Part
One:
http://www.imnotdisordered.co.uk/2021/03/the-ultimate-guide-to-pinterest-mental.html
“Do
what you can with all you have, wherever you are.”
Theodore Roosevelt
This post has actually become
something it wasn’t going to be when I first thought of it and started planning
it! Initially, I thought that it would just be a ton of images created on Canva, but in creating the images,
I began thinking a lot about what they mean, how important they can be, and how
they can impact mental health…
METHOD OF
CREATIVITY:
I
think I’ve been a creative person since I was little. I used to make collages
with my Nana out of torn up catalogues and then I began writing short stories
about horses! The writing sort of fizzled out when I got older, but for a few
years I wanted to be a fashion designer, so I opted to study Textiles for my
exams.
Unfortunately,
I had a really terrible subject teacher who would constantly undermine my work
and criticise my understanding of the briefing we’d be given to inspire our
projects. It was as though – only with me – she couldn’t decide whether she
wanted literal interpretations of the topic or imaginative. I couldn’t win.
Couldn’t get anything right. And it really knocked all the confidence and
passion I had in my creativity, leaving me with absolutely no drive or interest
in pursuing some sort of career in the industry.
I don’t think it was until my second psychiatric hospital admission after a suicide attempt that I re-discovered creativity; and more specifically, writing. I think it was a truly pure moment when I just felt that writing how I felt and what I had experienced for the staff, was the most natural and obvious way to get help and support, and to recover.
Over
the years, I’ve very fortunately had so many people compliment my writing and
I’m always reluctant to accept it because I mostly don’t feel as though I’ve
tried very hard. And I often worry that to say something like that would sound
as though I was looking for a compliment or reassurance. I now realise though,
that this – me thinking I haven’t put a whole lot of effort in but being told
it was good – was evidence that maybe it was just that writing came naturally
to me… Perhaps it’s this, that has contributed to I’m NOT Disordered’s
popularity and its (thankfully) forever growing audience.
I’d
like to think it’s not just about being a good writer/blogger though – it’s
about being creative with it! It’s like this one instance when I was invited to
an event about coal mining and I somehow (I still wonder what I was thinking!)
made it relevant to my mental health blog! I also enjoy different, very simple,
formats for posts; like including bullet points and subtitles. Most recently
though, I’ve become very fond of creating and adding images to my posts using a
bit of Pinterest and a lot of Canva!
People
are usually surprised to hear that I’m not massively talented with technology;
I guess a lot of them assume that having a blog with the numbers I have will
automatically mean I’m confident and knowledgeable using computers and their
various functions! This was pretty well evidenced when I talked on Twitter
about my tutorial sessions with Elev8 Web Design for the new LEAPS website
being created on WordPress. The thing these people didn’t know was that when I
was creating, I’m NOT Disordered, I’d had a brief, little scan of WordPress and
very quickly deemed it too complicated and that was why I decided to go with
Blogger. And in that very beginning, I didn’t have a clue about designing a
blog, so I had another inpatient in the psychiatric hospital do that side of
it. Then, because she was being discharged before me, I was sort of ‘forced’
into learning things for myself! Obviously, this was intimidating and scary to
feel as though I’d been thrown in at the deep end, but ultimately, I’m so glad
it happened because it’s allowed me the opportunity to use my creativity in a
way that feels more important. I’m NOT Disordered means so much to my life,
that to be able to take full responsibility for everything about it – good and
bad – is rewarding and a notion that is full of pride and honour.
I
don’t think I really appreciated or knew just how creative I could be with my
blog and social media until I had my Digital Marketing Internship and was
taught the amazing joys of Canva in creating memes. Or at least that’s how it
started. In creating title images for my blog posts, I discovered so many more
features of Canva and particularly enjoy the photo collage element to it –
which I used in this post! It’s proven to become one of my favourite aspects in
creating blog posts and some of the content on my Twitter feed.
My other favourite aspect of creating these graphics, is sourcing the images for them on Pinterest. I think using the platform in that way, can really open up how creative you can then be on Canva because often, I find that my vision of the finished graphic becomes completely different the more I scroll through Pinterest! It really feels as though a whole other realm of creativity is opened when you search for a particular subject or topic of image. I think my absolute favourite example of this was when I compiled my Christmassy pins!
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/aimeswilson/christmas/
INSPIRATION &
IDEAS:
I
think that growing up, I never really had someone – other than my Mum – that I
felt inspired by or who I looked up to. The respect and appreciation I have for
my Mum leaves me with the belief that if I can be half the mother she is when I
have children, they’d be pretty darn lucky! I guess there was an element of a
really vague inspiration in the series of books I used to read about the
adventures of a girl and her Shetland Pony: Sheltie. I was obsessed with horses
and had horse riding lessons for a few years, so the thought of having my own
horse and going on exciting missions with him, felt like a great idea!
I
don’t think it was until I started blogging that I began really investing
myself in the work people I deemed inspiring, would produce. When I first
created, I’m NOT Disordered in 2013, there were only three very notable mental
health blogs and none of them were by someone in my position as an inpatient in
a psychiatric hospital. On the one hand, this was a good thing because it meant
I had very quickly – and somewhat easily – found a niche for my blog and that
could mean more readers who had been looking for something that was missing in
the industry. On the other hand, it meant that my first year or so of blogging,
was kind of lonely… I mean, I didn’t have anyone to brainstorm with, there was
no one to give me tips and advice, and I had to make absolutely all the
decisions for my blog by myself because I couldn’t ask someone for their
opinion on something, they knew little to nothing about.
Feeling
that I’ve learnt a lot about blogging ‘the hard way’ has definitely had an
impact on myself as a person in that I think I’ve become more resilient and
confident around learning new things and developing skills. It’s also driven me
to produce content around advice and tips on blogging or mental health in
general because I have the hope and intention of helping others to avoid having
to take the scenic route(!) I did. I guess, there needs to be a balance though;
because some people need to learn by doing, but there’s also people who might
completely give up on something when a seemingly overwhelming challenge comes
along.
I
think that the feeling that I was really floundering in the early part of my
blogging career meant that when I somehow discovered Zoe Sugg from ‘Zoella’ and Victoria Magrath from ‘inthefrow’, I felt reassured and
relieved. They were both also in the early years of their blogging and YouTube
careers, yet they were already proving successful, popular, and influential, so
they were both pretty much instantly inspirational in different ways.
With
Zoe, I loved watching her going from filming videos on her phone or web camera
in her bedroom at her family home to now filming in her own little studio in
her home worth over one million pounds an! And then her fashion hauls used
mostly be from Primark, but she’s now gifted hundreds of products upon
products! I found it so enduring to see that she has remained grounded and is
always grateful for her roots and recognizing how far she – and her blog – have
come.
Seeing
this, I’d like to think it became something I was inspired by and have come to
learn and embody. You know, I’ll never forget starting I’m NOT Disordered in my
hospital bedroom and with another inpatient designing it and then screaming and
jumping up and down to celebrate my first 100 readers! And I think that’s a
really good quality when I – and my blog – are at the point they are now; with
heading toward one million readers and affording me so many incredible
opportunities that I might have never gotten if it weren’t for my blog and its
readers. So, I guess I really recognize just how important my readers are, and
I’m forever grateful to every single organisation that’ve offered me those
opportunities. I’ve never deemed one to be ‘better’ than another or any more of
an achievement because I recognize that if it weren’t for the collaborations
earlier in my blogging industry, I wouldn’t have gotten so many more.
Grounding
myself also became a lot more important when I began speaking to the media about,
I’m NOT Disordered and mental health in general. I guess it was the typical
challenge of the whole ‘five-minutes-of-fame’ and people thinking that if you’ve
been on TV or in newspapers or on the radio, then you’ll think you’re famous,
that everyone will know who you are, and that – in some way – you should be
treat as special. I think that the closest I came to this feeling was when a
few staff in my local shops would say they’d seen or heard me in the media. And
I think it was really helpful that I was speaking to Journalists and Reporters
about self-harm, and suicide, and mental illness because it filled me with the
belief that I wasn’t publicising myself. I was talking about my journey and my
experiences to better the help and support others receive.
Then
Victoria, I also watched her blog come on leaps and bounds from filming hauls
with companies like boohoo, to now being invited to fashion shows with Dior and
opportunities to design her own beauty collection and to write a book! Aside
from seeing inthefrows continued improvement, I took the majority of
inspiration from Victoria herself and her incredible work ethic. I mean, other
than my Mum, I’ve never known someone to work so hard, or be so dedicated, and
so passionate, about something. I think that finding someone – and for that
someone to be a Blogger too(!) – who embodied these things to a level where I
hoped to one day be at, was really beneficial for my blog. It’s meant that I
use those qualities and that work ethic, to apply to creating content and I’d
like to think that it has resulted in an improvement in the standard of the
posts I’ve published.
Seeing Victoria’s work really motivated me in terms of collaborations. I would see her advertise fashion brands and work with beauty companies, and it made me think ‘what would be the mental health equivalent?’ Her content inspired me to be so much more creative with my ideas for my own blog posts and I think doing that, has made I’m NOT Disordered so much more unique; enabling it to remain popular and successful regardless as to how many mental health blogs there now is. Victoria’s ethos of constantly bettering her content, has inspired me to do the same.
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/aimeswilson/in-the-frow/
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/aimeswilson/zoella/
FEELING INADEQUATE:
Again,
I felt it important to shed light on the challenges of this platform and others
like it because there are so many opportunities and instances of developing a
feeling of inadequacy occurring.
I
think my first experience with the belief came with my exams in High School.
Unfortunately, the preparation and revision for them began not long after the
abuse had started and I was already very aware of just how much it was
affecting me, that I couldn’t imagine ever achieving passes on my subjects. I
mean, how could my brain really absorb all of the required information when all
it seemed to be doing was thinking up methods to hurt myself? The exams I was
studying for were milestones in my education and finding my path to a
successful, employed, future. So, I also wondered how I could even consider
having a future when my present was so difficult and upsetting. I was already
having suicidal ideations so a big part of me recognized that actually, maybe I
wouldn’t even have a future far enough to sit the exams.
As
it happened, the abuse ended a few months before the exams and my determination
to beat my abuser’s efforts to sabotage my studying, motivated me to persist in
my revision as a desperate attempt to feel as though I had ‘won’ in the war
against him. As it happened, his one last attempt to ruin my future failed
thanks to the love of my Mum, and I passed all of my exams!
Going
through that, I don’t think I had been fully aware of the thoughts and feelings
around inadequacy, so the first time I can remember having full recognition of
inadequacy was when the auditory hallucinations (in the form of voices) began
two years after the abuse. I remember walking out of the retail store I’d been
working in and all of a sudden this man’s voice whispered in my ear: ‘you’re
useless. Kill yourself.’ I looked around but there was only one man and he was
too far away to have said those things as close to my face as I had felt, and
heard, it. I somehow shrugged it off as a very random one-off experience; but
the following day, he was back.
For
the next ten days, I battled overwhelming feelings of inadequacy as I came to realise
that my mentality and determination were absolutely no match for the
hallucinations. My counter arguments to their continued and persistent comments
that I’d deserved the abuse and should kill myself, became so insufficient and insignificant
that I wondered why I even bothered trying to put up a defence. My attempts
seemed futile and ultimately pointless; it was almost as though from that first
day, I knew it was going to end in a suicide attempt. As though it was almost inevitable…
From
that first suicide attempt in 2009 until my admission to the specialist
psychiatric hospital in 2012, I spent almost every day feeling inadequate in
some way. First it would be because I continued to fail at the suicide attempts,
I made or that the instances of self-harm were totally pathetic because they
would ‘only’ amount to steri-strips at the very worst. A lot of those feelings
of uselessness stemmed from experiences as an inpatient in psychiatric
hospitals where I witnessed so many incidents of others making a suicide
attempt that left them unable to breathe, or self-harming in ways that resulted
in them needing plastic surgery. It almost became a self-created competition –
something which, to be fair, isn’t unheard of in psychiatric services.
Thinking
I could never hurt or kill myself in a way I could deem adequate, continued for
over four years until I created, I’m NOT Disordered and found a whole other subject
to feel inadequate about! I think that blogging can be deemed a competitive
industry to a lot of people so feeling that way, wasn’t exactly self-created as
the previous occasions of inadequacy had been.
Finding
the absence of a mental health blog written by an inpatient of a psychiatric
hospital, meant that probably for the first year or so, I was quite confident
and comfortable in continuing to create content just the same as I had from the
first day of my blogging career. Looking back, I partly wish I had appreciated
that comfort a little bit more because honestly? When the industry became more
saturated with mental health blogs, blogging became a little bit more exhausting!
Initially,
beginning to experience inadequacy around my blog was a bit off-putting and
left me questioning whether I should even continue blogging. I almost weighed
up the pros and cons – did I experience enough benefits from blogging to make
putting so much more time and effort into it, worth it? Obviously, I came to
the conclusion that it was and now – over eight years later – I’ve found the
inadequacy has actually been beneficial to I’m NOT Disordered. It’s meant that I’ve
almost been forced to improve my content; to be more imaginative and more
dedicated.