COME WITH ME TO… LEEDS! | IN COLLABORATION WITH RADISSON BLU

“The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.”

Eleanor Roosevelt

So, the other week was a bit hectic, wasn’t it?! I don’t know if it showed – I really hope it did – but I put a lot of effort into creating the content that was published every day for Mental Health Awareness Week (if you missed it, the re-cap about each day is here: RE-CAP | MENTAL HEALTH AWARENESS WEEK: DAY SEVEN | I'm NOT Disordered (imnotdisordered.co.uk)). With the amount of time and effort in mind, I had the brilliant idea of treating myself after it and having visited – and loved – Leeds before, I began trawling through booking.com for hotels and then National Rail for train price; and the trip kind of snowballed from there…

My first consideration in travelling:

The first thing I really considered as the plans and arrangements and bookings were starting to take shape, was my mental health. You know when you’re in the habit of doing something to the point where even when you don’t need to do it anymore, you continue to? This was like that. I mean, my mental health has been so stable for what feels like forever now, and that stability feels pretty concrete; but I still feel the need to think about how a certain plan or event etc will impact it.  

I think a huge reason for this is because I’ve now seen what it looks like when I don’t think about my mental health. When I don’t carefully consider what decisions would be best for it. It’s kind of like with my medication too… I’ve seen how terrible the hallucinations get without it and that makes me really reluctant to ever have the dose decreased or for it to completely stop. Of course, this is mostly a good, positive thing and is a huge reason I’m safe.

EVERYTHING YOU DESERVE | THREE DAYS AT THE LAKE DISTRICT WITH MY BESTFRIEND

So, me and one of my best friends; Georgie, went to the Lake District for a little three-day holiday and when talking about the trip – both before it and during it(!) – the comment ‘it’s deserved’ was often used…

I don’t want this post to be too heavy and intense, but I think it’s important that I put things into perspective in terms of the concept of someone being deserving and my journey with that mindset because my first real memory of thinking about someone being deserving of something, was very obviously and probably understandably, when I was fifteen and the abuse began in 2006.

Deserving pain…

From Day One of the abuse, I hated him. I hated him with an anger so hot and so powerful that I always worried I would end up punching him in the face – or worse! I believed he deserved pain – I mean, if he thought he had the right to hurt my body, why shouldn’t he feel that same pain?! Why should he be exempt from it? Why should he get away with hurting someone else and then suffer no consequences?!

PLANNING AHEAD & MENTAL HEALTH | BLOGMAS, ONE MILLION READERS, TRIPS AWAY, ONE YEAR FREE OF SELF-HARM, & ANOTHER GOD-CHILD!!

So, I have a few really important things coming up in my life and they’ve meant that I’ve had numerous conversations with a whole variety of people who have given a mixed response when told that I’m making plans and putting these things into consideration now…

When I was younger, I always felt like there was a plan to things… Like my Mum and I would plan what we’d do the following day – or week(!) – and I almost knew exactly what to expect. And then the abuse happened…

In the beginning – when I first met my abuser – I expected the complete opposite of him starting to hurt me. I had just been attacked on my way to school and my abuser offered to be a source of support for me in volunteering to make himself constantly available to me should I become upset at some point during my school-day. But it was only the third time I utilised that suggestion of support, that it turned into his opportunity to begin hurting me.

I was caught so completely off guard by the abuse – to the point where I considered whether I’d imagined the entire thing – that I instantly began going to extreme measures to avoid spending any time alone with him. But all that initial support and kindness, and the fact he had already held the respect of so many people, meant that when it all twisted and turned into him requesting time with me, no one questioned things!