Dear Luna,
I feel like the way a pet comes into your life says so much about the bond and relationship you’re going to have. It’s like a hint or a sign of what’s to come. If you find a pet as a stray or if you adopt them from a shelter or buy them from a store… The difference in a beginning can hold a lot of importance for the journey you’re going to have together. And I believe that our beginning was no different…
So, this post
has been a long time in the making! Its inspiration actually came when I was
gift hunting for the Birthday of three of my five best-friends who were all
celebrating in the same month (March!). So, I found some lovely customisable
prints on Etsy from The Design Parlour, and we decided to team up to bring you
this blog post of a chat about the impact mental health can have on friendships,
and we’ve even thrown in a huge discount code…
WHY IT’S AN ACHIEVEMENT TO MAKE FRIENDS WHILST EXPERIENCING TRAUMA
“A best friend is the only one that walks into your life when the
world has walked out”
Shannon Alder
The best friend I met first was Sophie in 2006/2007. Now, if
you’ve read, I’m NOT Disordered for a while now, you’ll know that the abuse I
experienced started in 2006 so meeting Sophie around that time was pretty
special and important. I mean, whilst the years my mental health was at its
most poorly were horrific and challenging, the time during the actual abuse was
the most overwhelming and difficult in my life. I was so full of anger and
hatred towards almost everyone who mattered in my life because no one
recognised what was happening to me and so, no one stopped it.
Meeting Sophie during that really frustrating time meant I felt a whole lot less isolated and alone. I mean, she didn’t know about it either, but to see that I was capable of building a new friendship whilst feeling the way I did and thinking the things I did? Well, that gave me hope. It left me thinking that if I could challenge those lonely thoughts and emotions by adding someone to my life, I might just get through it. I might just survive. Sophie made me feel stronger and more positive at a time when it felt like I had been feeling the exact opposite for forever!
So, I’ve said
before that when I began hallucinating and made my second suicide attempt in
2009, a number of professionals commented that ‘at this rate’ I wasn’t going to
make it to my nineteenth Birthday (which was just a few months away!). At the
time, my first was “thank goodness for that!” So now, to be celebrating my
birthday and turning thirty-one? Well, it’s a pretty big deal! And I wanted to
publish a post that was just as special and just as important…
WHY I’M
CAREFUL WITH THIS SORT OF THING:
In my life, I’ve learnt a lot of things the hard way, and one of
these lessons in my mental health recovery has been making me more aware of any
advice I give around the topic. I learnt this through one of the other
inpatients in the specialist psychiatric hospital I was in for two and a half
years, asking me what my turning point had been.
In fairness, this girl had become very easily influenced. I mean, when she was admitted to the ward specialising in Personality Disorders, she was the only girl to have absolutely no self-harm scars anywhere on her body. At the time, her method of self-harm was to abuse the medication she was on for a medical condition she had. But, being hospitalised meant that this method was completely taken away from her (and I try to identify with this because my own method was made more difficult too) and so she almost naturally, desperately searched for an alternative coping skill. And I guess that being surrounded by girls who self-harmed in a same, particular way meant that she very quickly and somewhat easily came across the means for doing that. So, by the time my discharge was being discussed, this girl needed plastic surgery on her massively damaging self-harm wounds.
In the past, being a single Blogger on Valentines Day made creating content on your blog and social media slightly more difficult than if you had a partner who you could write about or share the day with. Now, though? There are so many versions of the day where people are starting to acknowledge the importance best-friends (or even friends and colleagues) can have on a person and why that makes it completely reasonable to show your love and gratitude to them on Valentine’s Day.
So, here I am taking this opportunity to show my love for my best-friends…
Lauren, because of her way of making everything into something aesthetically pleasing:
“Women are the largest untapped reservoir of talent in the world”
Hillary Clinton
For Georgie, for her difficult days at work:
“Never give up, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn”
Harriet Beecher-Stowe
So many people are pleased to say goodbye to 2020 since so many terrible events have happened during it. Aside from the pandemic and UK lockdown, I personally, lost quite a few loved ones this year. Yet I still struggle to view it as entirely ‘bad…’ Since my Aripiprazole (an antipsychotic medication) was restarted and increased, I’ve not experienced a single hallucination and therefore, haven’t self-harmed since August. I’ve also achieved quite a lot this year relating to I’m NOT Disordered (particularly reaching 800,000 readers), so I feel torn between being thankful that the year is ‘over’ whilst also having the ability to look back at it with some level of fondness…
So, I was looking at last year’s blog post (which you can read in full here) and thought I’d include updates and new thoughts around each of the 20 points I’d discussed.
One
The first was about saying a thank-you to Richmond Fellowship who have provided me with a support worker (the worker has changed a few times over the years) since my hospital discharge in 2014. But I wasn’t really thanking them for that support, I was actually acknowledging the amount of opportunities they’ve given me through events and meetings. And that still stands! Over the last year, the lockdown has prevented so many face-to-face meetings and pretty much every single event; but I’ve still felt included in being a member of the Working Together Committee – who have a huge influence on the general way in which Richmond Fellowship is ran. I’m enjoying have the ability to speak up on behalf of service users and being treat with respect that regards my views, thoughts, and feelings on different topics, as important. However, I’d also like to thank my support worker this year! Since the beginning of the UK lockdown, our face-to-face appointments have been scarce and that has meant using the phone to get support… I used to struggle with audio calls because it reminded me of the auditory hallucinations in that I could hear them but couldn’t see where – or who – they were coming from. Being almost forced to do calls though, has gotten me used to the sensation and I find myself ringing my support worker and speaking to her even more than when it was just normal appointments! And she’s been brilliant with this.
