When it comes to our careers, it’s very easy to find ourselves striving towards someone else’s definition of success, but this will never make us happy. Some people’s idea of success might be a smart car, a senior title and an expensive suit and house. But is that yours?
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 MoreFor several years now, governments in various corners of the UK have been gradually recognising the influence on young people’s mental health of schools/ universities–for better or worse. And it is worth noting, too, that they have a duty of care in common law to their students – both educationally and pastorally, to protect their students’ health, safety and welfare.
Read MoreYoutubers were a new and exciting type of celebrity. It felt as though they were real people with relatable lives. Youtube was how I learned to apply foundation and understood what a skincare routine was. Some of the earliest videos were filmed on grainy webcams and the soundtrack was twinkly royalty-free music.
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 MoreHow can we imagine so much about the past? The answer is simple: through the stories left behind for us. Both ‘The Elfin Knight’ and ‘Scarborough Fair’ tell the story of a woman who’s about to marry a mysterious man. The wedding doesn’t have to go ahead – but only if she completes certain impossible tasks. The situation sounds hopeless.
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.
Read MoreThe problem with trying to pretend that history was neutral, something that happened without deliberate political choices, is that history happened to real people. Africans were enslaved. Jews were murdered on a horrific scale. Women were assaulted and raped. Precious objects were looted and stolen from where they were created and displayed as exotic things thousands of miles away.
Read MoreUnless you have been living under a rock for the past few weeks, you’ll have inevitably seen a surge in discussions surrounding Putin and Ukraine. However, if you were educated within Britain, you were probably not taught much about the context of this situation, and how it has built to the point we are at now.
Read MoreLife is for living, learning and loving, and even when times are uncertain, unstable or unprecedented, life is moving forward, lessons are being learnt, and love is carrying people through.
Read MoreThe Human Rights Act passed in 1998 as an assurance that all people in the UK would be treated with dignity, equality, respect, and fairness under all public authorities. Using this as a frame of reference, the act has been an invaluable source of protection for people in the UK at their most vulnerable, ensuring individual freedoms and their welfare. In the last few months, these rights have come under attack.
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