pleasure difficult to justify, narrows the world, and turns ordinary life into something you must manage rather than something you can simply live.
I have had purpose during these years, and it has probably kept me going. Work, writing, studying, advising, contributing, speaking from lived experience and trying to make sense of systems. But purpose is not the same as financial security, and that distinction matters. Purpose can give meaning, but it does not pay the bills, repair a pension gap, or replace the security that comes from knowing you have reliable income. It does not calm the body when the foundations underneath your life are still unstable.
Wanting stable income is not greed or excess. It is what Maslow described as a foundation, not an extra: safety and security before a person can fully thrive, so that confidence, creativity, connection and belonging can properly take root.
This is where I think the conversation often goes wrong. Systems in this country do not seem to grasp how much stable income matters to wellbeing, or how directly it is tied to whether a person can rest, plan, or simply be present in their own life. Some people may want uncertainty or variety across several different roles, but I never have. I have wanted a stable role, a clear focus, enough income, and the space to build a home and future around it.
Instead, people are encouraged to be resilient, retrain, network, build confidence and tell their story. I have done those things, repeatedly, by the system’s own measure. I have written, studied, advised, contributed and built a recognised body of work. If effort and capability were enough on their own to convert into stable income, mine would have by now be tenfold. That they have not, is not about my resilience running out; it is evidence that something in the mechanisms meant to convert effort into outcome is not working as designed.
A system that asks someone to do everything it claims to reward and still cannot produce the result it promises is not failing quietly at the margins. It is failing in plain sight, and that is a failure of design, not of attitude.
I do not want to be idle or sit outside life feeling sorry for myself. I want to work. I want to contribute. But I cannot seem to navigate the final step between capability and secure paid employment, and that is the part that makes me feel flawed even though I know it is not simply a personal failing. It is the painful gap between effort and outcome.
It has also affected my ability to make ordinary life choices. Moving home or relocating, planning a different future, or even imagining a new chapter all require some level of financial confidence. When that confidence is missing for years, life can start to feel suspended. There is shame in that too: the shame of watching others move on, while knowing you have been trying just as hard but have remained stuck.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from trying for years to rebuild a life while the one thing that would make the biggest difference remains out of reach. Anxiety continues not because I have not done enough inner work, far from it, but because the outer conditions have not changed enough to allow my nervous system to settle. The body still knows when the ground beneath it is unstable.
People are often judged by how well they appear to cope. If someone is articulate, reflective or capable, it can be assumed they are fine, or that they should be able to sort things out alone. But capability does not remove the need for security, and purpose does not replace a wage. I sometimes think we are more comfortable praising people for surviving than asking why they have had to survive for so long.
This is why I believe mental health support needs to be much more closely connected to employment support and physical health. These things are not separate. Anxiety does not sit neatly in one box while income sits in another and blood pressure in another. A person’s mind, body, work, income and sense of security are all connected, and if employment remains unstable, mental health support can only go so far. We need systems that understand people as whole lives, not separate problems passed between separate services.
This is also why scaffolding matters for neurodivergent people who need it. Not everyone will, and support should never assume one model fits all. But for those of us who do need it, the right scaffolding can help connect the parts that systems keep separate: employment, health, communication, confidence, planning, daily functioning and practical next steps. Without that, people are too often left to self-coordinate across silos while already carrying the very difficulties that make coordination harder.
I can see my children navigating the world with more of what I never had, and I am proud that I helped give them that. But the strange and painful part is that I still struggle to see that same possibility for myself, even though I used to see it when I had full-time employment. I want to believe again that stability, ease and belonging are not only things I could help create for others, but things I am still allowed to have too.
I do not need another lecture on resilience. I have purpose. What I need, and what many people need, is the chance to feel secure enough to live properly again.