DAY ELEVEN | A SECRET BLOGMAS 2025

“Leadership is about empathy. It is about having the ability to relate to and connect with people for the purpose of inspiring and empowering their lives.”

Oprah Winfrey

Welcome to A Secret Blogmas 2025!

Today is Day Eleven and this eleventh post is all about the beneficial impact there is if you – as a content creator – publish content that is empathetic towards your audience or followers.   I’ll discuss writing trigger warnings and self-care advice and other strategies of showing empathy as a result of the recognition as to how beneficial it can become. Keep reading to find out why and how being validating of your audience can impact the success and popularity of your content and/or your platform…

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…

ALL MY CURRENT THOUGHTS & FEELINGS AFTER TWO MASSIVE FAILINGS BY THE CRISIS TEAM

A lot has gone on recently in my mental health journey, and as I came to recognise that I hadn’t posted any new content in over one week and started trying to think of what to blog about, I realised that it’s been a long time since I’ve talked about recent goings on! Like, I feel as though a lot of my most recent posts have largely been collaborations and reflective, regarding advice I’d give or things I’ve learnt rather than what’s actually currently happening in my life. And now that a number of pretty big things have happened this past week, I felt inspired and – to be honest – compelled to blog about them. I really want for this post to take I’m NOT Disordered back to its very roots in the fact that it was created to blog about my mental health and what was happening for me in the psychiatric hospital I was an inpatient in at the time, and I don’t want the very valid fact that blogging is (still) therapeutic for me, to get lost among adverts, awareness dates, freebies, events, and complimentary experiences…

AN INTERRUPTION TO BLOGMAS UNBOXED | TW: DISCUSSION OF SUICIDE

I honestly can’t believe what I’m about to blog about… I mean, it happened over a week ago, but it still feels surreal. And I still find it extremely difficult to actually even just say the words because they continue to feel dramatic and unbelievable. I mean, a little while after I first became poorly – and right around the time I was given the Personality Disorder diagnosis! – I was labelled an attention-seeker and dramatic countless times by mental health professionals. And in all honesty, the sentence I’m about to say feels like I’m fulfilling all those remarks… In the early hours of Friday 8^th December 2023, I jumped from a bridge…