DAY NINETEEN | A SECRET BLOGMAS 2025

“No one has ever become poor by giving!”

Anne Frank

Welcome to A Secret Blogmas 2025!

Today is Day Nineteen and this nineteenth post is all about the beneficial impact there is if you – as a content creator – provide and/or create resources and supportive information. This can take many forms that could range from graphics on social media to entire pages on your blog or website! This Blogmas post is likely more useful for mental health content creators and Influencers. So, keep reading to find out why and how providing or create resources and support information can impact the success and popularity of your content and/or your platform…

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO NETWORKING | IN COLLABORATION WITH TYNESIDE CATS PROTECTION | SUMMER OPEN DAY 2025

“Social networking is playing a huge role in creating awareness and mobilizing support for all kinds of common interests. What better way to use this remarkable tool than to change the world?”

Natalie Portman

You may remember a few weeks ago, I published a blog post titled: ‘The Importance of Peer Support in Mental Health’ (you can read it here) as pre-event content in the run-up to the Summer Open Day of my local Cat Protection’s Adoption Centre (Tyneside). Well, I promised you all another collaboration piece after the event so that you could see the photos and videos from the afternoon and read more some of the cats that the charity said myself and my two best-friends (Jack and Spencer) could visit. In this piece, I realised that – according to my search in my content archives – I’ve actually never done a blog post completely about networking (it’s typically just been mentioned in other posts) and I thought it was a great angle to use that would also work in introducing you to the three cats we actually networked(!) with too… Ps. There’s a YouTube video at the end of the piece too!

HELPFUL RESOURCES DURING GRIEF | IN COLLABORATION WITH ETSY UK | AD

“We don’t stop loving. We don’t forget. We don’t stop hurting. We don’t get over it. We journey forward. Living the best that we can. We hold them in our hearts. Until we’re together again”

Grieftolife.com

The loss of my bunny; Pixie (you can read more about her death here) has really shown me a lot more about grief and that has included recognising the importance of having help and support…

A huge motivation in me maintaining I’m NOT Disordered and my safety, is my hope that my experiences are helping others in some way. The notion that I didn’t go through all that I have for no reason has been massively reassuring and a positive step in my mental health recovery. It has given me hope. Hope that all those hard lessons I’ve had to learn, were worthwhile. Like they were thrown at me for a reason.

So, similarly to my mental health, I want to use my experiences around grief, loss, and bereavement to help others safely navigate (in my opinion) one of the most difficult emotions you can go through. Having lost Pixie almost two weeks ago, I’ve turned to numerous things to help and support me to cope with my grief in a healthy way, and I thought I’d share what I have found the most beneficial for my mental health:

So firstly, practical items – chosen from Etsy…

SELF-SOOTHE:

Learning the Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) skill of self-soothe in the section of the Therapy labelled ‘Distress Tolerance,’ I was initially kind of reluctant to tell people how helpful I found it because I was so worried it would give others selfish, materialistic connotations about me. As though hearing that washing my hair could help my mental health meant two things:

1.       I can’t have been that unwell if something so simple could make a difference

2.       I must be really shallow and self-obsessed if I felt I had to do something for me to help me

Gradually, though, I began to warm to the idea of telling others what I found helpful because I found that sometimes, when I was in a mental health crisis, I needed to be reminded by others of the coping skills and mechanisms that were helpful. As though my head was so focused on being unsafe that there was no room to entertain healthy thoughts like those around what I could be doing to keep myself safe. So, telling the hospital staff, and then the professionals who would continue my care in the community after being discharged, was pretty necessary and in recognizing that, I had to just swallow my pride and ignore any concerns as to what others would think of me.

THE INS AND OUTS OF GIVING A SPEECH | MY EXPERIENCES, TIPS, & RESOURCES | IN COLLABORATION WITH CUMBRIA, NORTHUMBERLAND, TYNE, AND WEAR NHS FOUNDATION TRUST

So, I delivered a speech to some of the Peer Support Workers from Cumbria, Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS FoundationTrust (CNTW) and decided to upload videos of clips of my twenty-minute speech to social media. I received a lovely response and was sent a few private messages asking more about the bits that you don’t see – the behind-the-scenes parts of giving a speech, so I thought it’d make for a good blog post…

My first speech:

I think that my first real speech was for a Time To Change event named Story Camp in 2015 (you can read about it here) – and it was requested after I had volunteered at one of their events in 2014 (which you can also read about here).

With it being my first opportunity to do something like that, I obviously had a lot of nerves and fear at the thought of standing before a ton of complete strangers and talking about my mental illness and other experiences that most people would deem ‘personal’ and ‘private.’

I think that the fact my first speech had been requested could have had a negative impact on me and cause me stress if I felt as though there was pressure on me to do it. But actually, it really helped me in providing motivation to do it because I felt sort-of obliged. As though if Time To Change (a big organisation centred around challenging mental health stigma) could go through the process it would have taken to choose me, the least I could do was take them up on their offer!