There’s something I’ve heard that I can’t fully attribute, probably because it’s common sense, or perhaps just sense. I’ve variously heard it from friends and relatives and a therapist and social media memes, and it goes along the lines of: sometimes, when you become a parent, you end up parenting yourself.

So often, this is the case; especially when the things you find yourself frustrated with your child over are the things you find frustrating in yourself, or when one of the ways in which they are starkly different to you throws your similarities or difficulties into sharp relief.

Our son is autistic, and for him this means he has what is sometimes called a “spiky development profile.” In practice it means he can go a very long time avoiding or not doing something before very suddenly starting to do it.

Today we took him, together with his sister, for his first swim in a while. This was a challenge because he has never vibed with the water — in sharp contrast to his little sister, who has loved it pretty much from the first — and he struggles. We persist with the swimming not just for water safety reasons but because he wants to enjoy the water and says as much; he just hasn’t found the key to unlock it yet.

He spent a lot of his time in the pool yelling and clinging, and Louise talked him through it. “You can do hard things,” she said (both children are Saint Ms Rachel fans). “You can do hard things.”

Our daughter was getting cold and clingy so I took her to get changed. While I did that the volume from the pool area seemed to turn down. Eventually it stopped. Had they got out?

No, he’d just found his key. Something flipped, something connected, and suddenly he was ecstatic to be in the water and climbing along the side and being brave. When he came back to the car he was buzzing. “I loved it! It was the best! I love swimming. Can we go again soon?”

And in witnessing it all I was reminded how much it is that life’s triumphs almost always come from facing the things we are frightened by, even when — sometimes especially when — those fears do not entirely make sense, and when they originate in things we would so very much like to do.

This newsletter and my video series is an experiment in facing down rejection sensitivity and over-thinking, and it is working, but even as it rides buoyant other things bob beneath the surface. Some things that very much need doing, often things that I have avoided because of semi-rational fears about being rejected, have fallen off in the course of this start-a-business experiment, and if I don’t pick them up they will never get done and I will never know what might have been.

So much of my self-improvement stuff has been about this; the longing for certain things to go from inscrutable eldritch horrors to easy. And some hard things have become easier; other things turned out to be unnecessary, but some things remain that are simply hard and may always be so. But they only reap any reward if they are done, and the only way they get less hard is in the doing.

“You can do hard things.”

Ms Rachel really is always right.

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If I find myself getting particularly snappish or shrewish or off-centre it’s almost always one of three things:

1. Not enough sleep
2. Forgot to eat
3. Haven’t been exercising

And to this list I am tempted to add a fourth item; Haven’t been touching enough grass. And perhaps a fifth: Haven’t seen friends enough.

Well, today I managed to fix all five. Charlotte finally gave us a sleep worthy of the name, and then I went for a hike with some mates.

I am deeply suspicious of the traditional introvert/extrovert continuum; while I know there are people who trend more in one direction or another, we all want to see some people sometimes and other people no times, and there’s a lot of in-between. So I put the increasingly scary lawns to one side and all the work stuff I might conceivably do on a Sunday and walked up a bush-clad hill and down again with a couple of good friends.

I’ve had plenty of hikes where deep and meaningfuls are exchanged but this was not one of those occasions. From the moment we arrived in the carpark we were each a more or less continuous fountain of bullshit. Unmitigated, unadulterated shit-talking; there were bants and witticisms and non-sequiturs and Your Mum jokes. It was all the stuff that you can’t really exercise around the family unless you are a particular kind of dad (bad). No-one hiked near us; people got wind of the sheer malarkey in the air and stayed well clear. It was a mediocre day for it; low cloud put an end to majestic views, and we got drizzled on. None of us cared.

Coming back in the car I felt cleansed, despite being liberally smeared with trail-clay. Sometimes you just need to get some shit out of your system, and sometimes you just need to see your mates, and sometimes it’s both. Yes, this meant the lawns didn’t get mowed. Well… too bad, lawns. You’ll wait another day.

Of course once the kids were in bed I was straight back to work. The business isn’t going to start itself, as much as I might wish it would. And now I’ve done what work I could in the little evening interregnum and now I suppose I might actually try for another early-ish night myself, kick off some kind of virtuous cycle.

And if you too have felt a bit scratchy lately I really can recommend an honest grass-touching session, combined with a bit of hearty intra-friend bullshitting as needed. It’s good for what ails you.

I spent the latterly chunk of today despairing of getting nothing done, on account mostly of our youngest’s new habit of being an angel during daylight hours and a shrieking, sleepless imp by night. I’d call it teething, but that would require her to be producing teeth; at the moment she is keeping all but two of them safely — and, one presumes, painfully — in her gums.

The problem with being zombified with lack of sleep (at one point today I put Ms Rachel on to babysit the kids and lay down on the floor for a bit) is that you are still running over your undone to-do list in your head, and being in your head with regard to tasks that you know you have to do is, I find, the least helpful way to get things done. The longer you’re in your head the less chance you have of getting the thing done at all, until the anxiety crests a breaking point and you either do it in a panic or autoclave whatever project is causing you mental anguish.

Because I’m not sure how coherent that was, I made a graph.

The problem is that being very very tired and avoiding work because you are worried about it occupy similar mental spaces (I assume, non-neuroscientifically, that both are redolent of a lack of easy dopamine) and both produce the same kind of craving for both distraction and ice-cream. Which is to say, you feel lazy, even when it’s not your fault.

It hits me like this: I have a business I am starting, and it requires time and completed tasks, several of which would have been rather useful to have done six weeks ago, and here I am burning nearly an entire day on almost cleaning the kitchen.

I said as much to My Wife and she said “Some days just don’t work.” And she’s right. So we took the kids out and got takeaways for tea and we are now calling an early night, ideally to rack up as much sleep as possible before getting back on the wheel in the morning.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

Our family game was always “Balderdash,” a trivia game where all but one answer is made up by the players. It goes a little like this: one player is get handed a card, on which are printed a bunch of wild but true answers — a word (with a definition) or a movie (with a plot description) or a date (with some vanishingly unlikely occurrence). They read out the word or the movie or the date or whatever, but not the definition. Then everyone secretly scribbles their fake answer which is mixed in with the real one and they’re all read out by the person who knows what the real one is. Points are given accordingly. Strictly speaking, you’re meant to assign points to the definition that sounds most like the real answer, but it is much more fun if you just vote for the one you think is the funniest.

That tended to be the way our family played it. I say “played” but we still play it, on the sadly rare occasions when we’re all in the same place, and some of the bullshit definitions we’ve come up with have passed through the fires of in-joking and been forged as family folklore.

I bring all this up as my way of introducing the Egyptian Goddess of Irony, a figure who (of course) does not actually exist, and whose corresponding word has been lost to time. But we are an irony-appreciating lot, and the idea that the ancient Egyptians had a goddess specifically attuned to the vagaries of Murphy’s Law really tickled us, to the point that the nameless deity has somewhat dogged my life. Whenever something suitably ironic happens, the Egyptian Goddess is never far from my mind, sometimes paired with a fist brandished at the uncaring sky.

In my mind she looks like Alanis Morissette by way of Cleopatra.

And isn’t it ironic how the projects we care most about, the ones we’d most like to see succeed, are the ones that so often seem to fall a bit flat or get passed over by audiences? This was always the case with the stuff I wrote, as far back as my student media days — I’d put together something I thought was an absolute blinder, or plead with audiences to consider this one Very Important piece — and it’d get passed over entirely, or (worse) damned with the faintest “oh yes, I saw that, I think”-type praise. And perhaps the agonising process of carving off little lumps of soul and presenting them for the world to consider, only to have them spurned — or even just to risk a spurning — is what led me to adopt a certain blithe, perhaps supercilious, ironic detachment about earnest things, and perhaps it plays a role in what I now think of as a decade or two of missed creative opportunities.

Irony on irony.

Late in life, I am back to embracing earnestness. I don’t think irony took me far. The Goddess will lurk still, ready to be cursed or invoked with a wry chuckle; there will always be a darkly funny side. But perhaps I need to find a new patron. Perhaps a further game of Balderdash will reveal the name of a Goddess of Earnest Endeavour, a new, cheesier, but kinder and ultimately more productive muse.

On that note, here’s the Secret Project. I’m very proud of it, even if (as early signs indicate) it completely whiffs on social media.