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Now that Mental Health Awareness Week (MHAW) has finished (for links to all my posts and to watch my vlog of the entire week visit here) I’m free to commit to other projects, pieces of work, and collaborations! Don’t get me wrong; I thoroughly enjoyed this year’s MHAW and producing all the posts for it, but I also missed being able to dedicate time to creating more varied content.
The planning for the MHAW content actually began a while in advance to the week itself so this is the first chance I’ve had to talk about Calico Catch-Up (which launched May 1st!). The brand new monthly column on Cats Protection Tyneside Adoption Centre’s blog; The Daily Mews, was a genius idea brainstormed with myself and the Centre’s staff. The original plan was to write a one-off guest piece for their blog about how huge an impacts cats have had on my mental health; but I was really interested in the idea of making the opportunity into a bigger commitment. Being unable to work in a fulltime role right now because of my mental (and in parts physical) health means that I obviously have a lot of time outside of my support sessions that needs filling. As it was, my only real long-term, regular commitments were to my blog and to the support group that I Chair; LEAPS, and I felt as though I could manage an addition to those. At the same time though, I stayed reasonable and practical and knew that I wouldn’t have the time to be able to commit to writing a weekly column, so we agreed upon Calico Catch-Up publishing monthly.