My Last Post

It’s two completely separate conversations that start the chain of thoughts. The first one about what we choose – I choose – to share on the internet; the second a conversation about the importance of letting go of the past. When I think about it, it links to what I have long suspected to be […]

Why I think calories should be displayed on menus

The government, as I’m sure many of us are aware, has recently announced a new set of plans to reduce the rate of obesity in the United Kingdom. Whilst we know that nothing they ever do will actually have any sort of real effect on this because nobody can make changes for other people: willpower […]

What happened when I, someone with an eating disorder, downloaded popular fasting apps.

I had sort of been aware of the fasting apps being advertised on Facebook and Instagram, I suppose. I was aware that they were there, but it hadn’t really twigged because my pages always seem full of advertisements for diets (I guess that this is because I am a twenty-eight year old female who spends […]

Excuses excuses

Without doubt, we should all have patience and an understanding that people living with poor mental health don’t always find things easy. We should accept that we may need to do things slightly differently to accommodate them. It might be necessary for us to take on a little extra so that they can cope on […]

Is it time to change the focus of mental health awareness week?

I remember going into the Group Room when I was inpatient and reading some notes from a staff training day which had been left out by accident. On a list of ‘hard things about this job’, someone had written ‘some people will never get better’. It’s true. Some people will never recover from a mental […]

Anxiety in the time of Coronavirus

When we found out that Covid-19 was a thing, it was pretty anxiety provoking. When we found out that Coronavirus was on its way to us, we reached various states of panic. Different for each of us, of course, but I doubt there were many people who didn’t lie in bed at least once thinking […]

April 2020

It has been a long, hard winter. A winter of restriction and of desperation; a winter where I returned to starvation because I thought – yet again – I had found the answer in my own diminishment, where I strove for a painful state of perfect. The winter was concrete grey. Flat. And now, we […]

Small Changes

At the beginning of this year, I wrote a blog post about how I was going to do things differently in 2019. As I remember it, I was going to take up yoga and stop drinking. I had a vision of becoming a sort of self-possessed highly spiritual being. I forgot that I can’t carry […]

The Unforgivable Curse

I’ve written about bullying before. I’ve spent thousands of hours thinking about bullying and, in particular, my experience with bullying. Last night, I watched Jesy Nelson’s documentary Odd One Out. I was struck by how profoundly emotional and moving it was; how many home truths it hits. Because it’s true: once someone has been bullied, […]

Suicide and the importance of waiting

Life changes every day. This is why I cannot and will not ever believe that suicide is the right answer. This is why you have to hold on tight. This is why you have to stay alive. I’m not going to lie: the past few weeks have been tough. A couple of weeks ago, I […]