I think the first ever time I had any understanding of what anarchism actually was (other than "chaos") when I was 13 or 14 and encountered them while on a sort-of political-ish forum I used. Aside from that, I was liberal at the time and didn't know that much about economic issues but gradually matured into a social democrat. For many years I kind of had a basic idea of what anarchism was but mostly dismissed it as unachievable, despite often finding it sympathetic. So, what happened? 2 and a half years ago, I was kicked out of sixth form (without any prior notification or anything given to prepare myself for what came next, the head didn't give a shit, apparently), just a couple of months into my second year and after having barely scraped through my first. It wasn't to do with behaviour, my depression was beginning to get serious and I couldn't get any work done (which was not entirely due to my depression and more the fact that I can't organize written work for shit). What does this have to do with anarchism? Well, I grew alienated with constantly hearing all the sugar-coated bullshit about everything with vague references to "your future" and such.

The next September, I began a new course at another college. It was a vocational course in IT. And guess what, I hated it even more and it was even more coursework-driven than academic work. This is the point at which I really became alienated with the world around me. The person I socialized with most was an annoying kid who acted like he just discovered 4chan and would literally just spout memes at me all day. I ended up staying on it for a whole year because I didn't know what else to do and got a basic foundation-level of the qualification, and vowed never to touch IT again.

And where does this leave me? Over the last year, I've completed a single work placement mostly doing menial work as part of a general employability course that made my life even more meaningless and have somehow managed to avoid killing myself. And over the past weeks, I've begun (properly) investigating anarchism (partly thanks to someone I know online who's an anarchist but partly out of my own interest in reaction to the increased exposure anarchism and socialism has had on Reddit in response to the rise of the alt-right) and am coming to the conclusion that I am an anarchist. Oh, and err, this is my first post here. How's that for an introduction?