Steven Games
Steven — if you're reading this, go and get f****d! 😠🖕 Hey everyone, I'm Niamh. I'm 34, I'm a care worker in Manchester, and I'm a single mum to my little girl Mia. She's seven. I don't own anything. No rich family, no partner to split the bills with. Just me. Rent's £1,100 a month for a small two-bed flat that's freezing this time of year, and my rent takes up more than half of what I earn before I've even done the weekly shop. Lately it's just been doing my head in. I do the early shifts and the night shifts, I help elderly residents wash and get dressed, I hold their hands while they cry for family that never visit, and I come home so wrecked I can barely get my shoes off. Winter in Manchester is miserable, and when the energy bill came in, I actually felt sick looking at it. The only little luxury I kept was watching an episode of a show on Netflix on Sunday nights after Mia was asleep — the one subscription I couldn't bring myself to cancel just to stay sane. For my birthday a few months back, I bought myself a pair of Nike trainers on Amazon using Klarna, just desperately wanting to treat myself to something nice for once. But every month when that £30 instalment hit my bank account, I'd get that horrible panic in my chest. And then there's Mia. Once a week on a Saturday, I'd take her into Starbucks to get her a hot chocolate or a Frappuccino just so she felt special. I'd never buy anything for myself — I'd just sit there drinking tap water, and finish off whatever she didn't drink. The thing that broke me was small. Mia came home from school and asked if she could do the Friday dance class, because all her friends do it. Forty quid a month. And I had to say no. I told her maybe next term, and she just said "okay Mummy" in this little voice and went to her room. That night I properly lost it. The strap on her shoe was being held together with a hair tie, and I couldn't even give her forty pounds. One of the girls I work with, Chloe, showed me something on her
