Tag: mentalhealthawareness

I ran away to the Ukrainian mountains

I ran away to the Ukrainian mountains

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

As many of you have seen on social media, I went back to Ukraine this summer to work as a summer camp counsellor for a month, and if any of you are prOper big-time stalkers (*cough* I mean, ‘followers’…) of my work, then you’ll know that this wasn’t my first rodeo: I did the same job at the end of my year abroad two years ago. And what’s funny about coming back from doing anything for an extended period, is that people ask you how it was: some ask you out of politeness when they’re not really that interested, and others ask you because they truly want to know. But then when it comes to it, there’s no way you can effectively concentrate a month’s worth of experiences into one conversation, so you’re left with the ‘oh yeah, it was really fun thanks’.

I wanted to go back to Ukraine for two main reasons. The first was that I wanted to go to a different country because I like seeing other places, and because this year pretty much everyone on the planet has had the urge to leave their home country ever since being literally confined to it by law. The second reason related to the first, but was distinct in that I wanted to go somewhere else because for so long I felt stuck. I’d thoroughly enjoyed my second year at university but a pandemic, online learning, and the basic fact that I don’t really enjoy my degree made it so that I had this feeling that I was waiting around for something to happen only I had no idea what that something was. So I guess if we want to psychoanalyse it, I was eager to go back to do something I’d done during my year abroad since that was the time that I’d felt the surest of who I was and what I was doing.

The pandemic threw everyone for a loop, we know this, but my feeling lost and directionless at times can’t be wholly attributed to Ms Rona: it must also be a side-effect of our school systems telling us all the way through our adolescence that we need to know every step of our lives at least five years in advance. If you don’t plan, and if you don’t know, then you’ve done something wrong, you’re failing at adulting.

For the longest time, I knew I wanted to go to university and study Japanese Studies. So, then when I got there and realised that not only did I not enjoy it, but that the teaching had beaten my confidence down so much that I started to genuinely believe that I’m a bit stupid, it came as I nasty shock. And though I’d never really thought about it before, I now acknowledge that when situations or people stress me out, make me feel embarrassed or upset, I prefer to just run away and hide so I have time to make sense of it in my head. Hence the trip to the Carpathian mountains to fuck about doing dance routines and eating grechka with some kids for a month. Grechka, by the way, is this buckwheat thing and whilst I love some Ukrainian foods, grechka isn’t for me…it’s just that consistency in between needing to chew it and not needing to chew it…kinda gross. But anyway, back to the analysis of emotions.

I’m not about to criticise the part of my personality that likes to hide sometimes, because I don’t see why we need to change every little inconvenient part of ourselves, but I will say that I need to be less hard on myself right now. Yes, once you leave school and move out, you become an adult and there are lots of responsibilities associated with that, however, that process doesn’t automatically come with knowing exactly what you’re going to be doing at every stage of your life. Therefore, we should start cutting ourselves some slack for feeling a little lost sometimes. Especially considering we just lived/are living through an iNtErNAtiONal pANdeMIC.

On that note, coming back from Ukraine to see people no longer afraid of standing near strangers, of hugging, of going to a festival, of dancing in a bar, has really helped with dampening all those intense anxieties building up in me for the past 18 months. Let’s not be silly and assume that the stresses have completely gone – I’m still a languages student with no real semblance of a year abroad – bUT (!) as everything relaxes, and musicians release new music, life feels like it’s moving again. And thank fuck for that.

Love letters

Love letters

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

You know, it’s come to my attention that sometimes I’m not very kind to myself. And I’ve also just realised that that was a really deep way to start a blog… 🙂

Over the last decade or so, it’s become very fashionable for people to recognise when they’re being really hard on themselves and to rectify those moments. We start to do yoga, we meditate, we go on holiday (lol, imagine), we buy an adult colouring book, we have a good cry, we talk to each other. But still, no matter how self-aware we are, and no matter how many affirmations we say to ourselves in the mirror – although, I’ll be honest and say that I’ve never personally tried the talking to yourself method…seems a bit intense to me, but anyway – humans still don’t seem able to escape from those self-criticism shackles.

I was speaking recently with one of my housemates about this and we both noted that for each of us, part of growing up has been coming to terms with who we are: the good and the bad. Generally, I’m very comfortable in who I am and I like to think that I’m a pretty decent human being, but I know that every trait I really like about myself does have a side effect. For example, when I care about things I really care about them: I work really hard for it, I’ll spend hours on it, I’ll do everything I can to make it work – whether that be a friendship or my degree. However, the flip-side of that is that if I can’t control it and if something goes wrong, I lose my shit. I pin part of my self-worth on the success of that one thing, and if it fails then I get angry and I’ll probably end up sobbing until my eyes swell-up and the colour of my skin resembles Clifford the Big Red Dog. It’s intense.

Another thing I like about myself is that I’m pretty good at rationalising situations: I can be objective, and am decent at understanding why I’m feeling the way I do. Still, my overactive brain is very skilled in ignoring and doubting my own rationalisations, so I’m also pretty bad at practicing what I preach. Therefore, sometimes when I write a blog and I’m able to give what I hope is decent, pragmatic advice, that’s me writing a love letter to myself. Obviously, I’d love to always be as calm and measured as I can make myself out to be, but these words are carefully considered and they’re not always a reflection of my actions. But then, do any of us always follow the advice we give to our friends? Probably not. Do we know that we should? Yep. So why don’t we? Fuck knows.

I suppose I’m saying this because the more blogs I write, and the more advice I inadvertently give, the more I realise that I’m setting myself up for a fall when my friends see what I do and say ‘do I have to send you your own blog?’. (Which, though cutting, is always kind of hilarious when it happens.)

These blogs are the times when the rational part of my brain is able to take over and make sense of everything; to try and keep my anxieties and insecurities at bay. But, in this age of crafted opinions and convenient omissions, I’d like to make the disclaimer that I’m 21 years old and whilst I may know something is the right thing to do, that unfortunately doesn’t mean that I’ll always do it. What’s important, is that we each at least try to take care of ourselves as much as we can, and that we identify when we’re not doing such a great job of it. But as Hannah Montana wisely said: everybody makes mistakes, everybody has those days.

Enjoy the sunshine! Xx

Grind don’t stop

Grind don’t stop

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

What have I been thinking recently?

Not a whole lot if I’m honest. I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts. Pretending the sun is way warmer than it actually is. I went oUt oUt on Thursday; that was exciting. I watched The Little Mermaid yesterday.

I’ve been kind of tired.

We’re in the very last stretch of the university year and intellectually, I’m exhausted. I’m not walking around like a zombie, sleeping 15 hours a day – though I do generally need 9-10 hours of sleep a day to function, but that’s besides the point. I’ve been having a great time over the last couple of weeks, seeing and spending time with my friends and family and getting excited about restrictions easing. But during all the laughs there’s still this constant nagging in my head reminding me that I’ve got work and deadlines, and it’s making me really tired.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy my degree, because I honestly do find researching and writing essays, and speaking foreign languages incredibly fun. But this last academic year has been so taxing and I’m just bored of looking at screens. I don’t want to have to open up my laptop and sit for at least 5 hours a day doing vocabulary, or grammar exercises, or researching and writing essays. I look at the blank digital pages where my 2,500-word essay should be and though I’ve never struggled to have opinions, I feel like I have nothing worthwhile to say anymore. So I avoid it, but that only makes the process longer.

It’s just that the sun’s coming out, and restrictions are finally lifting after the most stressful year of pretty much everyone’s lives, but those deadlines still beckon. (!!) And I know that it might sound like I’m complaining about nothing but my friends and I have had a year of online university-learning and it’s been really hard. Just last term, we would each walk around the house letting out short screams or hysterical laughter or mantras of ‘can’t be arsed, can’t be arsed, can’t be arsed, I can do it, I can do it, don’t wanna do it, have to do it, gunna do it’ from the kitchen all the way back to our laptops, on our desks, in our rooms. And whilst it was always kind of funny to hear who was ‘losing it’ today, the stress and lack of motivation have been rEAl this year.

Nonetheless, even though we’re all burnt the fuck out, there’s really not that long left now: last push and then we can spend a day not studying, without feeling guilty about it or reaping the consequences the next time we sit down at our desks.

So, back to the laptop screens we go, but just for a few more weeks this time kids. Deep breaths.

Xx

2020 vibes

2020 vibes

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 1 Comment

I’ve been rewriting this entry for about 6 weeks now, because every time I’ve gone to sum up how I’ve felt for the past 18 months, I’ve ended up being brutally honest about how, at points, I’ve not been very happy. Then I wake up the next morning, and I’m embarrassed about being such a downer the day before. But the fact is, that ever since I moved to university, and ever since being thrust into long periods of isolation, there have been a fair few moments when I’ve felt really down. More down than I’ve felt in a while.

If I think about it, then it’s easy to attribute it to lots of things in my life – huge changes, new stresses, the usual stuff. I know it’s normal, and I feel a lot better now than I did in the Spring, or even a couple of weeks ago when I started writing this. Nonetheless, the past 18 months have been really hard, I’m really tired, and though I have lots of things to feel excited about this year, the first couple of weeks of 2021 have felt like we’re going to have much of the same for the foreseeable future. And it’s difficult to have to force yourself to keep looking on the bright side when normally, you don’t have to think about it so regularly.

For me, isolation meant that I had a lot of time to sit on my own and think. This allowance to just stop for a minute seems like it helped a lot of people all over the world. But my brain just started to get hung up on the negatives, and I started to get more critical of myself than I’ve ever been before. I became acutely aware of how lonely I’ve felt at points over the last 18 months, and somewhere along the line that morphed into me shaming myself for sleeping with men. Don’t ask me when, how or why. I also started to think that I must be stupid if I can’t remember those 15 Japanese grammar structures 10 minutes after I’ve been told them. I thought maybe I just wasn’t good enough. But worst of all, for the first time in my life I started to feel like when I’m at university I should cover up my callipers so that I don’t draw attention to them. I don’t even think I’ve ever been to my university library wearing clothes where you could see my shoes. And that’s not like me at all.

However, it’s difficult for me to admit these things in such a public way because I know that my friends and family won’t enjoy reading this, and will probably tell me off for being such an idiot. I know these thoughts are stupid, I know there’s nothing wrong with the way I am or the way I look, I know it’s dumb to feel so lonely, I don’t regret anyone I’ve ever slept with, and I know how lucky I am in so many ways. But it gets tough out here sometimes.

If we’re going to get anthropological, sociological, or just a bit nerdy about it, then a lot of the things I’m feeling can be traced to the fact that society just doesn’t like young women to succeed. It encourages us to criticise each other, but more importantly, our societal structures and expectations ask women to tear themselves to shreds so that they can be as inoffensive to the world as possible. Thus, all the millions of pressures coming from every b*stard direction can sometimes get the better of you – no matter how much you love yourself. So don’t feel stupid, weak, or guilty if you can’t always bat them off.

I’ve had some really upsetting moments in 2020 – like everyone else – but I also laughed every single day. And as long as we can still manage to do that, then it’s not all bad, is it?

So Happy New Year kids; let’s have some better vibes this time around the sun.

Xx

Lockdown blues

Lockdown blues

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

A few days ago I was feeling really low: I wrote a blog all about my experience of coronavirus, my opinions on the way the government has handled it, and how depressing quarantining is. I didn’t publish it though, mostly because I’m super bored of talking about our shambles of a government…

Everybody hates being ill, and now more than ever we’re made to feel like we should fear illness. Obviously the pandemic has caused suffering on a huge scale to many people, but as we approach the winter, we need to give as much attention to our mental health as we’ve been giving to our physical. It’s been very easy to focus on coronavirus as the only relevant illness for the year, but a dangerous consequence of that has been that we’re kind of neglecting everything else.

As you might’ve read in my posts from back in the summer, I found quarantining in Peru really intense and exhausting at times. So on the 26th October when I realised that I wouldn’t be able to leave the house until at least the 8th November, I was thrown back into all of the emotions I remembered from the first lockdown. And I really don’t think that anyone has been talking enough about how awful it is to be on house arrest for weeks. Yes, it helps with slowing down the spread of the virus, but it also does some serious things to your state of mind.

Thus, the point I want to make this week is that we have to push the drama of the government’s restrictions to one side. Whether you agree with what they’re doing or not, when you catch this virus you’re going to have to stay inside for a couple of weeks. That experience can feel overwhelmingly bleak – especially when you know that you won’t be able to go out for food or for a drink at the end of it. You might wake up some mornings and not see the point of getting changed. Then when you check your phone and see text after text from NHS track and trace instructing you to stay inside, you might start to feel really suffocated. We’re all feeling the same things, and it’s sh**.

But you have to make the effort to get changed; to cook something interesting; to have fun with those you live with; to call the ones you don’t. Do your best to surround yourself with good vibes, and try your utmost to address how you’re feeling.

I’m not always the best at looking after myself, but as I get older, it gets clearer that my own happiness is my responsibility. So just keep reminding yourself of the positive things, because this lockdown world can so easily push you down.

Sex education

Sex education

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

This week I’m on my period. So for the past few days, I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing painful cramps, mood sWINgs, and a whole lot of bleeding. Too much information? Well tough.

Even though I have my period once a month, and it’s an entirely healthy part of my life, society encourages me to never talk about it. Then a direct consequence of this, is that women generally know very little about how their bodies work, and how to take care of them. And the men around them know even less. So no one knows anything, and half of the population’s physical and mental health is put at risk.

Not ideal.

But I’m not talking about everyone being able to regurgitate the facts they learnt in science – although you should be able to do that. This is about acknowledging the hormones and the pain women feel whilst on their periods as legitimate. We’re not overreacting: it f**king hurts. And as funny as it might be to see a girl cry over her bobble snapping, those hormones do genuinely mESS you up for a couple of days. I mean, sometimes we literally wake up in a pool of our own blood.

So, periods are intense and tedious enough: I don’t need society telling me that I should be embarrassed by them too. Nor do I need people to tell me how/what I should feel/wear/say/think when no one is taking an interest in my body or me anyway.

At the same time, I don’t know much about what male bodies go through. I know they don’t have such a dramatic time of it every month, but that doesn’t mean it’s always smooth-sailing. Like puberty, that doesn’t sound like a walk in the park for a boy – physically, or psychologically.

The point is that we never ask detailed, comprehensive questions about our bodies. But we go further than not asking: we stigmatise the topics so much so that it becomes ‘gross’ or ‘uncomfortable’ to even think about going there at all.

For women especially, getting to know yourself intimately isn’t normalised, so a lot of us just don’t do it – by ‘intimately’, I mean both sexually and biologically. A lot of my female friends have never even taken a mirror to have a look at themselves, let alone experiment with masturbation. Whereas a huge proportion of my male friends know their genitals as well as any other part of their body – maybe even better.

So if we’re saying that women barely know anything about their own bodies, and we then take that to talk about health and safety, how could we ever know that something is wrong, if we don’t know what we look like when we’re healthy? Then on a psychological level, how is it right that we’re so disgusted by our own bodies? We won’t touch or get to know ourselves but we’ll let some random lad who might ditch us next week do whatever he wants? I dOn’T tHiNk sO.

Conversations about our bodies shouldn’t be separated according to whatever genitals you were born with, because we don’t exclusively socialise with people of the same sex. We need to ditch the euphemisms and the pressure, so we can learn to look after each other and ourselves more effectively. After all, knowing this information will definitely save someone’s life one day – maybe even your own.

I want to go for a walk

I want to go for a walk

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 2 Comments

For me, disability causes a constant conflict between personality and body. Ever since I was small I’ve struggled to mesh the two together because I’ve never wanted to accept that there are things that I’ll never be able to do. From the age of about 8 until 14 I was awful for it: I’d just do everything that my friends were doing because I wanted to, and I’d rarely give a second thought to my feet. But then I’d end up with infections, and in a wheelchair. So living that way didn’t get me very far.

After about the age of 16 I’d managed to (sort of) make my peace with it. I accepted that I couldn’t ever live my life the way most people could, and I mourned it, but ultimately I realised that those are just the cards I’ve been dealt. I mean, my disability could be so much worse, and what do I gain from fighting it?

Then I was 19 and I had my gap year. I proved to myself that I could travel the world on my own: I went to seriously remote places, away from medical institutions, and showed myself that doing what I want to do doesn’t always have to end in infection and debilitation. It might sound trivial to you, but it was breaking news to me, my family and my doctors.

This year, quarantine happened and after a while the government started allowing people out for walks and exercise. This change to the lockdown brought so much relief to most people, but not to me because I can’t just go out for a run. I can’t just walk down loads of steps to the beach and then back up them, because if I do, I have to accept that I might injure myself. I might put myself in a wheelchair.

This is where we get back to how complicated disability is, because many of my readers have seen me in person and have seen me walk plenty of times. I can walk short distances, and I’ve been known to dance for hours on a night out, but sometimes it’s just luck that I don’t end up with a blister after doing these things. I’m a seasoned professional when it comes to internalising my worries and pushing my disability as far as it can go. I’m stubborn and I’m young, and I don’t see why all my friends can but I can’t. Like I said, it’s a constant conflict.

But I don’t write these blogs to be all ‘woe is me’. Loads of people have it so much worse than I do, and everyone does the best with what they’ve got. It’s just that if I’m going to write blogs about when I feel empowered by being a young disabled woman, then I have to show you the side of my condition which gives me no joy whatsoever.

Some days I just don’t want to be this disabled person. It makes me feel weak and suffocated. I don’t want to have to think about whether I can go somewhere, I want to be able to just go. Sometimes I look at my feet and wonder how it’s fair that I have to be the only person I know who can’t just wear normal shoes and have normal legs. I wonder how it’s fair that I’ll have this for the rest of my life, and how I’m supposed to get over it when there’s nothing I, or anyone else can do to ever improve it.

There are no solutions to these problems. Life doesn’t work in ‘fair’ and ‘unfair’ – especially when I don’t believe in any type of God. As far as I can see, random people get random sacks of sh** to deal with, and we move. I have a really good time even with the headache of my Spina Bifida, and it’s shaped me in so many positive ways. To be honest, if someone told me that I could flick a switch to get rid of it I’m not even sure that I would. Disability can enrich a person’s perspective on the world and life in many ways, but I’d never, ever, wish it on anyone.

Not feeling it

Not feeling it

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 2 Comments

Until yesterday, I wasn’t going to write a mid-week blog. Mostly because I’ve spent so much time with myself these past 52 days. 52 days man: I’ve not been outside in almost 2 months. (!) In fact, I have absolutely no clue what the country I’ve been living in for that time even looks like. If it’s past the view from the windows, then I’ve never seen it.

So the routine of my week kind of revolves around writing blogs now. But I’m only any good at this when I’ve got something to say, and how can I have anything to say when I don’t do anything? I’m trying to write down the things I talk about in my head, but I’m soooooo bored of hearing that little voice blabbering on all the time. I’d kinda like to hear someone else for a bit.

Lol didn’t manage it though, did I? Here we are, reading another instalment of that little voice’s monologue… ah well.

Quarantine has been a serious strain on the mental well-being of my parents and I. We never argue and we get along uncharacteristically well, so generally speaking we’re totally fine. We have a laugh and our issues are never with each other. But human beings aren’t built to be locked inside for months on end; it doesn’t matter how much they like each other.

Thankfully, me, my mum and my dad have somehow managed to alternate our breakdowns so none of us have been miserable at the same time so far. It’s not every day but every now and then, it just hits you. And whoever isn’t feeling like jumping out of the window on that day, gets the job of comforting whoever does. Lots of hugs, loud music, drunken dancing on the balcony, crisps and chocolate, Blue Planet, Judy Garland, sarcastic jokes. You know, usual family stuff.

But what I’m trying to get at in this blog, is that if you’re waking up some days feeling absolutely miserable then that’s a totally valid feeling to have right now. It’s a completely mad, upsetting time. It doesn’t matter how lovely your house is, or how amazing the people you’re locked in with are, sometimes you just can’t face another day doing the same thing, in the same rooms, surrounded by the same people, with no idea of when you’ll all be able to do something else.

I could end this with ‘hey, it’s mostly not that bad, let’s not dwell’ – a very true point. But there’s a lot to be said for allowing yourself a minute to just listen to some maungy music and bask in how crap you feel. You don’t always have to rationalise things; sometimes you just feel rubbish. And we’ve been stuck in the house for weeks with no prospect of an end date, in a world where the only news story seems to be how many people are dying. So if that isn’t an excuse to feel sad for a day, then I don’t know what is.

Xx

Does being masculine mean you shouldn’t slut-drop?

Does being masculine mean you shouldn’t slut-drop?

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

I wanted to know whether these young men feel like they need to act/look/talk/think a certain way when they like someone, and whether they think there’s a generally accepted version of ‘attractive’ for the male sex.

My favourite response was: ‘I’m not saying I go around crushing beers against my forehead but I do maybe try and avoid slutdropping for hashtag bant’. I mean, that first part is just a really funny mental-image.

But overall, the answers were interesting because they were all pretty 50/50 on ‘yes’ and ‘no’, with equally passionate viewpoints on both sides. However, the ‘no’ answers had quite a lot of contradictions, with boys saying ‘no, not really’ or ‘definitely not’, but following it with ‘I try to be the most appealing version of myself’. Noting that it’s ‘pointless’ to be something they’re not in the first stages of getting to know a person, but still wanting to make themselves ‘more likeable’ to ‘not put girls off’.

I did completely understand what they meant: we all try to temper or alter ourselves when we first meet someone because we want them to like us. But, I can’t help feeling sad at how much pressure we put on ourselves just because we want the approval of a stranger…

Regardless of how many of these lads said ‘I just kinda do me’, there were a lot of mentions of the ‘tall, dark and handsome’ trope. The ‘v-line’ and the ‘older look’; the ‘jawline’ and the ‘muscular look’; the ‘confidence’ that always almost crosses over into ‘arrogance’. Oh, and ‘that typical white boy look’: I’m learning that for both men and women, other races have a lot more trouble with fetishisation than us Caucasians. But that’s a whole other blog.

Overall, the boys were saying a lot of things which equate to the experiences girls have our age. We all overthink how we should be when we’re trying to impress someone. We try not to change in front of strangers we fancy, but often we do it anyway. We have social standards we kind of want to live up to – no matter how impossible they might be. Our upbringing and our social class influence what version of ourselves we think is preferable to whoever we’re talking to. We’re all just kind of insecure and unsure at this age.

However these boys made a point that deserves a specific mention: not enough time is given to how much these pressures to look a certain way damage the mental health of young men. My friends were so right to tell me that ‘body image amongst men isn’t taken as seriously’ as it should be, because according to the National Centre for Eating Disorders in the UK, men are thought to make up around 50% of all cases. And I don’t know about you, but that statistic came as a surprise to me…

I think we’re doing pretty well in diversifying what it means to be ‘masculine’ in the modern world. But we’re moving so slowly. We still need to fully recognise that sexism is a huge problem for both men and women now: in 2020. If we sorted it out for women, then men would definitely feel the benefits too. Maybe we’d even realise that if someone likes us, then they probably couldn’t give less of a sh** about our hair colour or our height. Imagine it! A world without gender rules.

So, does being masculine mean you shouldn’t slut-drop? Well I certainly hope not. And FYI lads, if you want to play with gender expectations, then a little bit of eyeliner can go a long way too…I’m just saying.