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The Post Inspiration:
A little while ago, I was travelling to London when a cabinet above the sink in the train bathroom swung open and hit me on the head. As an apology, London North Eastern Railway (LNER) issued me with complimentary first-class tickets to any destination on their route! When I got talking to the Communications department though, and they heard about I’m NOT Disordered, we agreed to turn it into a collaboration, so the bestie and I decided to go to York for the day!
It was actually when we were waiting to come home though that we had the conversation which – along with the actual trip - has inspired this blog post. There were no tables outside the pub in York train station so we ended up sitting on a table with a man (Tony) and lady (Nikki). It turned out that Tony worked for Network Rail, so we got talking about my LNER collaboration and the benefits travelling has on your mental health…
Benefits of travelling:
For a lot of people with a mental health illness, I think that there’s a level of expectation in society that if you behave in a particular way then that must mean you have this diagnosis or if you do that then you must have that diagnosis. This can be especially exacerbated when surrounded by people you know; not just friends but professionals too - there can be pressure in appointments when you feel that you need to seem more well than you feel so as to avoid particular responses from professionals. This pressure from all these different places can obviously become overwhelming and can result in a huge amount of stress which could be slightly alleviated by travelling somewhere different to be surrounded by people who don’t know you… or your mental state! When I temporarily moved down South (where I was born) it felt like a fresh start because was there no one feeling that people were thinking ‘it’s her again.’ I could start new relationships and determine just how much of my mental illness they saw.