Craft & Crumbs #Crafternoon

The thought of organising a fundraising event simultaneously thrills me and terrifies me. I love planning. I’m the person who creates a Facebook event for her birthday six months in advance. I have post-its in every shade and I have to have a relevant emoji after every event in my iPhone calendar. 

But paired with stellar organisation skills is a deep, overwhelming anxiety that I’m not doing enough, I’m doing everything wrong, I’m missing something, I have no idea what I’m doing, no one will care, no one will turn up, and/or whatever I’m organising is going to fall flat on its arse, much like all the parties I’ve ever planned on Sims 2. 

An education in medication. #WMHD15

Today is my 75^th day on antidepressants. Sertraline, to be exact. I’d never heard of it until the day I had a breakdown in my doctors’ surgery’s reception, and at first I treated it like a child hating its new baby sibling. This tiny, tiny white pill was apparently going to help things, but I had no idea how and resented it for being so smug in its ability where I lacked it.

But now we are best friends. The kind of friendship where you walk into the friend's kitchen and help yourself to food, know how to work the oven, and make yourself at home taking control of the TV remote. We’re comfortable, we’re tight, and if it ever moved away, I would cling on to its ankles wailing that Skype calls would never be enough.

Today is also World Mental Health Day. So, to mark it, I've written down the things I have learnt since starting medication, in the hope that it might help others who are battling between unwelcome sibling and clingy friend.

Raise your hand. Be brave anyway. #YAtales

You could hear the incensed whispers from across the country.

“What the hell is she playing at???”

“She’s disrupting the status quo, someone do something!”

“Is she ill? Shall I call 999? I’m gonna call 999.”

There was no doubt that my old university course mates, now dispersed across the UK, would have sensed that something was awry in that packed out room at Waterstones Piccadilly where, sat at the back by a protective pillar, I had just raised my hand to ask a question.

RAISED MY HAND.

TO ASK A QUESTION.

This is unheard of. You don’t ask questions. It is the one Victorian tradition we are ok with keeping: you do not ask questions. No one asked questions in university lectures. And if you did, you were shunned and burnt at the stake. So why on earth had I found myself feeling compelled to put my hand in the air like I just don’t care?