WHEN & WHY IT STARTED, WITNESSING IT IN OTHERS, & HOW I CAME THROUGH IT | SELF-HARM AWARENESS DAY 2025

“Resilience isn't a single skill. It's a variety of skills and coping mechanisms. To bounce back from bumps in the road as well as failures...”

Jean Chatzky

This year, for Self-Harm Awareness Day, I thought I’d create this slightly(!) jumbled-up post and it is honestly, mostly a mess because I actually just found out it was this Awareness Day at about half three in the afternoon on the day of it! So, this post is basically full of bits and pieces about my experiences of self-harm, things related to self-harm which I’ve learnt and witnessed throughout my mental health journey, and advice I would give to someone who is utilising it as a coping skill…

HOW I’M COPING WITH THE PROSPECT OF MORE SURGERY | IN COLLABORATION WITH NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE HOSPITALS NHS FOUNDATION TRUST | AD

http://www.newcastle-hospitals.org.uk/

https://twitter.com/NewcastleHosps

In January I talked about the connection between mental and physical health after needing tendon surgery at the Royal Victoria Infirmary (RVI); part of the Newcastle Hospitals Trust. For those who missed that post, on Boxing Day 2019 I was attempting to open a bottle of Prosecco by wiggling the cork out with my thumbs when all of a sudden, I couldn’t move my right thumb anymore! I thought it was dislocated and went to my local Minor Injuries where – after an x-ray – I was told that it was ‘fine’ and to ‘put it in warm water and slowly start moving it.’ 

After a few days that feeling that something was really wrong became intolerable and I took myself to the RVI. When I was being triaged by a Nurse I actually said to him “I feel like such an idiot for coming to A&E because of my thumb” because I honestly thought I’d just be laughed away and told to follow the advice of the Nurse in Minor Injuries but in fact, the exact opposite happened! The Nurse sent me to the RVI’s Minor Injuries and literally as soon as the Nurse there called my name and I stood to follow him to an exam room, he looked at my thumb and said “well, there’s definitely something wrong with that, isn’t there?!” I honestly couldn’t have been more grateful and comforted – which sounds strange that I was comforted by the thought of something being wrong but it was more about the fact that I’d been right the entire time and that I was especially right in coming to A&E. It was actually such a relief.

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN MENTAL & PHYSICAL HEALTH | MY TENDON SURGERY

There’ll probably be some people who follow me on Twitter who will be surprised that it’s taken me so long to blog about my recent injury and the subsequent surgery. I guess that with me putting the majority of my life on I’m NOT Disordered and social media(!), some people assume that I’ll talk about anything and everything. Whilst it’s true that I probably have less privacy boundaries than most people, you guys don’t know everything and sometimes it’s less about keeping things from you and more about me not being ready to talk about something. And that’s the case here… After meeting with my GP today and having a good cry and talk with her, I finally feel able to talk more about what happened to me on Boxing Day.