EVERYTHING DISORDERED’S OFFICIAL RELEASE | EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE PROCESS MY BOOK WENT THROUGH

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Honestly, this is one of numerous posts which I would have never imagined I’d end up writing! I don’t know if that’s saying a lot though considering the number of things that have come from blogging that I would have never expected. I mean, I’m NOT Disordered started with a target audience of just a handful of special people, and it now has over 870,000 readers! Having such little expectations of my blog meant that I’ve been extremely pleasantly surprised by the incredible opportunities it has brought me and the benefits it has brought to my life. And, of course, this is so true and applicable to the release of my new book: Everything Disordered…

The dream:

The inspiration for Everything Disordered actually stemmed from a number of different places, but firstly, since writing my short stories about ponies going on adventures when I was little, I’ve loved the idea of writing a book.

I used to love handing my stories and notebooks over to my Nana who would laugh and smile and was forever asking me to write more. It taught me, from a very young age, that writing can have power and influence over a reader’s thoughts and feelings. That your words can change a person’s day, week, month, year or even, life! I thought that having a wild imagination at that age meant that fiction was the perfect genre for my writing and even though I was young, I couldn’t envision writing in any other way.

The inspiration:

I’m NOT Disordered didn’t start off with a lot of faith in it. Not just from others – but I think I underestimated it too. With my target audience being my friends and family, I never thought for one minute that it would amount to all that it is today.

But becoming what it has – being so important to me and my mental health recovery – makes it into my greatest inspiration for the majority of things I do in life. And writing Everything Disordered was very obviously a result of that inspiration.

I mean, even from Day One of I’m NOT Disordered, I found it beneficial to my mental state… It helped me to work through thoughts and feelings when I felt unable to put them into verbal words and it provided me with an outlet for all the, often contradicting and difficult, emotions. Experiencing this positive impact on my recovery has been an inspiration in me promoting blogging and encouraging others to try their hand at it in the hope that it has an equally good affect for someone else and their mental health.

How the idea changed & what it became:

So, originally, I was going to write the book from absolute scratch because a huge motivation for creating Everything Disordered was that it would be completely different to my first book: When All Is Said & Typed (still available to buy on Amazon). In that book, I literally copied and pasted every single blog post from the very first one on January 6th 2013, to the most current (on publishing in 2019) and ordered them into themes/chapters. And honestly? I began to see it as a much less challenging method of creating a book, and I’m all about challenging yourself and learning new things so it felt almost natural to have the need to create something that took much more time and effort.

As I began typing Everything Disordered, my idea seemed to very easily and quickly evolve into something a bit different. I firstly noticed that actually, copying and pasting some of my blog posts into the book, would work well as an example for the topics discussed in the never-before-seen writing. In developing that combination, my ideas went on to become a bit more imaginative and creative and I found the desire to create something interactive. Something which people could buy and feel the need to keep it even after reading it because it would have their own writing and competition of the worksheets in too.

Did I even think about it?

There has been three things in my life where I’ve thought ‘I wish I knew what I was getting myself into.’ The first, was when I began self-harming, because I only saw it as a current coping mechanism and not something that would almost kill me. The second thing was buying my bunny, Pixie because I quickly realised rabbits are such high maintenance that I really wasn’t prepared to take on such responsibility. And the third, was creating Everything Disordered!

In writing Everything Disordered, it very quickly became like that saying about biting off more than you can chew. Whilst it was very obviously stressful, I also found it very ironic because I’d felt as though I’d put so much time and effort into the thought process prior to the actual writing and creating. I mean, it felt as though I’d been almost destined to do something like this from the beginning of my blogging career over seven (at the time I first started putting Everything Disordered together) years ago!

Where do I actually start?

This was one of the questions that came to mind during the panic that maybe I hadn’t thought it all through. With my first book being a copy and paste job, I has the start realisation that I really didn’t know where to start in writing a book. I mean, do you start with page one or can you focus on entire chapters/parts in any order that is different to what they will be in when the book is actually published? Or do you just go with the flow and write bits and pieces to various places when you feel like it?

Creating the cover & other graphics:

In the end, I decided to go with the process that seemed to naturally come to me, and I started with designing the cover and creating the graphics. I think that this was the first bit for me because whilst I’m obviously such a fan of writing, I’ve recently found a new passion and love for creating things on Canva!

I first learnt about Canva from my digital marketing internship and to be honest, I wasn’t taught much about it – just the basics of what I needed at that time. I enjoyed creating my first meme during the internship so much that I started using Canva at home too and gradually, I realised there were so many more features to it. Features which would become so much more useful and enjoyable for my blog and then, for my book.

I think my love for this stems from the creative imagination from when I was younger. Canva has kind of brought back the opportunity and ability to be more visually creative than I can with solely writing. I mean, aside from my catalogue collages with my Nana, I also enjoyed drawing fashion illustrations when I was a teenager and wishing that I could be a Fashion Designer. Then my Textiles teacher tore apart my confidence and passion and left me feeling completely useless and incapable of working in that industry or having that career.

Creating the cover on Canva was fun, but also kind of annoying and stressful. I learn that my first design might infringe copyright as the background had been taken from Pinterest. So, I found a very similar background on Unsplash and used that. When I uploaded it to the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), I had the realisation (and I actually felt embarrassed that it took me so long to realise!) that I also needed a design for the spine of the book and the back cover! Fortunately, there was a function on KDP that provided you with the basic tools to be able to do that.

Initially, I used a pastel pink on the spine and back cover because it was a colour which ran through the design of the front cover, but I got the sense that it looked too feminine and I had no intentions of purely targeting a female audience, so I settled on a pastel blue which also matched the front cover.

Then, when I uploaded the new design, the stress really hit because KDP wasn’t too happy with the sizing and positioning of everything! Honestly? That might not have been too upsetting and annoying if I hadn’t already made a song and dance about the cover and launching it for everyone to see! Having done that, made me feel very reluctant to announce that there was a new cover at fear that people would think of me as unreliable and inconsistent. At the same time, though, I didn’t have a choice on whether or not to change it – it KDP wouldn’t accept it.

In the end, I re-designed the entire thing and introduced a whole new colour scheme! Go big or go home, as they say! Like, if I’m going to make a change, why not just do it completely? I mean, I totally agreed with that, until I realised what a new cover meant for literally ALL of the graphics in the book… In a lot of the graphics, I had used the previous cover’s background as a background and in some I had made the text and other features match with that colour scheme. At first, I felt a bit unmotivated to go through and change everything, but at the same time, I recognised that the whole aesthetic of the book would look so much better if I made those changes. And obviously, I wanted to be happy with it. I didn’t want to publish it and be thinking ‘I wish I’d changed that…’

Changing the cover and the graphics, left me thinking a lot about change in general and how it has impacted my mental health and my life as a whole. So, the fact that I ended up liking them far more than the previous ones, and thinking the entire book looks so much more mature and a whole lot less ‘girly,’ felt like a testament to my mental health recovery. If this had been even just a year ago, I would’ve really struggled to accept that this important part of my life needed to change. That the cover I had told everyone about needed to be re-designed would have probably left me feeling like a very embarrassed failure! Now though, whilst I do think about my readers and put a lot of consideration into how they’ll feel, I’ve learnt to put more focus on my own thoughts and feelings on the work I produce.

Writing from scratch & reconsidering:

With my original idea being to write an entire book from scratch, I wanted to still have an element of that in my new idea of making the book interactive.

So, I split the book into ‘parts’ of different elements of blogging that I wanted to discuss and started to search through my blog posts in the archive and label search functions. I very quickly found that whilst I had a lot of content relevant to each part of the book, there was also a lot of things that’d either happened or been learnt, more recently and I came to the conclusion that I would use those bits for the ‘writing-from-scratch’ element of the book.

I did end up reconsidering the idea when I thought about how much I’d learnt over the eight years of blogging because I wondered whether, if I had another year or so, I would find myself with so much more information to share in a book. Like, how could I determine that now is the right time to publish Everything Disordered?

After shaking myself out of that questioning and becoming adamant that now is exactly the right time; I began tackling the writing-from-scratch bit and initially, I thought of it as a bit of a chore. There were times that I’d write something and would start experiencing déjà vu and wondered whether I’d already talked about these things on I’m NOT Disordered. But then, thinking about it, I realised that the audience who might read Everything Disordered might not be completely the same as those who read my blog. Also, the parts which I thought I was repeating, might have been published before some people had even began to read my blog!

I enjoyed writing from scratch because it felt like an opportunity to be more productive in creating the book as opposed to merely scanning through previously published blog posts. It helped me to build confidence in the feeling that I had put a lot of time and effort into the book and that made me also feel more deserving of any success it might have.

Choosing blog posts:

After producing the original writing pieces, I was faced with the difficulty of having to choose which blog posts would be featured in the book.

I say ‘difficulty;’ just in the sense that there ended up being quite a few posts that I wanted to include in Everything Disordered. In the end, to decide which to feature, I read back through the original writing to better understand which blog posts were the most appropriate to providing an example of everything I’d talked about.

Another contributing factor to choosing the blog posts, was that I very obviously, and understandably, wanted to feature posts mentioning specific people, organisations, and events. My page of acknowledgements in the book is fairly long and whilst I do mention my reasons for being grateful, I thought that featuring a blog post about those I’ve thanked, would be an even bigger illustration of the motivation for my gratitude and the influence they’ve had on I’m NOT Disordered and its content.

Writing the ‘technical’ pages:

With my first book being a copy and paste job of blog posts and only available in the kindle version, I hadn’t gone through as big a process as I did with creating Everything Disordered. In that, for this book – particularly with it being a paperback – there was a lot of things I needed to do which I’d had no experience of.

Fortunately, one of my best friends; Martin Baker is also an Author (https://amzn.to/3dcqZVS and blogger: www.gumonmyshoe.com) so he has been enormously helpful and kind in sharing his experienced wisdom with me. He’s honestly given me so much advice and taught me so much about writing a book and all of the components to it… His experience and knowledge was particularly useful when it came to writing the pages, I hadn’t had to do in my first book, the copyright, contents, acknowledgements, dedication, foreword, afterword etc.

I actually ended up enjoying creating these parts of Everything Disordered because it felt as though the book was becoming more real and more professional and official! As though having these pages made it into an actual, real book!

For the copyright page, I combined a few templates and examples from other books to create my own, and then the others were kind of more straightforward as to the expectation of what they should include and the context they should be written in.

Teamwork: proof reading & the Foreword:

In starting to create Everything Disordered I had no expectations as to whether I would be involving others in the actual process. I mean, I didn’t really think about the possibility that others could be part of it too. I didn’t imagine any sort of area or opportunity of the boo where it would mean another person could become part of things.

When I began learning about the technical pages of the book, I found out that the Foreword for a book is typically not written by the author so I began thinking of people who I could ask to write it for me… And I finally decided on Debbie Henderson who is the Communications Director in my local mental health NHS Trust (CNTW)!

Honestly though? I thought there might be at least one hiccup with involving someone else. I thought that maybe there’d be some element of stress in relying on someone else and allowing another person a measure of input in something I so strongly deemed to be my own. However, working with Debbie was an absolute pleasure! I briefed her on the book and sent her the first ‘part’ so that she knew exactly what she would be putting her name to.

For me, being happy and content with something you are endorsing or representing, is a massively important quality to have in working on whatever it is you’re working on! It can enable you to exhibit passion and dedication toward the project and that could motivate you to put so much more time and effort into it. I think this has been a big part of my blogging career and the journey of I’m NOT Disordered; I’ve worked so hard on it because I didn’t want to put my name to something, I wasn’t immensely proud of – or which I was at the very least, happy with. So, when Debbie agreed to write the Foreword after reading the first ‘part’ of the book; I actually took it as a huge compliment because as it was though she was saying that she liked Everything Disordered enough to be a part of the team behind it.

The other brilliant element of working with Debbie was how straightforward it was! We had one phone call together before she began working on the Foreword and had it returned to me by the deadline I’d had to set.

An equally perfect match was with my proof reader; Emma, a Communications Officer from St Oswald’s Hospice. From very early in the process of creating Everything Disordered, I was aware that one crucial step which I was absolutely dreading, was to proof read the entire book before submitting it to be published. I guess I maybe had a bit of a lazy mindset around this and was just reluctant to have to go through the one hundred and something pages that I’d just put together and look for typos and other corrections. So, asking Emma to do it seemed like the best solution!

Emma was also a dream to work with because she used her initiative a lot but actually also balanced that with checking in with me to confirm some things she questioned. She also, very obviously, stuck to the deadline – in fact she beat it and had the book edited earlier than I’d asked!

Ending up viewing Everything Disordered as the product of some teamwork, took a bit getting used to. I guess because I hadn’t expected it to end up that way, but also because I debated what that meant about my own input… If others had played a bit part in the book, would it be fair for me to be given any/all of the attention, the credit, and the criticism?

I think that having been the sole creator of my blog, and the person most responsible for maintaining it, for over eight years now, I’m definitely in the habit of not being on a team, and of just trusting myself to make the decisions and to determine the future of something. However, through collaborations with organisations and featuring guest posts by well-known individuals, I’ve learnt some things about teamwork and have been able to see the power and potential it can have to really heighten the chances of something being successful. And, of course, I picked such a bloody good team because – on many occasions – they’ve told me that they were merely contributing to what was completely my work. This was lovely to hear but I still thought it would be nice to credit each of them in the Amazon details of the book.

If I were to give one piece of advice on working as a team in producing and creating a book like Everything Disordered, it would be to choose people who you would ask advice from because that’s usually a good measure of how well you trust, appreciate, and respect someone. And those qualities are – in my opinion – key to making a good, productive team.

Sizing confusion:

As time went on whilst I created the book, I became more and more aware of the fact that I was going to be faced with a stress toward the end of the process. I began considering whether to make changes right there and then in the hope that there’d be less work to do at the end, but decided to just continue so that I only worried and got stressed when I felt like I really had to be!

Basically, I created the entire book – including the layout of the images and worksheets etc – in Word and very obviously and understandably just continued to use the typical A4 sizing Word automatically sets. But obviously, it’s very rare that you get an exact A4 sized book; so when it finally came time to upload the manuscript and look at the preview of the book, the entire layout was completely thrown off kilter! Some of the images were cut off, some didn’t fill the page the way I had positioned them…

So, I did a bit of research to find out page measurements and I think I tried three or four different sizes until eventually finding the one I settled on (6x9 inch / 15.24x22.86 cm). However, even with this size, some of the graphics weren’t laid out quite right so I ended up resizing those too. During this stressful process, I remember practically growling at my laptop at one point and being very close to throwing it across the room!

Then the text went to pot! I couldn’t find a way to ensure that the way the text was in Word would continue through to the Amazon preview. It was mainly about the pages where one part didn’t quite fill the entire page so there was space before the other part started on the next page. To get around that, I created a few more graphics to separate the pages where that was happening and then also edited it so that the text was more continuous in some places.

I was at boiling point when I made the decision to do one more final attempt to fix everything before giving up for the night and nearly screamed with excitement and relief when Amazon matched the preview to the way it was laid out in Word! I guess that my persistence paid off, but I think I only had that quality because of my passion and dedication to Everything Disordered. That if I hadn’t been so determined in making this book happen, maybe I would’ve given up at this point.

Thankfully, I managed to pull it off and I think that doing so after going through such drama and stress, made it all the more important!

Pricing:

From the beginning of Everything Disordered, I had £6.99 in my head as the price of the book, so when the total for the printing costs came through, I was actually quite shocked and disappointed. Those costs meant that to make even just 11p from each copy, I’ve had to set the price at – in my opinion – quite a high number.

I think that my chief concern was about whether my book was even worth £18! I mean, I tend to have a lot of difficulties in my confidence on a whole range of things in life, so it wasn’t a total surprise to be having this doubt. To be feeling unworthy and undeserving.

My second concern was whether people would actually be able to afford the amount. Finances are such a tough subject and often a difficult aspect of a person’s life – even no matter what their employment status etc – and each person is in a totally different situation with their money. It has meant that I didn’t want to pigeon-hole anyone in saying that maybe one side of my target audience will be struggling financially.

So, I just hope that mental health and blogging are topics that a perspective reader might be as passionate about, as I am.

Publicity ideas:

As Steph, Head of Communications and Marketing for St Oswald’s Hospice, said; I have a ‘Comms head’ so I think that was the reason why a pretty immediate thought to cross my mind when thinking about Everything Disordered was how I would go about publicising its release. I mean, I don’t think I even stopped – or at the very least paused – to think about whether or not to even do it. It felt like a natural road to take my book down.

Obviously the most blatant thought and idea as to how to publicise the book was to use my blog and it’s 870,000 plus, readers! I’m NOT Disordered is typically the first place I turn when I want to get the word out about a new project, collaboration, event, etc because it’s where I have my biggest following. With it being a bit of an automatic idea, I really wanted to do something a bit different and a bit bigger for my book so I wrote a few press releases that will hopefully be picked up.

Honestly, in an ideal world, I’d love to have been able to host an event to celebrate the book’s release, but UK lockdown has only recently lifted and social distancing regulations are still in force so that’s a no-go!

My other thought was to gift some bloggers or organisations the book and ask them to write a review and share the purchase link on their social media. Like a book blog tour – a concept that’s been growing in popularity throughout the coronavirus pandemic. But then the printing costs were established as fairly expensive and I realised I really couldn’t afford to gift as many people and organisations as I had really wanted to.

Deciding on a release date:

As soon as I realised that Everything Disordered would very likely be ready to publish for March-ish time; I knew April 20^th would be the perfect date for release.

One of the many things I learnt from Martin Baker and his experiences with publishing books via Amazon, was that they can take between 24 hours to days to approve your manuscript and even when they’d read it, that didn’t mean they would be happy with it! They could come back with a whole list of errors and areas that needed altering or completely deleted or corrected. If they did, you’d then have to follow their advice and submit it all again!

Fortunately for Martin, he hadn’t promised for his books to be ready to buy on a particular date and part of me, began to question that decision of mine but there really was no debate; I had settled on April 20^th and accepted that meant submitting the manuscript with plenty of time for any corrections or delays in the book’s approval. Ironically, Everything Disordered was approved fairly quickly and actually ended up available to purchase from over a month early and boy was that hard to keep quiet! I won’t lie, special people were told it was there but otherwise, I stayed silent.

So, why April 20^th?

Readers who have been with me and my blog for a fairly long time will probably know the answer because I’ve written a number of posts about it over the years. April 20^th, 2007 was the day the abuse physically finished.

It started like any other day and he began to hurt me like any other day but on that day, I’d had enough. After six months, I had finally realised that, for so many reasons, if I didn’t stop it, no one else would. I mean, my mind was so completely overwhelmed by threats and worries around the thought of speaking up and reporting the abuse that I felt pressured into staying quiet and instead, desperately tried to tell people through changing my attitude and behaviours.

After fighting back in his office, he chased me through the building until we neared his employer’s office and as I yelled “think of your wife and children!” the employer came out and ordered us both into his office. After finally blurting out what had been happening for six months now, I was deemed a manipulative liar and my ‘punishment’ was that I was banned from the building. Ironic that it was meant to be that way yet actually, it was the most helpful and welcome response I could have asked for!

Obviously, that was a hugely monumental day in my entire life and since then, I’ve flipped between being triggered to remember the abuse on that date and being grateful and appreciative of it and the fact that it had happened and how far I have come since that day. And I think that this former mindset is the inspiration for the decision to release Everything Disordered today. I wanted to have a big important celebration to give me the ability to say ‘I published my book April 20^th ’ before saying anything about the abuse. I want my book to take over the importance of the date and the meaning it has in my life.

Opening my copy for the first time:

I’m very happy to say that the first book review of Everything Disordered can be found on the blog of one of my best-friends: www.gumonmyshoe.com

Funny enough, Martin was actually the first person to get a copy of the book – even before me! For some reason, it seemed that the ‘Author copies’ took longer to deliver than a regular customer order, but Martin being Martin, he agreed – and was understanding – to not open the package until I’d opened my own.

My copies (I bought one for myself, one for my Mum, one for my Foreword author, and one for me proof reader) actually arrived during a Microsoft Teams meeting with St Oswald’s Hospice and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)! I spent the last ten minutes of the meeting constantly glancing at the Amazon box until the DWP staff suggested I open it whilst on the video call so that I had someone ‘with’ me. I agreed because I honestly couldn’t think of a reason why that wouldn’t be ok. Like, I didn’t think I would end up a crying mess!

Opening the box, I think that there’s been a few times where I’ve felt like something was a dream – like it was surreal, but in that moment – looking at my book in real life – it felt as though I hadn’t experienced anything like it! As though all those other instances hadn’t been genuine. I mean, I honestly thought I was imagining the entire situation.

I think it was mostly because my first book had just been available for a kindle and so I hadn’t seen something I’d produced actually come to life in this way. I think it took me about one year to create Everything Disordered and I obviously spent all of that time looking at the book through a computer screen and I only had so much imagination! I couldn’t picture it in real life. I think this was because I was sceptical it would turn out the way I might picture it and I didn’t want to be disappointed. But it was completely the way I had hoped – even after all the sizing drama and confusion I talked about earlier! The graphics and the text were completely the way I had planned them to be. And I loved that because it meant that any feedback on the book would be – in a way – accurate. It would be based upon what I had intended and not the product of something I wasn’t happy with myself.

I was so grateful to those who had been on the video call with me because not being alone felt like an important aspect of seeing the book for the first time. I mean, ideally, I’d have been with absolutely everyone who mattered to me… but at least I had company of some sort. And at least they were company I would remember!

So, after ending the meeting, I got in touch with Martin and he quickly opened his own copy while I cried with happiness. You know, it’s not very often that I say I’m proud of myself but sitting and looking at Everything Disordered in my hand? Yeah, definitely proud.

My thoughts on feedback and the first book review:

Martin asked whether he could publish his review on April 20^th or if I wanted him to hold off for a day. I kind of thought that it would be nice for my blog post to be the only content published regarding the book on the day of its release. A while later though, I saw that it might actually be really lovely to have the first review published that day and for that review to come from one of my best friends.

At the time of writing this, I haven’t seen the review yet so I’m still a bit anxious; especially with it being the first one. It’s not that I’m nervous of any constructive criticism (because I believe that if there is any, it will be constructive), it’s about a fear of someone reading something I worked really hard on and expressing their opinion of it. An opinion which I wasn’t exactly sure as to what I could do with. I mean, usually, I’d say ‘learn from it’ but how do I do that for a book that is already published and, in a world, where there’s a very real chance that I won’t write another one?

Then, where there’s positive feedback or compliments on Everything Disordered, I wonder how I’ll feel and what I’ll do with that. I mean, I get a lot of lovely comments about my blog every day and I sometimes worry if I’ll become immune to just how meaningful they are and how powerful their impact should be. And it’s kind of the same in real life sometimes… I hear my Mum and Aunt and friends say how proud they are that I’ve achieved so much, and it never gets tired. But I worry that one day it will.

So, I think the most powerful and influential feedback you can get is what you tell yourself. The comments by others? Well they can motivate your own thoughts and feelings but I believe that – at least for me – someone could give me all the praise in the world and if I don’t see those things for myself, then it likely won’t make a huge dent in my thoughts and feelings.

Being as happy and content as I am with the final product of Everything Disordered has probably put me in a really good position in taking on feedback and reading book reviews (I still find the thought of people writing a review on my book kind of strange and surreal!) because I think that no matter how deprecating any feedback might be – and let’s face it, there’s a lot of that on social media in general – my happiness won’t be knocked. Of course, a comment like that will likely hurt and sting a bit, but I feel like it won’t change how I feel about the book. And I think that’s a really important quality in receiving feedback – not allowing it to cause any thoughts or feelings of regret.

So, I’m kind of a mix of excited and anxious about reading Martin’s review but I have the upmost appreciation and respect for whatever he says/thinks. And I think that the fact my best friend is doing my first book review really puts me in a good place for any future reviews; because I have a feeling, I’ll need to get used to reading reviews!

Gratitude and a sneak peek of the Thank You page:

I wanted to finish this very long post (eleven pages in Word!) with a little thank you and a sneak peek of the acknowledgements page in Everything Disordered!

In writing this part of the book, I was firstly so happy to be able to give thanks to some hugely important people and organisations. And secondly, was completely lost as to where to start in listing everyone! In the end, I decided to do a very obvious and understandable order of listing my loved ones first and then working through the organisations and individuals who have had the biggest impact on my life, my blog, and my book.

I think that my passion for this page and the enjoyment I experienced in creating it are largely because of the belief I have that there should be credit where it’s due. There are so many organisations I’ve mentioned who very easily (and sometimes people could argue; deservedly) receive a lot of criticism and negativity and yet, when they do something well, there’s not so much publicity on that. And I’m very conscious of not being a person who does that to organisations like the Police and the NHS.

There was once some social media content about my local Police force, and someone made the comment that I would defend the force no matter what. I corrected them and explained that whilst I’ve collaborated with them – and organisations like them – I will always try to maintain a balance and will speak up if I have a bad experience with them. In fact, I took out an organisation’s name and cut off collaborations with them for the reason that I very passionately didn’t agree with something they had said/done. And I hope that, in doing that, people will view me as fair and recognise that I try to be balanced and talk about an organisation when they do good as well as bad.

Another balance that has been important in achieving at this stage, was to recognise that whilst other contributed to Everything Disordered and whilst others have saved/changed my life, they can’t be given all the credit. I need to acknowledge my own efforts in my mental health recovery, my blogging, and in creating this book.