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Dear world. I am a fraud. For the whole of my working life, pushing twenty-five years now, I’ve been disengaged. It was the same through two degrees, and schooling from start to end.

Colleagues at work treat me like some kind of genius, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Occasionally I produce good work which earns plaudits. But by and large, I’m below mediocre, often distracted and completely disengaged.

Just as at school where I would stare at my work, willing it on to do itself, so it is in the workplace. For most of my working life, I’ve done the bare minimum, while exhausting myself with a perpetual refrain of inadequacy, forever chiding myself for my lax attitude.

The worst part of all this is that nobody around me realises I’m a fraud. I started to open up about it to my previous manager, only she quit her post in a whirlwind of her own anxiety, declaring herself a fraud too.

Not even my wife recognises that I’m a fraud. She’s constructed a vision of me likewise very far from reality. The breadwinner of the household, yes, but only through this inner fraud, of the helpful office worker, capable of answering a few niche queries on his specialist subject.

I don’t mean that I have no qualifications, or that I didn’t finish school. I simply mean that my brain doesn’t work as it properly should. I cannot focus, nor get interested enough in any duty I’m employed to discharge.

Occasionally, if deadlines loom prominently enough, I will put my head down and work long and late hours to bring it to completion. But even here my enthusiasm is waning. I’ve lost interest in what I do, bored of the business as usual.

And so weeks, months and years fly by like they were just minutes, as I find myself with little to show for the time God gave me. And the more I stumble in this maddening fraud, the worse I feel, knowing that soon enough God will take me account for the life I’ve lived.

What do I actually provide for this household, other than a steady income? What’s my actual contribution? And the steady income: do I actually do anything to deserve this? Rather, it’s a test for the fraudulent soul.

I carry with me so many frauds. I’m not really the nice man people say I am. I’m not really very well educated. I’m not particularly talented in anything. And, more than anything else, I don’t really work very hard. I’m a fraud in every sense.

And the last of these frauds: this declaration isn’t even new. I’ve been cognisant of it for decades now, but still nothing has changed. I’m starting to think this is beyond me to fix, because I keep on returning to the same blunders, cyclically, as the years pass by.

Would I still be a fraud if I could put a name to all of this? Would having a diagnosis make any difference, or would it just make my behaviour even more fraudulent? What I seek is to overcome this tiring morass, to arrive at some kind of normalcy. But I can’t. Because, as I’ve mentioned, I’m a fraud.