"Action
will delineate and define you."
Thomas
Jefferson
When the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) asked me to write another blog post after the event (I published one before the Conference; which you can read, here), I struggled to think what angle or theme I would use for it. So, I thought about why people come to I’m NOT Disordered anyway, and really, it’s typically about looking for advice and accounts of situations they’ve been in too – accounts which bring hope of recovery and tips on coping. But I also wanted to recognise that my life – and that of so many others – doesn’t revolve around trauma and mental illness. So, I created this post which contains a thank you, a couple of videos from the event, and is also full of advice and thoughts on the three actions I've taken which, I believe, led to me being invited to speak at this prestigious conference hosted by the Emergency Medicine Trainee Association (EMTA)….
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It’s been
said many times, and by a variety of people, that I’m a ‘cup-half-full’ kind of
girl and that I always look for the ‘silver lining’ in horrible situations and find
and establish positives in difficult thoughts or feelings. In all honesty, I
think that at least half of the instances where I do this are those where you’d
say; “if I don’t laugh, I’ll cry,” and so I almost feel like I’m picking the
better option as opposed to consciously creating a positive mindset or thought
process.
Now,
regardless of the fact that I’ve been that way for a good few years, I’ve never
developed the mindset that professionals preach about and who tell you that
you’re properly in recovery when you reach that point. And that’s when you’re
grateful for all the bad things, all the trauma, all the hardships, that have
happened to you; and that you feel that way because you recognise those things
made you who you are today and put you are where you are today. The problem
with this for me – and which lasted many years – was that I didn’t really much
like myself, and I didn’t exactly feel ‘lucky’ for the – often horrible and
upsetting – positions and situations I’ve been in over the last few years.
I also
struggled with the idea that anyone would say they were grateful for going
through sexual abuse or for being raped – two traumatic experiences I’ve had. I
thought; ‘who the hell could say “thanks” to someone for doing that to them?!’
That’s the way I had understood developing this positive and helpful mindset. I
mean, I thought that if anything, it would mean someone was mentally unwell to
say something like that! Like, what did a person have to do to reach that
point? How could anyone become grateful for it? What would have to change for
someone to develop those thoughts and feelings around their trauma? What would
have to happen?
Ironically,
the majority of those professionals who reassure you that you could reach that
point of gratitude say so with the best of intentions, but actually; it filled
me with distrust toward them. It’s incredibly similar to the fact that a lot of
mental health services and staff work towards you reaching ‘recovery’ but lead
you to believe that once you have recovered, that’s it. You won’t get sad
again. You won’t struggle. You’ll never self-harm or feel suicidal… And, for
me, the real danger with avoiding telling people that even if they’re thought
to be in recovery, things can still get difficult, is that if those people do
find themselves struggling again, they feel like an utter failure. And, on top
of that, not being made aware or prepared for any sort of setback or relapse, means
that if it is to happen, the person doesn’t know what to do. They don’t know
who they should call – even they even should call anyone(!) – nor what they
should do to get help and support through it.
Unfortunately,
I’ve been one of those people who was filled, from professionals, with a false
sense of security in believing I’d never struggle or end up in hospital again once
I was discharged from my two and a half years detention under the 1983 Mental
Health Act. This is how and why I can recognise the level of hopelessness you
can find yourself experiencing as well as how difficult, time-consuming, and
energy-consuming it really can be to learn the brutal fact that recovery just
isn’t linear. That nothing is ‘wrong’ with you, and it isn’t you ‘fault’ if
things do go backwards for some time.
So, I
think that rather than all these professionals spending their time pulling the
wool over everyone’s eyes; they could instead use that time to provide advice
and information on how someone can cope and what they should do if they feel
they’re experiencing a relapse in their mental health. It would be so much more
productive! And I completely appreciate that some might worry that in telling
people that any of their improvements might not last, will fill them with a
sense of ‘why bother trying?’ but, I’d say it’s a lot safer to provide them
with some sort of forewarning.
Alongside
overcoming feelings of failure, this situation also provided the foundations
for my distrust in professionals and mental health services. Having that
foundation, has meant that if anything else has come up, where it’s led me to
doubt the validity of what I’m being told, it’s been a whole lot easier for
that to become something huge because really, it’s just piling on top of what
is already established. And so, the preaches on being grateful for your trauma,
mostly ‘fell on deaf ears.’ It just sounded so impossible and unpractical. It
made me think; ‘if there’s a chance, I’ll feel that way about it, why am I
letting it have the power to kill me now?’
The
past few weeks or month or so, though, I’ve found myself feeling more and more
kinship, understanding, and appreciation to that more positive and productive
mindset actually becoming a reality for me! So, in my speech at the Conference I
talked a little bit about that and the fact that I feel so lucky to have had
the chance and the opportunity to be able to eventually come to that way of
thinking. I mean, there have obviously been multiple points in my life where I
could have very easily died and have had that chance to recover taken from me –
because of me!
So,
this provides me with the insight to recognise – and be massively grateful for
– the life-changing and life-saving impact professionals, mental health
services, and emergency medicine staff have had on me. Years ago, I would
massively resent those saving my life because they were doing so and then I was
just… kind of, left. Like, no one did anything to help me to improve my life or
my mental health and it’s a huge reason why I resented the whole ‘duty of care’
line because I saw it as those people just doing their job without actually
caring or having passion for it. Without really wanting to save my life. They
just were, because they had to.
In
choosing the subtitle for this part, there were honestly a ton of negative
instances I could talk through and discuss how I turned them into good, but I
felt that explaining my new-found gratitude for my traumas, was actually the
most powerful example, because I feel that it has been the most monumental change
or improvement in my recovery.
So, in keeping
with the subtitle stating the good I’ve found from these things, here’s some (hopefully,
helpful) bits of advice and messages I’d like to say based on the experiences
I’ve just spoken about:
·
Do
not walk around life with rose-tinted sunglasses. The mindset of a ‘glass half
full’ isn’t intended to be used to ignore or dismiss negative instances rather
than confronting them and establishing safe coping skills. Instead, it is about
using such instances to learn from them so that they ‘make’ you instead of ‘break’
you.
·
Learning
recovery isn’t linear and seeing how important that awareness can be –
particularly in terms of safety and risk – I now try to tell others, but that
shouldn’t really be my place or responsibility. Professionals: do better with
this.
·
Having
doubts about professionals and what they’re telling you is completely ok, it is
not ok to let them result in you distancing yourself from services, mistrusting
professionals, and being uncooperative, particularly in terms of therapy and
medication. Instead, use your doubts to create questions and ask them with
confidence and the knowledge that you deserve answers.
· Know that even if you reach a point where you think life is perfect; your mental health is completely stable, you’re safe, relationships are going well, you’re being productive with your time… That doesn’t mean it’s the end of the hard work and the achievements; stay motivated.
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Before
I began blogging, I don’t think I really paid much attention to my confidence
and my ability to make new friends or to build on relationships. Looking back,
perhaps the most notable relationship relevant here was the one I built with my
ex. We met on January 17th, 2009, and by my Birthday on February 1st,
we were boyfriend and girlfriend. In the May-ish, I began experiencing auditory
hallucinations and made my first suicide attempt, so; when I say he was there
from the start? I mean, he was there from Day One!
The
irony is, despite the hurt I imagine I put him through – I say ‘imagine’
because he never told me that I had – it was still his responsibility and fault
as to why the relationship eventually ended in 2018 (I won’t go into the
details because I wrote two blog posts that talked a bit about it at the time
it happened; the first is here and the second is here). I think that the reason why
that stung and mattered, was because I felt I had spent years feeling guilty
and wanting to apologise and ‘make it up to him.’ In the real poorly days with
my mental health, I 100% recognised the impact it was having on my loved ones
in general (especially my Mum), but it didn’t matter. Or, at least, it wasn’t
enough to stop me from coping in all the ways that were hurting them and ending
up in the situations which they struggled with the most. So, to have felt bad
about upsetting him, but for him to then go and do what he did? It made me feel
stupid. Naïve. And it was like; ‘I’ve spent all those years feeling guilty, and
this is how the relationship ends?!’ It was like there was no recognition for
my guilt and my sympathy for the impact my actions had on him and that there
was no mutual respect for that because he clearly didn’t give two monkeys about
hurting me! I felt I’d wasted all those years of my life loving someone who
didn’t love me as much.
Losing
a relationship which has lasted that long, I initially, felt complete
desperation; I mean, we had been engaged, had our wedding venue booked, had
registered to get a home together, and were talking about babies. He was going
to be my soulmate. My ‘forever.’ My ‘happily ever after.’ So, I felt lost too.
Like, what should I do now? I mean, even down to the details of the break-up;
like, do I throw all his things that were in my home out? Do I tell him to come
get them or do I never speak to him again? Fortunately, my Mum had gotten his
copy of my house key from him so he couldn’t just march in and get his things. So,
I ended up packing them up and putting them out in the garden, hoping it would
rain before he got to them (because even the eldest person in the world can
become immature and petty when there’s a relationship break-up!)!
In
keeping with the very first bit of this post about the cup-half-full mindset, I
learnt a lot from that relationship and one of the largest lessons was that I
actually wasn’t too fussed about being single. And initially, that was because
I had this belief that it meant I wouldn’t get emotionally hurt again by a guy,
but then I developed a healthier thought that I liked my freedom. I also
reflected on how different we had both been. Whilst my Mum was incredibly
supportive of the relationship (to the point of starting to save for my wedding
dress!) it was something she had picked up on too: that I was more passionate
and dedicated to things – particularly my blog. Whereas he didn’t seem to have
any direction in life or any ambition to do better! Even is so far as to get a
promotion at work or to get a better-paid job. And I think that sometimes, you
can get lost in a moment – and in a person. You can become so focused and
invested on all the good things, that you almost ignore or become blind-sided
to anything contradictory to that. Like the whole rose-tinted sunglasses thing
but in a negative way.
So, I
think that leaving my ex, ended up being really good for my mental health and
also, for my blog; and I know that might sound a bit silly but the majority of
you will likely know how important I’m NOT Disordered is to me – even if it’s
your first time reading it (because I’d like to think that I get that across in
every post!)! So, for me to feel that my content has improved in quality and
that the blog’s popularity has obviously massively improved… Of course, some of
that is natural growth and a lot of other things like collaborations and media
appearances etc, but I think that ending that relationship… Well, I think that
I realised that his absence of drive and passion and determination and
dedication, had started to – ever so slightly – started to rub off on me a bit
too. That I had perhaps become less passionate and dedicated to improving my
blog’s content, to building upon its readership, to developing collaborations
with more well-known organisations, and to securing more media appearances.
Recognising
this reduction and losing the person who I felt had caused it, led to a notion
I’ve experienced a heck of a lot since being sectioned under the 1983 Mental
Health Act for over two and a half years… And it was the thought that: ‘I have
a heck of a lot of time to make up for!’ It’s something I’ve especially had in
my relationship with my Mum and our determination to do as many activities and
trips together and make as many memories as possible to make up for me being literally
over 100 miles away for two and a half years! That time away taught me a lot
though and from this particular sensation that I have time to make up for, it’s
meant that the hospitalisation has massively helped me to recognise the honour
it is to have the freedom and time to be with loved ones and to do things that
make you happy and are working towards you having a positive and productive
future.
I also
created I’m NOT Disordered after about six months in that psychiatric hospital
all those miles away from home! It meant that, when I was learning through
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) about relationships (there’s an entire
module on Interpersonal Effectiveness – which includes a ton of work
on building and working on relationships to ensure they are safe, healthy, trustworthy, reliable, helpful, meaningful,
positive, validating, and are full of good communication) – maintaining healthy ones,
and ending negative ones – it meant that it was apt to establish how this was
relevant to my blogging too. This was good, because if I hadn’t been blogging
then, I might have asked different questions and established different skills
in this area, and it might have meant that if I did still start blogging, I
would’ve been trying to figure things out by myself. And, as independent as I
like to be, I’m a huge believer in the power of recognising when you need help
from someone, and my mental health; is most definitely one of those things.
So, I
think that through that particular module of DBT, as well as my general mental
health recovery, and my thoughts around my blog, I quite quickly developed a
sense of recognising how helpful others could be with my blog, its content, its
popularity, and a general understanding or definition of ‘success.’ It was
actually just under one year of blogging before I began my first collaboration,
and it was with the UK’s leading charity for the mental health of children and
young people; YoungMinds! I connected with the Charity
because with my first suicide attempt being not long after my 18th
Birthday, it meant that when I was sectioned, I had to be admitted straight to
adult services. Typically, a young person has some prior experience of the
Children and Young People’s (CYPS) NHS mental health services before entering
adult services, but I hadn’t spoken up about the abuse nor told anyone when I
started struggling with my mental health. That experience though, showed me the
importance of having a difference in services and in care between age groups,
so I wanted to illustrate my support of that notion/factor by reaching out to
YoungMinds – who were just launching a new Campaign (YoungMinds VS – which I
blogged about in various posts from January to April 2014: to give you a good starting
point though, the very first one is here!).
Building
on that first collaboration, I made contact with Time To Change (a national
Campaign against the stigma and discrimination surrounding mental health) and
attended my very first mental health event (I blogged about it here). My work with Time To Change
over the following seven or eight years (the Campaign lost funding and closed
in 2021) was pretty career-defining! I mean, I think our work together gave me
the largest example or illustration of how much progress I had made in terms of
my blogging career, the content I created, and the popularity of I’m NOT
Disordered. And the simplest – but, in my eyes, most profound – example of that
is that when we started working together, I handed leaflets out at my first event
with them, one year later and I was asked to give the closing speech at their
London event (Storycamp, in 2015: I blogged about it here). A while after that, and I was
asked to actually run one of their social media channels from their London
Office for Time To Talk Day!
Building
that sense of achievement in working with Time To Change and feeling like the
change in responsibilities that I was granted, really illustrated just how well
my blogging career was going; was a huge inspiration to continue engaging in
collaborations and events. And this was how I met the Doctor who offered me the
EMTA opportunity, because, in 2015, Josephine Darke invited me to be the
Blogger for the second Conference of Mind The Gap (you can read the blog post
about the event here) which was the Mental Health
Society created by students of Newcastle University. With the rewarding notions
stemming from those experiences with Time To Change, I had come to recognise that
the opportunities available at an event are literally endless – regardless of
why you’re there! And I’d say that’s how I ended up filming an impromptu
interview with the amazing and inspirational Comedian; Dave Chawner after his
set at the event (you can watch that interview here)!
A
mindset that helped me to have that experience and to begin really making the
most of events, was the recognition that those instances might never happen
again, and I think a hugely influential aspect of my life to impact this, was
my suicide attempts and time on life support, in Intensive Care. They’ve really
opened my eyes to how quickly and how drastically, life can change, and when my
mental health improved, I started to view every opportunity as worthy. I
desperately wanted to do as I talked about earlier in ‘making up for lost time’
and unfortunately, this initially meant that I would often commit to too many
responsibilities at once. I just wanted to make the most of the time I now had
left. Over the years of my blogging career though, I’ve learnt about moderation
and recognising that if I agree to ten things, maybe I can only give 5/10
effort to all of them, but if I say ‘yes’ to three, I might end up being able
to give 10/10 to each! So, it can become about quality rather than quantity. And
I used this understanding with the Comedian chat because I recognised that it’d
be so much easier to have a sit down with him there and then than swapping
business cards and trying to get in touch again and find another date when we
were both free…
Another
helpful mindset or thought process, is something my Mum actually taught me a
few years ago and it’s the saying that ‘shy bairns, get nowt.’ Which, if you’re
unsure, very basically translates into meaning that shy people get nothing. With
this, Josephine and Dave had something big and special in common: I recognised
that they were both going places(!) and that remaining in touch outside/after
the event, could be really important and fundamental to securing more
opportunities to work with each of them again! And I wasn’t just right about Jo
– now Dr Darke(!) – but I also worked with Dave again (which you can read; here) and got him an entire set at
an event once too (which you can read about; here)!
Once
again, similar to earlier, here are a few bits of advice or messages I’d give as
a result of the bits and pieces I’ve just talked through about networking and
its impact on me getting the opportunity to deliver this speech:
·
Never
lose you in someone else. Don’t give too much of yourself to someone else so
that there’s not enough or nothing left to give to your own life.
·
No
matter how brutal the ending of a romantic relationship is, don’t let it
destroy you nor define you.
·
Use
the ‘shy bairns get nowt’ logic in earning opportunities in life where, if it
wasn’t for that mindset, you’d have just walked away and came out with nothing
for your time or energy.
·
Trust
your instincts when you meet someone new and get the notion that they’re
special and that a connection could be beneficial: having business cards are
fairly relevant to this one!
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I think
that the final of the three largest reasons why I think I got the opportunity
to give my speech at the EMTA Conference, is a bit more fun and less intense
than the other two, because it’s around the content I create.
When I
was little, I used to write short stories about animals going on adventures –
particularly horses because I took horse-riding lessons for a quite a while –
and my Mum and my Nana used to read every single one of them. I mean, my Mum
told me that my Nana was always on the phone asking when the next story was
coming! I think that alongside enjoying my writing and being creative and using
my imagination, I also really liked to see my Mum and Nana laugh and smile when
they were reading my stories. And I wonder whether, subconsciously obviously;
because I was so young, that stuck with me and helped me to recognise the power
and influence your writing can have on a reader’s thoughts and feelings. Knowing
that you can make someone smile with your words, helps me to also really
recognise that you can do the exact opposite too; and I think this – an
awareness of the impact of your content – is a fundamentally important skill or
mindset to have, in mental health blogging.
When
the abuse began, I stopped writing stories because I was so afraid that I’d
write something, and the abuse would just come out in all of it! As though I
would just get like that verbal diarrhoea but in writing form! And, for so many
very valid but often contradictory(!) reasons, I wasn’t exactly ready for anyone
to know what was happening to me. I kept a diary still, though I wrote in very
brief notes and abbreviated a lot of words – and I actually ended up being very
grateful for that because it was quite helpful when everything was reported to
the Police. It enabled me to provide exact dates (which would have been
incredibly hard without the diary because I didn’t report it until two years
later!) and that gave them the ability to double-check that he and I had been
in the building on that day and to ask him for an alibi.
After
the abuse, my absence of writing continued until after my first suicide attempt
when I was detained under section 2 of the 1983 Mental Health Act for the first
time. I found myself suddenly on an adult inpatient psychiatric ward in a
mental health hospital and I was so terrified that I just stayed in my room for
the first few days. When I eventually came out and was in the communal sitting
room and saw another lady seemingly talking to herself and glaring into thin
air, I realised – for the first time since it started around two weeks ago – I
wasn’t alone in my experience of auditory hallucinations. Yet, despite feeling
less alone and despite even knowing that I was only in there because no one
knew why I’d done what I’d done, I still couldn’t find the words to tell them
about the hallucinations. So, I wrote about them, and I gave my writing to the
staff, and I’d say that this really laid the groundwork for me to not only
continue writing, but for my writing and creativity to turn into I’m NOT
Disordered. This means that I recognise that I was incredibly fortunate with
the staff’s response (they called the Consultant Psychiatrist in, and I
received a lot of praise and encouragement for writing about it and for just
generally, finally opening up) because had I received something different e.g.
the complete opposite and felt dismissed or ignored, I might not be where I am
today. It’s one of those instances where it actually seems fairly small and
insignificant at the time, but later; you realise it was literally fundamental
to all that you’re doing with your life now and to creating the most important
part of your entire mental health recovery! It’s also something, however, where
I shouldn’t have to be grateful… Like, support and encouragement should be the
guaranteed response when a mental health service user opens up to staff. I
shouldn’t feel lucky for it happening to me. But… Reality is, that I really am.
Over
the following three years (2009 – 2012) my records showed I had over 60
admissions to both psychiatric and medical hospitals and throughout most of
them, I wrote letters and messages to the various staff. I really struggled to
verbalise my thoughts, feelings, and experiences; and I think that a huge
reason for that was that feeling that so many people experience where you find
that something becomes so much more real when you say it out loud. It’s like
when there’s a death or a loss of some sort and the more people you tell, the
more real your grief becomes. In recognising this, you can be in real danger of
ending up becoming completely reluctant – or just point-blank refusing – to
talk about a whole variety of things in life. But, having desperately tried all
these unsafe methods of dismissing and ignoring the memories of the rape and
abuse, I’d really learnt how potentially fatal denial can be. How, refusing to
accept when something terrible has happened, can leave you stuck in that
‘before’ and whilst – in the short-term – that might feel safe and happy, in
the long-term; it will ultimately make it even harder and take longer to learn
to cope with it than if you’d just faced things and confronted it when it
happened!
So, when
I was admitted to the specialist psychiatric hospital over 100 miles away after
my suicide attempt in Summer 2012 (when I ended up on life support for the
first time), it didn’t really take long before I started writing about things
for the staff there. Because of it, on January 6th, 2013, I had a
1:1 with my amazing Key Nurse (who I’m still friends with on Facebook and have
actually seen a few times since my discharge!), and we agreed that on an
evening, I would write about different bits of the abuse and the rape and give
the notes to the staff. She created a Care Plan to inform all the staff that
I’d be doing it so that things could be put in place to support me during those
times and to be more proactive if I did begin to struggle because of the
writing. Leaving the room after that 1:1, I felt really, genuinely, positive
and hopeful for the first time in around six months and I wanted to do
something to document and celebrate that.
One way
in which the hospital specialised in helping and supporting people with a
diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) was by operating on a
therapeutic timetable’ whereby we had a wake-up time for medication and
breakfast, communal Morning Meeting, then activity groups and Dialectical
Behaviour Therapy (DBT) sessions until teatime, and a communal Reflection
meeting before we had the evening and night to ourselves (sort of!). The
regimented days meant that we weren’t allowed access to our laptops until a
particular time of the evening when we had to ask for them, and it just so
happened that I was in that 1:1 at the exact time. The staff member responsible
for getting the laptops knew I always asked for mine though, so when I got back
to my room after the 1:1, I found my laptop on the bed waiting for me. With
that being the first time that they’d done it, I saw it as a sign in regard to
my thoughts on ways to document that productive chat and without much thought,
I found myself creating a blog and branding it I’m NOT Disordered!
I
remember the first hurdle in starting to create content, it was in that very first
blog post (which you can read here)
and mostly centred around not knowing whether to start my blog off by talking
about things from the very beginning, or whether to just start from now and see
what comes up. I decided on the latter. I figured that not only would it take a
month’s worth of blog posts to tell people my entire journey(!), but if I did,
I’d likely end up bringing things up and referring to things again anyway when I
did eventually get round to blogging about the current days.
Since I
was in the psychiatric hospital for over a year after creating, I’m NOT
Disordered, I published content quite a lot because there seemed to always be
something to say! In doing so, I developed two motivations that were additional
to wanting to document my journey:
1.
It
meant I could better communicate my journey with my friends and family who were
over 100 miles away and had little insight into mental health.
2.
It
became therapeutic to have a space where I felt I could rant about the many
dramas on the ward without fear of upsetting another patient or staff member.
Having
these motivations and feeling that I was really benefiting from my blog, meant
that in creating content, I put very little – if any – thought into how it
would affect others and how readers might respond to my honesty. I ended up
getting a rude awakening with a random person commenting on one of my posts that
I was being unappreciative and disrespectful toward the hospital staff. That
was hard to read, and I was filled with one frustrating thought: that this
person wasn’t in the hospital with the staff 24/7. So, what right did they have
to judge my thoughts, feelings, and responses to staff? This was when I learnt –
or realised – that actually, I had given her that right by continuing to blog
about everything regardless of knowing that complete strangers could read all
of it. It’s like that controversial issue about influencers almost
automatically losing the right to privacy because they because they publish content
which provides some sort of insight into their lives. As though passing
judgement on someone else isn’t the responsibility of the person who passes it.
It also
filled me with thoughts about acknowledging that when a person is suicidal and
others save them, they’re bound to experience some level of resentment towards
those people. Especially when those doing the lifesaving don’t then do anything
to help improve the person’s life or provide help and support for all the
reasons why the person was suicidal in the first place. It’s like taking
painkillers in that they help your pain, but they don’t cure the reason why you’re
actually in pain. And so, perhaps I had a sense of that toward the psychiatric
hospital staff and that might be what the reader picked up on in my content.
But I also realised that this meant she likely had very little knowledge or understanding
of those thoughts and feelings, otherwise she wouldn’t have caused a
confrontation over them. For me, this is a prime example of the dangers of
someone have no education in raising their awareness of mental illness.
When my
discharge began being discussed, I was faced with a huge decision: do I close I’m
NOT Disordered down? One huge reason for this debate, was the uncertainty I
felt regarding whether I would have anything to blog about once I was back in
the community and in my own home. I mean, how exciting or even interesting would
my life become once I was in recovery? To
me, this is a perfect illustration of what I mentioned earlier about the fact
that professionals rarely explain that recovery isn’t linear. If I’d understood
that, then I would have recognised that I might still need the therapeutic
benefits my blog provided for my mental health. As it so happened though, I
received a horrible comment on another blog post and experienced that sense of
a straw breaking a camel’s back which led to me closing the blog down for a few
months after my discharge. I soon missed creating content though and after
receiving a few messages from readers asking me to start it back up, I
re-opened I’m NOT Disordered and literally haven’t doubted or questioned it
since!
I’ve
learnt a lot about creating content over the years though, and as I titled this
part about creating ‘popular’ content, one of the largest lessons I’ve learnt in
relation to that has literally been discovering which topics, themes, or angles
of content are most successful or most popular with my readers and which tend
to attract new readers. I’m NOT Disordered actually has a ‘Contact’ page (which
you can visit here)
and on it, there’s a PNG version of the blog’s media kit which includes the
themes of the content which have earned the most views: mental health advice,
tips for bloggers, accounts of experiences, collaborations. Whilst I’ve learnt
about popular themes, I still try to get a balance of creating content I have a
large amount of faith will do well and trying out new things. This is mostly
because I don’t want to get bored creating a lot of content that is in the same
style or of the same nature, and I like to think I’m NOT Disordered is the
perfect platform for my creativity to really be able to take the lead.
I’d say
that the most profound tool to have contributed to an improvement in the
content I create, has been learning of the existence of Canva (which you can visit
here) and discovering all the services and
functions it possesses. The content I’d say it had the largest influence or
input on was the Blogvember series last year (2024) where I published a blog
post for every week-day of November (you can see them all here). I used Canva to
create the entire posts and I had an absolute whale of a time realising that
literally every single time I log into it, I feel like I actually learn
something new! So, saying that; don’t feel like a failure if you don’t pick up
a lot of skills on it at first, I’ve been using it for around five years now
and as I said, I’m still learning!
·
Don’t
be embarrassed to follow your instincts and listen/take notice when you feel
that life is throwing you ‘signs.’
·
Learn
to take a certain amount of responsibility for how you think, feel, react, or
respond to online content.
·
Sometimes
you need to fight for the things that help you. See the fight as an opportunity
to express your dedication and determination.
· Check out Canva! You can choose to pay a subscription or create a free account. Even though the free version will mean access to less features, mine is free and I’ve never felt that there wasn’t enough to do with it!
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