INDULGING IN CHILDHOOD ACTIVITIES VIA AMAZON!!! | CREATE A HOUSE WITH AMAZON | IN COLLABORATION WITH AMAZON UK

I’ve spoken numerous times during I’m NOT Disordered’s eleven-year-long existence, about my Nana – my Mum’s Mum – and usually this has been about her love for my writing when I was younger. She used to absolutely love my little, short stories about animals – usually Horses – going on adventures, and my Mum has said that my Nana would often ask her on the phone when the next story was coming! She used to laugh and smile at all the bits that weren’t even necessarily that funny or weren’t even meant to be funny! She and my Mum were my greatest supporters – not just in my writing, but in my life too! And I don’t think I’d be a blogger without having had their encouragement at that vital time in my exploration and development of my enjoyment, ability, and passion for writing and we all know how grateful and privileged I feel with my blogging career…

WRITING THE FOREWORD FOR MY FRIEND'S BOOK BY MARTIN BAKER | 7 DAYS UNTIL YOU'RE NOT DISORDERED PUBLISHES!!!

Foreword /ˈfɔːwəːd/ 

Noun: a short introduction to a book, typically by a person other than the author. 

 

Would you mind writing a foreword for me?  

I was happy and proud earlier this year when my friend Aimee Wilson invited me to write the foreword for her new book You’re NOT Disordered: The Ultimate Wellbeing Guide for Bloggers. It was a great honour and responsibility, and something I took very seriously. I remember when Fran and I were looking for someone to write the foreword for our book High Tide, Low Tide: The Caring Friend’s Guide to Bipolar Disorder. It was important to find someone we trusted, who also had relevant experience and standing. For Aimee to extend me that degree of trust meant a great deal, not least because I knew how important her writing in general — and this book in particular — was to her.  

WHY FINDING AN OUTLET WAS ONE OF THE GREATEST ACTIONS TO GIVE ME HOPE | WORLD SUICIDE PREVENTION DAY 2023: CREATING HOPE THROUGH ACTION

AN EXCLUSIVE LOOK AT ALL MY CURRENT PROJECTS & COMMITMENTS

Almost everyone I’ve spoken to these past few weeks – but particularly mental health professionals like the Crisis Team and my support workers from Richmond Fellowship – have made some sort of comment on the fact that I’ve been keeping myself very busy recently. And as is typically the way with someone who has a psychiatric diagnosis and is doing lots of things at once, two concerns have been raised on numerous occasions… First, that I’m doing too much and I’m going to ‘crack’, and second; that I’m doing so much as a means of burying my head in the sand and ignoring the fact my mental health is actually still quite poorly. With these comments in mind, I wanted to write this blog post to address them, to provide advice for anyone struggling with these things, but mainly, to bring some excitement for all the things that are currently ‘in the works…’

GUEST POST: SO YOU WANT TO WRITE A BOOK? | HERE'S SOME ADVICE BEFORE YOU START | BY BLOGGER & AUTHOR; MARTIN BAKER

I’m grateful to Aimee for inviting me to contribute an article about writing a book. In doing so, I’ll draw primarily on my experience as co-author with Fran Houston of High Tide Low Tide: The Caring Friend’s Guide to Bipolar Disorder (2016, Nordland Publishing). An extended edition was published by Kingston Park Publishing in 2021. I’ll cover some practical steps to think about in preparing to write your book. Your platform as an author, marketing and promotion, and the various routes to publication are also important, but are out of scope of this article. My suggestions are most relevant to non-fiction but many of the topics apply no matter what kind of book you want to write... 

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT WRITING A PRESS RELEASE

“The scariest moment is always just before you start!”

Stephen King

I’m always a bit unsure about writing posts like this in case some people perceive it as though I think I’m an expert! When really, the two press releases I’ve ever written were both printed and so it is off the back of that achievement, that I would like to use my experience to provide advice and information for anyone considering writing a press release or who are just curious as to what it entails…

The confidence build-up to writing my first press release:

In 2017, I got my first voluntary role in the industry I’d ultimately like to have a career focused on (media, publicity, marketing etc) when the support group for the unwaged; Listening Ear And Positive Support (LEAPS), appealed for an ‘Advertising Assistant’ on do-it.org. Not having any real formal experience wasn’t a huge reluctance to apply for the position, because at that point, I’m NOT Disordered was doing really well in popularity and that supported me being offered some incredible opportunities and collaborations with some really well-known organisations, (which varied from Northumbria Police to Oliver Bonas!). So, I felt fairly confident and capable of taking on my first role in that industry.

I think that my one difficulty in starting with LEAPS was just the unknown. I mean, I had an impression in my head as to what the role might entail and what I believed to be my new responsibilities, but would the members and the Committee of LEAPS have the same expectations? Everyone in the group had known one another for at least eight years at that point (LEAPS was founded in 2009), so would they take well to a whole new person giving advice on what they should be doing to build on the reputation and publicity of the group?

BLOGMAS 2019 – POST SIX : CHRISTMAS DRINKS WITH THE CREATIVE WRITING CLASS

Thanks to a poll on my Twitter back in November, my wonderful followers decided that I should publish a blog post and film a vlog every day for the entirety of December!

So welcome to December 6th…

A little while ago, I enrolled on a Creative Writing course through Northumberland County Council and have been thoroughly enjoying it – to the point where I was genuinely devastated when the Tutor called in sick one week!

I took a Creative Writing course at Bradford College while I was an inpatient in a psychiatric hospital down there and really enjoyed it and not just because it was much-needed time off the ward; but because it gave me the chance to do something I really enjoyed with like-minded people.

Ever since I was really young, I’ve enjoyed writing; obviously at first it was more about short stories with horses in every single one than deep and meaningful mental health blog posts but still, it was writing! Even before the abuse - in my happy, innocent childhood – I enjoyed the escapism and having the ability to get lost, or even just distracted, with the life of someone or something else. I actually enjoyed writing so much that one of Middle School teachers predicted that I’d be a Journalist when I grew up!

WHY I BLOG

Today, I wanted to talk a bit about why I blog. When I was speaking with the Team Lead for RichmondFellowship Tyneside yesterday she asked what motivated me to do everything I do, and it made me wonder if other people might also want to know the answer to that question. At the time, my answer was ‘there’s a ton of reasons but I think the main one is to help others.’ So, I thought this would be a nice opportunity to think a bit more about my rationale for doing what I have for six years now.

I feel like I’ve told the story of starting I’m NOT Disordered hundreds of times, but I recognize how many new readers I’ve had recently and it’s safe to assume that not many people will scroll back through the archives and read all 752 posts since January 2013.

HOW WORDS HAVE IMPACTED MY LIFE | THE POWER OF WRITING

Sticks and stones may break these bones,

But then, I’ll be ready

Are you ready?

-          P!NK – What About Us

The inspiration for this post came from my recent fuss with my medication… After the development of the new delusion/hallucination (which I talked about in this post there was many discussions around increasing my anti-psychotic medication. My Psychiatrist was reluctant; stating that studies show most people with Borderline Personality Disorder rarely benefit from medication and my CPN (Community Psychiatric Nurse) played Devils Advocate and attempted to remain neutral whilst clearly supporting the Psychiatrist! So, my medication was increased for twenty-one days and after taking a week to get into my system, it made all the difference. The delusion was gone, and I was safe again. But the professionals are still hesitant in making the increase permanent. As the days have gone on with me waiting for some sort of response/decision from the Community Mental Health Team, I’ve considered whether writing down everything and giving it to my CPN would help. Over the years of I’m NOT Disordered I think it’s safe to say that I’ve learnt the power of writing! But some old fear creeped in… what if I poured my heart and soul out and they still didn’t listen to me? It’d all have been for nothing! Another reason that stopped me from writing it all down was a feeling of stubbornness; they should listen to my words in the first place so that I don’t feel like I have to write them down for them! Either way, it got me thinking about the power of words – both written and spoken.

A LETTER TO MY EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD SELF

Your life is worth a lot more than you think because you are capable of accomplishing more than you know

-          Roy T. Bennett

I got the inspiration for this post from a book that recommended writing a letter to yourself ten years earlier and when I realized how old I would have been ten years ago (18) I thought it might actually be quite interesting (you’ll see why) – or at least to me it would be(!).

Dear 18-year-old Aimee,

I don’t mean to scare you but I’m just going to come right out and say it; this summer, things are going to get really tough. I know you think you’ve survived the abuse but that was only the physical part of it. Here comes the emotional battle for survival!

Aimee, you’re going to overdose in just four months’ time and doing so is going to be the center of your life for a while… Sometimes it’s going to get really scary and, in all honesty, a number of times your life is going to be in the hands of some professionals who won’t always understand you. You’ll meet some staff that think your self-harm and suicide attempts are attention seeking and sometimes you might even question whether this is the case, but it isn’t.

FIVE TIPS FOR ORIGINAL CONTENT

I’ve basically just wrote over six hundred words about forgiveness and the act of apologizing to find that I’d already posted something along very similar lines only three months ago! And the way I finally made that discovery inspired me to come up with some tips for other Bloggers to avoid making the same mistake:

1.       Use ‘labels’ or ‘tags’

On Blogger (I’m unsure if it’s the same on other Blogging sites) it allows you the option to choose keywords around the subject of each of your blog posts. You can make this list as extensive or as limited as you like but it allows for your post to show in Google searches on the words you’ve included. The other bonus of this (which I’ve just discovered) is that you can search for all posts featuring a particular label which means that you can ensure that your content is actually original to anything you’ve ever posted.

TOP FIVE NOTEBOOKS THAT MAKE FOR WRITING INSPIRATION | FUTURE LEARN DISCOUNT CODE | AD

So I recently had a massive overhaul of my wardrobe and it spurred me on to sort through everything on the shelf under the coffee table. That shelf is like the ‘bottom drawer’ people talk about where you find random things and they just all go in that one place. Anyway! There was a ton of notebooks and organizers under there that weren’t being used and – I believed – weren’t going to be used. So of course, I threw out the lot and promptly started an online course with Future Learn! Going notebook shopping for taking notes on this new course inspired this post… I thought I’d take the opportunity to talk about my favourite five notebooks, and the writing inspiration they bring:

‘MAKE TODAY GREAT’

https://www.paperchase.com/en_gb/gifts/gifts-for/stationery-lovers/moglea-make-today-great-lined-notebook.html