A BIG HUGE LIMITLESS THANK YOU for everything. For being tireless with your efforts… For opening doors to people side-lined in society like myself to get into work they would never imagine because I developed my writing skills (I'm working in YMU books, my dream internship and it's because you helped me).
Read MoreCommenting on other people's bodies, or rather, refraining from doing so, is a topic increasingly circulating not only on image-heavy platforms like Instagram, but also in the collective consciousness. The more people I meet, the more I realise that attitudes are changing, or at least, some thought is being invested into what is and is not acceptable or appropriate to say to someone about how they look.
Read MoreThere’s a quote from Jeremy Bentham – “Stretching his hand up to reach the stars, too often man forgets the flowers at his feet”. I think that this is true of many of us.
Read MoreIt’s been about 14 years since we’ve been in touch. Why did we lose touch? I honestly don’t know. We were in our early 20s and had both graduated from separate universities, and were taking tentative steps into whatever came next. Neither of us knew what lay ahead but somehow, on the walk to get there, we moved at different speeds and drifted in different directions. I sent you texts every now and again, on birthdays and when you just popped into my head. But you didn’t respond.
Read MoreThere were 5 people involved in the efforts to save my Dad, one of whom grabbed a snorkel and fins from his barge and went under the boats to try to rescue him putting his own life at risk. Incredible. Truly. It must have been so scary for them to have been witness to the shocking and fast moving drama that unfolded that day
Read MoreStraight Through Processing (STP) is used in almost all industries in the world and is used just as much as the internet. When a person pays for anything using a Credit or Debit card, they are using STP.
Read MoreBefore, I was not a divided person. I took pride in my decisiveness, and my ability to dissect, understand and articulate my own feelings. That was until chronic illness split me down the middle, like a kitchen knife through an overripe avocado.
Read MoreA weird thing started happening to me a few years ago, I started to become invisible. It wasn’t everywhere or all of the time - in the private sphere of my life I was still very much solid, visible and three dimensional, but I started to notice it happening occasionally on the public stage, like some sort of glitch. Groups of teens and twenty-somethings would start looking through me as I walked along the street towards them. Or I’d stand waving a tenner at the front of a busy bar for what felt like hours whilst the staff served everyone to either side of me.
Read MoreAt 15 months old I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. It gave my parents quite a fright to put it mildly. I almost died. So now I need to manually regulate my blood glucose levels. You can’t calculate the right dose of medicine if you don’t know where you’re starting from. That is where blood glucose monitors come in and they have come on such a long way in the 20 years I have been using them!
Read MoreThink about how much literal time is being spent unwell, to the point where you’re struggling with basic things such as work, the washing up, cooking, getting dressed and showered. Try to picture back to a time you were particularly unwell. Was it the flu, Covid, a broken bone? Consider how much longer all these basic actions took, or how much time passed before you could even do them? Unfortunately for chronically ill people, this is an everyday reality.
Read MoreMy name’s Harriet and I'm an alcoholic. We’ve all heard this before, but I first said this in my early twenties when I tried a 12 step programme for the first time. A few years prior to this I asked my best friend if she thought I was an alcoholic, and after being told in no uncertain terms that I don't drink in the morning so I can't be, I pushed it to the back of my mind.
Read MoreSchool…awful place for most of us. Are you one of those rare people I hardly ever meet who enjoyed it? It wasn’t all bad; school plays, drama and art were my hiding places. But mostly it was like being on Salisbury Plain with landmines, target practice and a lot of being shouted at.
Read MoreAll of them had: my parents, my teachers, my friends, my pastor. They had lied to me at school, at church, at home. They had kept that information from me, and used that ignorance against me. They had forced me to pretend for years to be someone I was not. They had made me feel pathetic, trapped, suicidal.
But telling me I was a woman wasn’t the last lie they would tell me, and far from the last one I would believe.
Read MoreDisabled LGBTQ+ folk should not be, and should never have had to consider, giving up something that should ordinarily be a wholesome and enlightening experience. Disabled LGBTQ+ people should not have to forgo the feeling of being special, included, and seen due to inaccessibility. Many people have no experience of their health, wellbeing, and safety being disregarded and therefore put at risk due to a lack of accessibility. Yet disabled people are often made to compromise our health in the name of inclusion or opt out of attending. Why?
Read MoreSince my early teens, I have carried a sense of shame for being interested in and enjoying sex. I come from a family (and culture) where sex is not openly discussed, and it has taken some considerable effort, discomfort, and re-learning to understand what sexual power means to me and how I can harness it for my overall empowerment.
Read MoreI broke myself, I closed off, dissociating, derealizing, depersonalizing, putting every feeling in a neat little box and slamming closed the lids. I could not just not feel toward a single person, or several, I had to form disjunction after disjunction in my capacity to feel such ways at all. It is no surprise to me now that in my worst depressive states I admitted to my partner that I did not love them. How could I? I loved no one, by necessity. To play the role of monogamist I had to abandon the pretense of monogamy as growth of purest love.
Read MoreThis year, the BBC celebrates 100 years of broadcasting, and those who regularly watch its TV channels will notice the recent ‘This is our BBC’ idents, where clips of programmes have been edited to create a narrative around the importance of the BBC, featuring greats such as David Attenborough, Lenny Henry and Judi Dench. On the surface, it may look like a way to tug on the heartstrings and appeal to nostalgia, but there is a subtle change of tone with the line ‘But the BBC doesn’t have to be here, it only exists if we really believe it matters’. We’ll come back to that.
Read MoreJust imagine you come out of a long relationship, so you have tons and megatons of pictures of your ex on your phone…the chances of seeing their face whenever you go left from your home-screen are pretty damn high. Sure, sometimes it helps you relive the highs of June 2019… but it also helps you relive the bad times. The very, very bad times.
Read MoreI’m sure I speak for many people when I say that it can feel fantastic to receive a compliment – both within the first (and hopefully, continual) steps of the ritual that is dating, and as part of everyday life. Paying compliments, too, can feel just as nice.
Read MoreIf only being someone’s muse was enough. The best of friends. For seven years I held your hand like it was almost my own. Your superb kindness and loyalty was like a chain around my neck. I stayed because the thought of leaving your beautiful soul hurt me too much. How selfish of me. You deserved better than that. You should have had someone in your bed that ran like a horny badger in the night to get to your body. But really, I was stuck, my cartoon addictions and inability to say ‘I don’t think this is working’ was toxic. I didn’t like how I spoke to you. I didn’t like how I was with you. I didn’t like how I needed to drink wine every day. I didn’t like that I wanted to leave when I was sat next to you. I didn’t like that I had already left.
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