Twenty Things

I saw a post the other day that basically made the point that today has been the best day of someone’s life so tomorrow might be the best day of yours. Coincidentally, it’s also five years to the day since I made the biggest, hardest decision of my life and began to eat and drink […]

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 […]

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, […]

The (Com)promise

When I started this blog, I promised (if not to anyone who may happen upon the site, to myself), that it would be real. There tends to be a view, made worse by the media, that Anorexia – if not a lifestyle choice where people eat cauliflowers moulded into different carbohydrates and crack vegan eggs […]

Honey from Blossoms

I am going to begin honestly, because honesty is what I have always strived to do on this blog. Honesty – apart from food – is the main weapon in this fight. Things haven’t gone quite so well recently. At the end of term, I was referred back to the Eating Disorder Services. This is […]

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 […]

Happiness

I think I’ve cracked happiness. Well, I mean, I’ve not cracked it in a recipe type way because then I’d be either constantly elated or very rich (or both), but I think I’m a bit closer to understanding one of the basic principles. I think I finally understand where I’ve been going wrong. When you […]