WALK SIX MILES IN MY HEELS | AGE UK | AD

Two days ago, (July 11th) I was kindly invited to go on a trip with Age UK. They planned a walk through Teesdale Forest and along to the incredible High Force and Low Force waterfalls with a group of around thirty avid walkers and explorers.

A couple of things happened while we were there that inspired this post; the first was when one of the staff pointed to one of my recent, red, keloid, self-harm scars and said “what’ve you been doing? Did you scratch yourself on a tree?” I get that the scars were quite red and perhaps at a glance they appeared to be fresh, sore, scratches but never the less, I was put in an awkward position. When I recently cut my hand and needed stitches I had to tell a lot of lies to a lot of people who asked how I’d done it and I think I was just tired and – to be honest – a little bit ashamed to lie again. I mean I’m one of the people promoting that we talk more about mental health, yet I still resort to lies around my self-harm. So, I replied with “oh! I have mental health problems.” The lady quickly apologised and changed the subject – which I was grateful for.

HOW EDUCATION HAS AFFECTED MY MENTAL HEALTH | FUTURE LEARN | AD

I’m honoured to announce that this post is in collaboration with Future Learn.

At school I excelled at English – from a young age I’d enjoyed writing (granted, back then it was for writing short stories on having my own horse) and one of my Middle School teachers predicted that I’d end up being a Journalist. But from as young as I can remember; we were taught at school that we do our GCSEs in High School, stay on for Sixth Form to sit our A Levels, and go to University to get a degree to get a job. We were never taught about Apprenticeships or alternative qualifications like Access to HE, BTEC, and vocational qualifications.

APPEARING ON KOAST RADIO (106.6 FM) | AD

On Tuesday July 3^rd I’ll be paying a visit to the Koast radio station! Tune in to find out more – 1pm on 106.6 FM!

Follow Koast Radio on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/KoastRadio

FROM CUTS TO CARLISLE | HOW I CHANGED MY MENTAL HEALTH AROUND IN WEEK

*Note: This post contains talk of self-harm*

Last Friday (15^th June) I had a complete mental health crisis in the form of two dissociative episodes within hours of one another.

One minute I was at home watching Netflix and the next thing I knew I was staring at a huge cut in the palm of my hand, blood dripping from it and covering the floor; which was littered in pieces of a broken cup. I still can’t for certain that I smashed the cup on purpose and cut myself but since I’ve done that in the past it seems like the logical explanation(!) I think that the only thing stopping me from accepting that as the case is the fear that comes with it. If I’m capable of completely switching off from the world and self-harming without knowing it, then what the hell else am I capable of doing?!

MY LIFE IN NINE iZOMBIE QUOTES

So, last year, I was facilitating a course in ‘Recovery Through Blogging’ at the local Recovery College and the ice breaker for the group was to talk about your favourite movie or TV show. The entire class had told us their favourite movie and then we got to one girl and she said ‘I’m going to be a bit different then and talk about my favourite TV show from Netflix.’ When she said iZombie was from Netflix, I got interested; having just signed up to the incredible service myself, I’d been in search of new shows and movies. She told us that the show was about a girl who was a Zombie but she solved the murders of the people’s brains she ate. I’m into gory things like that so when I got home I added it to ‘My List’ on Netflix and ended up forgetting about it for a couple of months or so. When I finally watched it, it was one of those shows were it takes a couple of episodes to really get invested in the characters but after that, I was hooked! I recently just re-watched the entire series for the fourth time (there’s four series with about twenty episodes per season) and wondered how I could spread the word about this incredible show…

1.     “But what if there is hope? Even if it’s dim and somewhere in the nebulous future. It’s a hope I need in order to survive”