We're getting a new bin. It's for plastics only. We were notified by an old-fashioned paper circular, which I opened, ingested, then shoved in the soon-to-be-replaced mixed recycling. Huh, looks like all the bins need taking out. But I just took them out yesterday. Wait, two days ago. Four, max. When I lived with nine other people in my first year of university, it made sense that a bin always needed taking out. We were big kids in a glorified dormitory who ate of out packets and wrappers. I live with two other adults, one loud cat, and I cook from scratch. How does all of this shit accrue? How does it just keep on coming?

***

A nice psychiatrist with a deep, plush voice once described me as, "conversationally able". He'd asked me for my life story as part of a larger diagnostic exercise, one of those rare instances where there's actually a pressing need for you to talk about yourself, the actions, events, and feelings that have come together to make you, you. The psychiatrist's comment didn't leave me shaken. Because I've always written in some shape or form - about myself, no less - I took it as a given that I'm no stranger to the this happened so I did that and then that happened and I felt this way and then it was now.

However, despite the detail I provided, I didn't fully match the diagnostic criteria. Instead of giving me a fresh label or a different medication, the dulcetly toned psychiatrist suggests I take part in a course. It's six weeks of online sessions. You learn more about what you have - or in my case, might have - and how to manage it. We're shown videos that are played from a CD that skips. The people in these videos have it too, our course convenor assures us, they're not actors. Everyone else is at the absolute mercy of this condition - and then there's me, an inconclusive case. But I do have impostor syndrome, I think, as I try not to cry about the criminal underfunding of the NHS.

Next up, a cartoon bucket on a creaky PowerPoint slide. The course convenor softly explains that the bucket gets filled with all kinds of watery stress, including positive emotions like excitement. The bucket needs to be emptied regularly so that the water doesn't flow over the rim and wreck the delicate harmony of the drainage system. We're the kinds of people who have smaller buckets so we need to turn the tap more frequently. A great way to do that, says the course convenor, is talk to those closest to us about how we're feeling.

"But don't I do that loads already?" I say, internally, to no one.

***

I don't talk about my life now like I used to. Perhaps that's growth. The writing I want to do is lit by the sun, not looking directly at it. I write and rewrite sentences to get them pretty, make me seem clever, because I'm vain and ambitious and other things that are so much worse.

No, this is a place where I allude. I observe and makes notes but I can't diagnose, I'm not in the slightest bit qualified. I clunk through metaphors and hope that you get what I mean when I talk about newborn kittens, mewling into each other's fur in absence of sight, and the bin that's going to come, that it'll be grey, and I just have to keep taking it out.

Oh, it's never done, and it's all in the doing.