Thanks to a poll on my Twitter back in November, my wonderful
followers decided that I should publish a blog post and film a vlog every day
for the entirety of December!
So welcome to December 11th…
Today
is all about my collaboration with one very special brand on Etsy, in this post
I’ll be reviewing the products they sent to me and on December 23rd you can
enter a competition to win these products and the remaining five that I’ll be
reviewing every other day this month!
So, at first, I had no clue how I was going to write an entire post about a cup and then I realized that maybe I could use the company’s name (Positive Instinct) as inspiration instead! So, I thought I’d talk a little about positivity, how I lost it, how I got it back, and how I maintain it…
I think that after the abuse positivity became very hard to come by because I honestly believe it made me into a different person. I think it’s inevitable that a trauma – of any kind – will change things for you and will have an impact on your personality, your ethics, morals, and all of the little things that make you who you are. I mean, before the abuse started when I was fifteen, I had had a very innocent and sheltered childhood and when you’ve experienced very little adversary in your life, it leaves you feeling pretty positive and trusting of others. So, the abuse was such a shock to the system that it felt as though it completely wiped away my personality and replaced it with an angrier and more negative one. By the time the abuse ended – after six months – I didn’t recognize myself.
Losing my positivity affected a lot of my relationships with friends and family who – because they didn’t know about the abuse – were lost as to why I’d changed so drastically. The hopelessness the negativity had also caused, then contributed to the motivation behind my self-harm and suicide attempts.
I think that in all honesty, a huge reason I got my positivity back was through taking my psychiatric medication. That doesn’t mean I promote you needing tablets to be positive(!) just that it helped for me. Another huge reason was going through Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) and learning new coping skills that led to my self-harm reducing. Not feeling that I had to cause pain to feel something lightened my mood and helped give me hope that my life wouldn’t always be that way. It showed me that things could improve.
I’ve discovered a few different methods to maintain my positivity…
1.
Listening to
motivational songs
2.
Spending time
with loved ones
3.
Watching
comedies
4.
Sleeping well
5.
Playing with pets
6.
Reading
7.
Taking my
medication
8.
Keeping to
appointments with mental health professionals
Naturally, seeing this brand name really rang true to me and I was excited to look through their products. I thought that this quote on the cup was very apt for mental health because I think that a regular comment made by Service Users is ‘I can’t.’ When I was struggling with my mental health, I couldn’t imagine ever getting better so I hope that this cup can be a daily reminder that you can recover, and things can improve.
You can buy this particular product here for £10.00: