The Adventures

The Adventures

of Bernard and Wilomena

Growing Pains

Growing Pains

Being Different

Speeches

Speeches

What I should have said

Image

Hello! Welcome to my blog spot. Whether you read any of my posts or you’re just passing by, thanks for dropping in. If you’re sticking around for a while let me explain a little bit about what I’m trying to do…

My blog posts are not in any kind of order. Life is unpredictable so I’ll just be posting things as I write them and also dipping into the notebooks I’ve kept over the years. Everything I write is the truth and will be either a past experience, an ongoing predicament or maybe something you can relate to. All names (where needed) will be changed. So here is my truth…I have Bipolar Disorder (let’s call it Bernard) and I have a Stoma (Wilomena). For me personally, one is an unfortunate blessing and one is a curse but I make the best of a bad situation; I live with both on a daily basis and the problems they both bring with them. Contrary to popular belief, I am not defined by either condition.

I am defined by the actions I take

Everyone has a hero.  Everyone has someone they look up to, someone they wish they could be like, someone they could just meet.

Who are my heroes?

When it comes to me, I’ve had a few…

Back in 1990 I watched the film Mermaids for the first time and within ten minutes I wanted Winona Ryder to be my big sister.  In 1995 Natalie Portman won an award for best performance by a young actress in the film Leon, I not only wanted to wear the clothes she was wearing as she stepped on stage to collect the award, but at the age of fourteen I wanted to be her best friend and be her at the same time.

Winona Ryder – Mermaids

In 1993 I saw Cool Runnings at the cinema and came out wanting to be a bobsledder.  I even went home and asked my mum to hard boil be an egg so I could have a lucky egg just like Sanka!  The minute I clapped my starstruck eyes on old re-runs of the 1982 TV series Fame, my imagination had already enrolled itself in the 7th series that never happened.

I wanted Meat Loaf to be my dad, I wanted to be Enid Blyton’s protégé, be best friends with Zach and Kelly from Saved by the Bell and have my first and second novel published by the time I left high school.  I wanted to be a ballet dancer and convinced myself if I pranced around my bedroom floor on my tip toes enough, I could give Darcey Bussell a run for her money.

Sylvester Stallone – the uncle

My first celebrity crush was Sylvester Stallone when I saw him in Rocky III and I was devastated that it was filmed in 1982 which meant he was far too old for me and would be more suited to the role of favourite uncle, which would have made things even weirder!

When I was picking out careers for myself my maths teacher pointed out that I wasn’t clever enough to be a psychiatrist.  I then turned my attention to becoming a psychologist; but shortly after I changed my mind and settled on becoming a podiatrist because by this point I was fully emersed into the world of Indie music and I had a crush on just about every singer in every band that I was obsessed with. 

I told myself I could be a “foot doctor” to the stars.  Whenever I watched Top of the Pops, Glastonbury, Leeds and Reading Festival, any kind of concert where my favourite bands would play, I always thought…

“Their poor feet, they must really hurt doing all that standing and dancing.”

I was absolutely sure that I could help them and get closer to them by becoming an employee.  If I was their “on the road” foot doctor, I could surely make them fall in love with me.

First it was Crispian Mills, obviously, and I didn’t care that he was ten years older and when anyone said…

“What would a twenty-four-year-old want with a fourteen-year-old?”

I didn’t care, I was convinced he would one day float into my GCSE maths class and say…

“Put your calculator down darlin’, you’re coming with me.”

When I discovered he was married I knew the Crispian Mills ship had sailed and my ears turned their attention to Ocean Colour Scene.  I would religiously watch TFI Friday just so I could hear the first few beats of The River Boat Song.  When one of my school bullies informed me that thirty-one-year-old Simon Fowler would most definitely not be interested in fifteen-year-old me, I said…

“Give me one good reason why not!”

He replied with…

“He’s got a boyfriend, you minger.”

Now mark my words, I was less bothered by the “minger” bit than I was about the boyfriend bit, because now I knew it wasn’t possible and now I had no-where to go. 

Then I saw a music video by The Montrose Avenue and told myself that if couldn’t cut Crispian Mills’s toenails or file the dead skin off Simon Fowler’s heels, then surely Scott James would let me check out his bunions, assuming he had any.

When my friends were fawning over Peter Andre and Deiter Brummer and trying to work out how they could go and see Titanic for the sixth time, I was looking out for the next band who might need their feet fixing.  It turns out I had a list…

Puressence

Mansun

The Seahorses

Dodgy

Starsailor

Ruth

Train – this would have been tricky since they were American.

Stereophonics

James

Gay Dad

Head Swim

I have often said that I live my life through music, because as a teenager music and my writing was all I had as an escape.  I could create any world I wanted and it didn’t have to be accurate because it was fiction.  I could invent good people and turn them bad, I could make my characters swear and it didn’t matter what they said or what they did because they weren’t real and that wasn’t their fault.  I could make them out to be as rude and as nasty as my school bullies because within those pages I could flick off the switch of whatever was happening in my real world and get some peace.

The archive…

Every Sunday I would finish off my homework while I listened to the Top 40 and pray my favourite bands were still hanging in there.  Whenever they released a new song or a new album I had already pre-ordered my copy at my favourite music shop in Bolton and on release day I would dart down to to X-Records to pick up my cassette (Does anybody remember cassettes?).  As soon as I got home I would gently unfold the leaflet to see if the lyrics were written inside.  Regardless of the case’s contents I would sit beside my cassette recorder with my ear as close as I could get it to the speaker and learn every single word my heroes were singing.

I would memorise those words and I would find a way of relating to whatever they were singing.  I looked for meaning in every lyric, every hum and every musical note that came from their instruments.

I wrote my stories, my novels, my plays and my screenplays to my favourite songs and I would pick out music by artists who had the same feeling in their songs that I was trying to convey in my writing.  I even wrote letters to some of those bands explaining that I was a writer and I wanted to use their songs in the films that were going to be made from my stories.  I never got a reply, although Mansun did send me two backstage passes for a concert I didn’t have a ticket to because it was in Coventry.

I think I was about twenty-six when I thought my musical friends were talking to me through their lyrics… and we can thank Bernard the Bipolar brain for that.

Bipolar Disorder has a nasty habit of taking the most innocent and peaceful thing in your life and turn it into wrecking ball.  When you’re in the throws of an episode it’s very difficult to decipher between reality and the fictional world your illness creates.

I have a recurring theme of wanting to make a difference in the world.  I want to improve it, help it, just save it!  In 2011 I thought this was my dream, in reality it was massive Bipolar episode that landed me in a psychiatric ward for nearly two months.

Since then, every episode and every blip has been the same…

Bipolar – musician – lyrics – meaning = save the world.

I write my blogs like I’m an expert and I stand in front of groups of people and I talk the talk about how I manage my condition and how I recognise my symptoms so I can put a stop sign in front of it before it even reaches the traffic lights, but the truth is, sometimes I miss the symptoms.  Sometimes they just show up unannounced and it feels like they’re supposed to be there.  Sometimes something unpleasant makes an appearance that you never expected and despite saying…

“I’m not giving it anymore airtime, it’s done.”

…it doesn’t work. 

I always say the human brain is the most powerful muscle in the body.  It tells everything else what to do, how to work and it tells us how to feel, what to think and how to act on what we think.  I have tried to train my brain using the concept of…

“Mind over matter.”

…but most of the time I feel I am unsuccessful because Bernard is in charge of that department.  I am a pro at burying the things I don’t want to think about, and Bernard is a pro at disguising the things I don’t want to think about by bringing them out through music.

In my teenage years I bought every single and every album my idols ever released and every year my mum would ask me…

“What do you want for your birthday?”

In 1998 I said…

“The Hatful of Rain album by Del Amitri.”

Hatful of Rain 1998

I’d heard one song on the radio, “Always the Last to Know” and saw them perform “Don’t Come Home Too Soon” on TFI Friday and I was already in love with Justin Currie and wanted to run off into the sunset with him. 

Justin Currie and co – when’s the next sunset?!

About ten years ago I went to see Del Amitri play in Manchester, it was on my bucket list!  I remember they hadn’t sold out so we got moved to closer seats, and I remember thinking they sounded just as good live as they did on cassette when I was sixteen.  I also remember Justin Currie said a lot of naughty words that didn’t match up to the love and adoration of the lyrics in his songs.

Twenty-six years later I still have a copy of that album and the other week I was having a little ole’ listen to it when Bernard latched on to “Kiss This Thing Goodbye”.  Before I knew it I had downloaded every album, every single, every EP, music video, collaboration song and live album from Apple Music.  I created four playlists for them on my iPod, a full list, short list, mini list and a list of their music videos.  I also trawled through YouTube and created a playlist of videos from the 90’s because at this point I believed Justin Currie had started talking to me through his songs, but I had to watch the videos and listen to the songs continuously to find out what he was trying to tell me.

It got to a point where I was still awake at 2am talking to a 1990’s Justin through my Amazon tablet saying…

“What are you trying to tell me?  Just say it.  What are you trying to tell me?”

…and even though part of my brain knew this was not healthy, Bernard’s part of my brain convinced me that this was fine.  Every second of the day, where possible, was spent listening to Del Amitri.  It was a comfort, but it was also stressful.  Most people would offer simple advice like…

“Well just don’t listen to it.  Distract yourself, listen to something else.”

But I cannot stress enough the effect Bipolar has on the human brain.  I knew something was wrong, but the more time that passes, the more powerful those warped ways of thinking become.  It becomes dangerous to not be able to listen to something when your brain is telling you it’s keeping you safe. 

When you don’t need to eat and you don’t need to sleep because you haven’t got time, and you just need to focus on what Del Amitri are singing about in a YouTube video from 1990!  It is impossible to rationalise your thought processes when fiction makes more sense than reality… because this fiction is your reality.

When you’re on the phone to your psychiatrist repeatedly saying…

“I’m getting messages from music again, it’s back and it keeps coming back.  It always comes back.  Is there any chance that this is real?  Is it real?”

And he says…

“It’s unlikely.”

…and he prescribes you some temporary medication to help turn that reality back into fiction, it leaves you with the feeling of standing in a gust of wind in the middle of a desert.  You can feel the sand scratching at your face and all you can do is wait for the wind to die down so you can open your eyes to look at the wreckage Bernard has left behind.

A sand storm

My biggest fear was that I would never be able to listen to Del Amitri again.  I was worried my connection to their songs would be tainted by the stress I’ve been putting on their lyrics to find a deeper meaning to this world’s never-ending crisis.

Part of me dreaded the possibility that I might still be getting messages from them, but rest assured, about an hour ago I looked at my YouTube playlist and where I’d initially thought that Justin Currie was talking to me through the song “Surface of the Moon” he turned to the crowd to introduce the song and he said…

“This is a song about Glasgow.”

Well…not even Bernard can argue with that.

When I was younger I would dream of meeting my heroes.  I would imagine the kinds of conversations I would have with Winona Ryder and how she would give me advice about boys and loan me her clothes.  I dreamt of the day Crispian Mills would rescue me from the lessons I hated at school and everyday I waited by my front door for a letter from a band saying…

“Of course you can use our song for your film! We’ll see you on the red carpet.”

Fan mail

This miniature episode will come as a surprise to most people.  I am a pro at looking “normal”.  I am a master of deception and apparently I make it look easy.  But trust me, this is not easy and I don’t enjoy a single part of it.  I view Bipolar Disorder as an equivalent to some kind of devil.  It sits in a corner with a grimace on its face, rubbing it’s grubby little hands together ready to wreak havoc in all directions and senses of the word. 

My obsession with music is my comfort blanket.  It’s anything from Kula Shaker to country music and this time Del Amitri.  It’s impossible to describe the disappointment you feel when you realise something you wanted so badly isn’t real.  When you realise you don’t have a special power and a band singing a song is really just a band singing a song, it empties your world a little. 

I know artists write songs to share their life stories and as listeners we can relate to their words.  We can all take something from a song.  It doesn’t have to be a ground-breaking solution to saving the world because sometimes it’s just simply about the place you grew up in.

I’m not sure I’d ever want Justin Currie to see this… but if he was to stumble across it while randomly searching for a blog to read on a wet weekend with a cup of tea in his hand, then I’d like to say…

“Hello friend,

Thank you for writing songs that became the anthems of my childhood. 

Thank you for making me laugh through the humiliation of talking to a boy I liked only to realise everyone in my year group knew he had a girlfriend and I was “Always the Last to Know”.

When I finished my exams and handed in my assignments I would turn on my heel like little miss sassy pants and sing “Kiss This Thing Goodbye!

Thanks so much for giving me a song to sing to at university.  While everyone was glugging Lambrini I sipped diet coke and whispered the words to “Stone Cold Sober”.

And honestly!  You will never know the difference you have made over the last few weeks.  While I’ve been putting my brave pants on every single day, I have felt about as successful as “Spit in the Rain.

So thank you, for being the hero in the battle between…

…the Devil and Del Amitri…

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Reading time: 14 min
The pretty scarf out of its cellophane

Today is Saturday 20th January 2024.

As I write this blog I am in my pyjamas, in my living room with my cat by my
side warming herself on a heated blanket.  I know, party like a rockstar
right?  Well, today I partied like a different kind of rock star.

Ten years ago, someone once said…

“Never say no to any kind of public
speaking opportunity.”

I listened to that advice, and I have never said no to any kind of speaking
opportunity.

Two years ago, the hospital chaplain walked onto the ward where I
work.  It was a week after I lost my friend to suicide and we could not
have been more different.  Ade is a Reverand and Minister of an
Evangelical church in Manchester and I have always struggled with the concept
of religion.  I am not a believer in God but I have always been a firm
believer in fate.  I believe everything happens for a reason; it’s not
always good and it’s not always fair but I also believe that people meet for a
reason.

Ade took me under his wing.  He looked after my wellbeing at a time
when I wasn’t sure what my wellbeing was supposed to look like.  Fast
forward two and a half years and last week Ade asked me to tell my story to a
hundred people at the annual conference at his church.

He said…

“It’s short notice, you can think
about it, you can say no…”

I said…

“I’ll do it.  Thank you.  If
you think I can do this, I will do it.”

He said…

“It’s an African church and 90% of the
people will be black and we wear white.”

Well, the only thing I have that’s white is my wedding dress and a scarf a
friend bought me that never made it out of the cellophane because it’s too
pretty.  I figured my wedding dress might not be appropriate so my pretty
scarf made it out of the cellophane to cover my hair.

Now I am not experienced when it comes to church attendance.  I can
probably count on one hand how many times I’ve been to a Greek church and any
other kind of church was probably for someone else’s wedding.  You can
probably imagine I was a little fish flapping away outside of the bowl
containing the water I needed to be in.

I had no idea what to expect.  Two of my favourite people came with me
in the form of mum and Matt and as I write this I have to tell you, I have
never been more grateful to them for being there than I was today, not simply
because I had people there, but trust me, when I walked through the doors of
that church I was instantly emotional.  I kid you not, the welcome we
received gave a whole new meaning to the word…

“…wholesome.”

We were embraced, we were greeted with smiles and warmth and it was
beautiful!

No one looked at us strangely.  We were the only three people who
weren’t African, and you know what?  It didn’t matter. 

We took our shoes off, the men were seated to the right and women to the
left.  I felt so sorry for Matt, this was probably not his most
comfortable moment and he was now separated from everything that was
familiar.  But you know what?  Matt’s a trooper.  He gets a lot
of stick in life and I am guilty for some of that, but I have never been as
proud and grateful to my husband as I was today.

There was music, there was dancing; there was joy.  I wish I could say
I lost myself in the atmosphere but my ridiculous inability to “let go” stopped
me from doing that and if I could go back, I would dance around that floor and
celebrate life with the rest of them.

I am always cold.  I wear between two and three pairs of socks all
years round.  I have the heater on underneath my desk all day at work and
whoever turns it off, they turn it off  at their own risk.  A cold
Kat is not a happy Kat.  I have three hot water bottles in bed with me and
I have never been to a church and not been cold…

Well, today I was warm.  I’m not sure if it was warm because the room
was small, or that we were all sat very close together?  Or maybe it was
the people that made the room warm? 

I sometimes say certain things warm my heart, like someone making a kind
gesture for another person, or kind words, so maybe that’s what it was, maybe
it was the hearts of the people and their kindness and compassion that made the
room warm. 

People I have never met before who had no idea who I was, came to us and
asked us if we were having a good time.  They encouraged us to dance, gave
us water and food and I sat in my seat, trying really hard not to cry because
the whole thing just felt out of this world.

As I watched each speaker I was in total awe of their energy and I couldn’t
help but wonder…

“How on earth am I gonna follow that?!”

I’ve never kept a count of how many talks I’ve done.  I’ve always been
grateful for any opportunity to tell my story but sometimes I’ve left the room
feeling like it was a really bad job interview.  I always put a lot of
work in to my PowerPoints and I have always denied being a perfectionist and
claimed…

“…I just like things being done right.”

But I admit it here, right now I admit that I am the biggest perfectionist
going. 

I felt really strongly about getting today’s talk right.  I wanted to
get it right for Ade and I wanted to get it right for the people who were
watching.  With their warm embrace around my heart I wanted to give them
something that they might think about, because being in that room, just sitting
amongst the ladies, is something I will always remember.

When it came to my moment, as I walked up to the front of the stage I told
myself…

“…I can do this!  These people are
beautiful, I can do it.”

I can’t explain it, there was something in that room that just had me. 
I looked out at the audience as Ade gave me such a beautiful introduction and I
thought…

“…I can’t not tell these people how
special this man is and how much of an impact he’s had on my life.”

You know what I did?  I cried, I did.  My emotion got the better
of me, telling people the circumstances of meeting Ade and being invited into a
part of his life which other ward clerks at Bolton Hospital might not get, made
me grateful, and I guess my tears took the place of my verbal gratitude.

I’ve only ever cried once before in front of an audience and I felt like I’d
failed.  I’d let myself down and embarrassed myself.  Today I didn’t
feel embarrassed because today the people I was with didn’t allow me to feel
that way.

I kept looking at mum and I kept looking at Matt, both of them trying to
calm my panic; but they weren’t the only ones.  The entire room was on my
side, ushering me to get through my pain; men and women offering comfort in a
moment that I hadn’t expected. 

Once I had a grip on myself I got down to it and I told my story in a way
I’ve probably never told it before.  I think I managed to let go a
little.  I made people laugh, they joined in with my humour, they were
saddened by my misfortune but they celebrated my achievements.  They made
Matt stand up when I pointed to the only white guy in the room and said he was
my husband.  He was mortified but it was a moment where I got to tell an
entire room full of people that I adore him.

I know I’m a perfectionist but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  I
do know I put a lot of pressure on myself to get things right and I don’t
always achieve my expectations.  I have a tendency to overanalyse and
overthink my actions, especially when it comes to public speaking.  I
wasn’t trained to accept my short falls so I go into everything I do with the
intention of it being flawless.

Today I was not flawless.  I made mistakes, I cried for starters! 
That is not in the public speaking handbook!  I talked too fast in places,
I may have gone a bit too fast with some of my slides.  But when you’ve
got a roomful of people nodding and talking along with you, shaking their heads
and laughing with you; when you’ve got men and women unafraid of eye contact
and surprising you with spontaneous applauses; those flaws, those mistakes,
well they don’t matter.  They don’t count.  What counts is the moment
where an entire room full of people stand to their feet and they give you the
biggest, the most profound, the warmest and kindest applause I have ever had.

I am not flawless.  Life is not flawless and human beings make
mistakes.  We might expect perfection but at the end of the day if we
achieve perfection, how do we learn from our actions?

Sometimes it’s the things we do that makes a difference.  Sometimes
it’s what we say that counts and sometimes it’s the people around you that
bring out the best in you. 

Today it was the people in the room who brought all of those things to the
forefront.  Maybe it was their enthusiasm or their laughter?  Maybe
it was their caring nature?  Maybe it was their faith?

Or maybe it was simply their warm hearts…

Dedicated to Ade and everyone at the Salvation-Ark Parish who made my
Saturday truly special.

 

 

 

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Reading time: 8 min

Valentines Day…Love it or hate it that bad boy is going nowhere.

Before I start waffling on about the beauty of Valentines Day, how it ignites and fuels the love struck but reminds the unlucky in love that life does indeed suck; that for one day and one day only, you are allowed to wallow in your own self pity and isolated despair, because remember…you are the only person on the planet that feels your level of broken hearted turmoil…

Did I just do exactly what I said was not going to do?  Well, whatever you feel about Valentines Day, it’s all relative and it’s all valid.  Not convinced?  Let me tell you a story.

I spent thirty-one years surrounded by people who worshipped the very concept of Valentines Day.  I didn’t.  Year after year the concept of that day became increasingly difficult to navigate and if I managed to come out of the other side somewhat unscathed, it was an improvement on the previous year.

From birth (I guess), I believed that it was the guy who was supposed to express his affection for the girl.  I believed that if a boy sent me a Valentines card with a terrible…

“Roses are red…”

…poem inside, then it was the real thing.

All the way through primary school the same kids were kissing the same kids regardless of the fact they probably couldn’t actually spell the word “Valentines”.

The girls got roses, the boys got a Wispa chocolate bar and I got…well, nothing.

Taking in to consideration my chronic constipation was in action from a very young age, I got my first spot on my chin when I was ten and back in the 80’s kids didn’t really mess around with concealer like they seem to these days, so there was no disguising the monstrous volcano that went from red to yellow to just plain gross!  So I understood why a boy didn’t want to send me a card or write me a poem.

In 1993 when I started high school, that’s when the fun really started.  I got more constipation so I got more acne.  I know it sounds strange and I only gained this knowledge just before I had surgery and got my stoma in 2017.  When you poo you’re getting rid of all the toxins and bad bacteria that your body needs to get rid of.  If you can’t poo, those toxins have to go somewhere, so for me; they came out in my face!  This was no good for a teenage girl my friends, no good at all.

In my high school years when my friends were experimenting with make-up and clothes and were allowed to go into town shopping on a Saturday afternoon; I was in my bedroom, ploughing through my homework with my cassette player next to me listening to Kula Shaker and Ocean Colour Scene.  As soon as my homework was done I pulled out my notebook and took inspiration from those voices and the lyrics in the songs they were singing to make a world with words that only I had access to.  A world where I could create the same characters in school that I spent every single day with and I could choose to take away their Valentines cards, their chocolates and their roses and just give them…

…THORNS!

As every year passed it became more and more imperative that you had to kiss a boy! You had to have a boy want to kiss you and every single year, neither of those things happened.

I became the gopher.  The friend people would send to another group of friends to break the news that one person fancied the other and they wanted to go out with them.  To this day I still don’t know where they wanted to go out to, it’s a mystery.

It was a known fact, that some of the people I went to school with were the lucky recipients of multiple Valentine’s Day paraphernalia but I was always empty handed.  I was the girl who never wrote a card and was never the recipient of one but every year people would ask me…

“How many Valentines cards did you get Katerini?”

I started off by hanging my spotty head in shame and saying very quietly…

“None.”

I remember one year I had a triangle of acne spots on my forehead with one sitting extremely uncomfortably in the space between my eyebrows and a boy laughed and said…

“I’m not surprised, Cyclops.”

I don’t know exactly where that boy is now but I’m pretty certain he’s not a comedian.

I lived my life through music.  I believed that listening to one song first thing in the morning as I put my school uniform, on would dictate how I lived the hours of my day until I could take it off again. 

I must have been about fourteen when I discovered a band called Ruth.  They did one album, Harrison, I was madly in love with the lead singer, of course, and when I heard their song “Valentines Day” where the latter of the lyrics were…

Ruth

“Stay out of my way, on Valentines Day.

Stay out of my way, and you’ll be okay…”

Well, it became my anthem.  Every year I would play that song and throughout the day I would sing those words in my head, strongly believing that the more I sang them, the more I believed them to be true.

I was bullied pretty much all year round, not just on this sacred day and I had to work out a version of self-protection that would make other people smile and keep the bullies at arm’s length.

14th February 1994…

“How many Valentines cards did you get Katerini?”

“Oh the ship’s not come in yet.  There were too many to load on to it so it’s due tomorrow along with all of my flowers and chocolates.”

Happy Valentines Day Katerini

Believe it or not that bought me freedom from the bullies, some of them didn’t know what to do with it to such an extent they backed off and I had the rest of the day to work out what to say next year.

From that moment on I used my creative mind to come up with the most ridiculous romantic scenarios as I could in the hope that people would think I didn’t care about the 14th February.

14th February 1995

“Oh, Crispian’s on tour at the minute with his band, Kula Shaker.  He called me last night and said he’s got me a card and a present but the post in Japan is really slow.”

Crispian Mills

14th February 1996

“Crispian’s on tour again.  He called me last night and asked my mum if I can go on tour and he’ll pay for everything because he really likes me.”

14th February 1997

“Yeah me and Crisp split, we’re still friends but I’ve got a new boyfriend now.  His name’s Scott James, he’s the lead singer in The Montrose Avenue.”

Scott James

14th February 1998

“Simon (lead singer from Ocean Colour Scene) sent me something in the post but it’s still on the way.  It’s coming by carrier pigeon but he said it’s really special.”

Simon Fowler

Silly stories made me feel better.  They made life feel easier, as if there was another world out there for me, an alternative existence where I was accepted as myself by the most creative and alternative people.

As I got older it was more difficult to pass those humorous stories off and I just looked strange.  I became a twenty-something trying to put myself in a world that didn’t exist.  I became the twenty-something whose mental illness spiralled when on the 14th February my letter box produced nothing but a hospital appointment or a writer’s magazine containing articles on how to write a successful love story!

I went through all of my teens with no sign of a love poem.  Even in my twenties the very short-lived relationships I had didn’t fall on Valentines Day so there were no chocolates and definitely no flowers on my doorstep.

I spent so long grieving over why I wasn’t the recipient of a ginormous heart shaped red card and a box of cheap chocolates that I never actually asked myself what Valentines Day looked like for me?  What did I want?  Did I want chocolates?  Did I want rose petals and candles?  Was I prepared for someone to write a writer a poem?  Could I even write one myself when I still struggle with the definition of a Limerick never mind harbour the ability to create one. 

The truth is, I had no idea what I wanted because I’d always been so focused on the things I didn’t have. 

When I met Matt I was thirty-one.  I’d given up on Valentines anything so ten years ago when he asked what I wanted to do for Valentines Day I said…

“All I really want is a card, because I’ve never had one.”

Two spring chickens

Well, I got my card, and I got chocolates that he still points out I didn’t eat, but in my defence, I can’t eat something that is in the shape of a heart and says “I love you” on it.  If I ate that, there’s no evidence of that ever being true.

Ten years later, every year I get my card.  Every year I get a little present. And every year people ask…

“What did you do for Valentines Day Katerini?”

And every year I say…

“Not much, I just wanted a card.”

This year I had a really rotten start to the week.  For three and a half months I have managed to swerve a Diversion Colitis flare up.  I have been able to serve up a Christmas dinner, do three presentations and make the journey up to Dundee without it getting a look in.  Until now…

Diversion Colitis is a nasty infection in your colon that around 90% of people who have an Ostomy and keep their colon will be the lucky sufferers of.  It’s a grim process and I cannot express how painful this one has been, but I’ll try.

It’s been agony.  To the point where the pain made me vomit, and I haven’t been sick for seven years so this was not a pleasant experience.  At one point I was lying on my bathroom floor, wiping my vomit-stained mouth with coconut scented toilet paper thinking…

“I’m never eating another Peparami ever again.”

And also…

“This might need a trip to A&E…but I have no idea how to move from my bathroom floor.”

Rest assured people, there was no visit to A&E this time, it was a close call but we managed to swerve that too.

I had three days in bed and went back to work on Valentines Day.  To cheer me up Matt gave me my Valentines card the night before.  Now Matt’s known in his family for his inappropriate card choosing skills and he’s not cottoned on to the fact that when he laughs at the cards he buys, he laughs alone.  Ten years ago I said to him…

“If you ever get me a stupid card, we’re done.”

Ten years later that threat still stands, and I have not received a stupid card.

Valentines Day night I had to go to Manchester to co-facilitate the Bipolar group, because just like romance, Bipolar can be unpredictable.  I felt rubbish, all I’d eaten in twenty-four hours was a chicken Cup a Soup and a tin of chocolate Nurishment, but, while being stuck in traffic with mum I got a text message from Matt that said…

“Keep yourself free Friday night.  I’ve booked that wrestling thing you fancied.”

Okay, so hold that thought…

As a teen, I was a lot of things.  I was a geek, a nerd, a swot, an indie kid, a music lover, an actress, and a writer.  I was not a wrestler.  But… I did like watching it.  I liked watching the crazy characters dressed in anything from spandex and tutu’s to chains and hooded capes. 

I would watch WWE and WWF and make up the stories of who those characters were and how they came to be fighting in a ring.  I even created my own wrestling club where I was the ringleader and the peacekeeper of all involved.  My members were troubled kids who needed guidance and I was the only person who could give it.  Sorry reader, but it never made it to the page.

I had never heard of Bolton Town Wrestling until Matt spotted a poster outside his work and joked about taking me.  Little did he know that he’d married a wrestling fan!  I am just so full of surprises!

At work I opened up every single conversation I had with people with the words…

“Ask me what I got for Valentines Day.”

“What did you get for Valentines Day?”

“Tickets!”

“Tickets for what?”

“WRESTLING!!”

To say people were a little bit surprised is an understatement.  A couple of people even said…

“Oh I’m so sorry.  Why would your husband take you somewhere like that for Valentines Day?”

Imagine those expressions when I told them it was the best Valentines present that I have ever had.  Seriously, Bolton Town Wrestling!  Guys! I am forty-one years old, where were you when I was fourteen?!

Bolton Town Wrestling – Love Hurts

I smiled as soon as we walked through the doors of the recreation centre.  There were families, there were couples, there were community groups, a raffle!  There was a merchandise stall and massive ring in the centre of the room, Tyson Fury eat your heart out mate, Bolton Town Wrestling is where it’s at!

I am not a violent person, for me it’s about the stories.  It’s about the atmosphere, it’s about a group of people forgetting who they are for a few minutes and becoming someone else entirely and making people smile.

As I watched the people bouncing around the ring covered in face paint wearing tiny shorts, I finally realised what Valentines Day looks like for me.

It’s not about chocolates and rose petals.  I don’t want a posh meal in a snazzy restaurant.  I don’t need violins or teddy bears holding heart shaped “I love you” pillows.

No thank you…

I want a card, that goes without saying.  I want to be in a room with the person I love looking at something that makes us both smile. I want to laugh, and I want to close my eyes at night and feel grateful for someone who knows me and does something for me that no matter how big or small it might be, they do that thing because they are happy and proud to be with me, not just because they feel they have to.  That’s what I want and I am thankful that this is what I have.

Okay so I may not be gorgeous, but at least I’m not a Cyclops anymore…

I have never been normal and even now, at the age of forty-one I am still discovering who I am and realising that there is no shame in being different.  There is nothing wrong with liking music no one else does.  It doesn’t matter if you have to make up stories to keep yourself safe because trust me…

Valentines Day 2024 may not have been your average Valentines Day, but…

…some things are worth the wait…

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Reading time: 13 min

When you have an illness, of any kind; it can be a lonely and isolating world.  You’re trapped inside your body and your mind and there’s very little you can do to separate yourself from that.

When you have an illness you’re reminded every time you look into the mirror that there’s something wrong with you.

When you have a mental illness, every time you look into the mirror it’s an introduction to how you’re doing that day.

It’s been ten years since I made the decision to try my hand at public speaking.  In 2014 I couldn’t even read a menu out loud never mind stand up in front of a group of people and talk about my mental health journey. 

Most people I talk to say the thought of public speaking terrifies them, and once upon a time, I would have agreed with them.

Over the years people have asked me…

“…Why? Why would you do such a scary thing to yourself…by choice?!”

My answer is simple…

“Why not?”

When I’m asked why I wanted to become a public speaker, I don’t struggle to find my words.

I got tired of people saying “no” to the things I wanted to do.  I got bored of medical professionals putting the mentally ill into a box and saying…

“This person can’t do this because they’re mentally ill.”

I got frustrated with the world for allowing people to perceive the “mentally ill” as a group of people who can’t function in a society that is far from functional in the first place!

My life today is very simple.  I have not travelled the whole of the world, I have not experienced a tornado of heartache and heartbreak and throughout my 20’s and 30’s I was never ambitious when it came to my working life.  Some say I settled for a basic way of living and I probably did.  But what I would say about that is…

“At least I’m alive.”

A friend once said I should aim higher and look for a proper career.  They said…

“If someone asks you where you see yourself in five years, what would you say?”

I said…

“Alive, hopefully.”

I don’t measure success according to the five, ten, fifteen year plan others set for themselves.  I try to be grateful for what I have and if I am happy with the things that come my way, then I count that as a success.

When I started public speaking I didn’t really know where I wanted to take it or how far I could go with it.  When people ask me what I talk about and my answer is “myself” I always answer with caution because all I can see in their eyes is them thinking…

“What could you possibly have to say about yourself that anyone would want to listen to?”

Well, as it turns out, I have quite a bit to say and people seem to want to listen to it.

Before Covid I was doing multiple talks per month but after lockdown everything didn’t just slow, it came to a halt altogether.  I went from one job where people knew I had a public speaking side show, to a job where no one knew anything about me and any mention of public speaking was most probably seen as either a lie, or not worth registering because there was no current proof. 

Well now there’s proof.  This year I have gone from doing three talks in four years to three talks in one month; and it feels good to be back on that horse.

Every year since 2019 Abertay University have asked me to speak to some of their students. During Covid I spoke over MSTeams, which if you’ve used it, you’ll know it’s a better version of Zoom but still problematic.  Last year the doors of in-person speaking reopened and I had the chance to go up to Dundee again, stay in a hotel and have a little adventure.

I had three rules!  My rules were as follows…

  1. Do not get an ear infection.
  2. Do not get fibre induced acne on face.
  3. Do not have Colitis flare up.

What happened?  I hear you ask…

All flippin three! Every single one of them!  I managed to curb the ear infection and found an anti-biotic spray I’d kept since my last one, so that was that taken care of.

I imagine you’re wondering what fibre induced acne might be.  Well, I can’t digest anything with fibre in it, which is basically anything healthy.  So what did I eat prior to going to Dundee?  A lot of fibre, which then causes my face to break out into a collection of volcanoes that take days to fully erupt and weeks to clear.  I got three of them on my face!

To complete the triangle, of course my colon decided it wanted to shed the insides of itself and have me writhing in agony the night before I left for Dundee, and skating on the edge of a cliff with no toilet insight.  And trust me, when you have no working muscles to hold in the delights of a stagnant organ that never worked in the first place, needing to go to the toilet is the last thing you want to be thinking about.

Picture this… I’d paid for a first class train ticket and as I was feeling like a tired and deflated whoopie cushion, I was beyond relieved to discover I could sit next to a toilet.  That is until they cancelled the train and we were stranded at Preston to then be ushered in to a strange taxi that would take a couple of us to Glasgow.  I was fine.  I was absolutely fine… until I needed the toilet. 

I have never used Tena Lady, but at that moment I would have snatched an old lady’s hand off just for the protection.

I remember finally arriving in Dundee and waiting for my hotel room to be ready and I sat looking out at the busy streets thinking…

“I’m not having a nice time.  I’m not, I’m not having a nice time.”

Sad penguins, not having a nice time…

Rest assured, after that things did get better, and I managed to get the rest I needed before I stood in front of fifty+ people and told them a story I wasn’t sure even I wanted to listen to, never mind tell.

Fast forward a year and I received an email from the course tutor at Abertay University asking me if I would speak for a fifth time.  My immediate response was yes, obviously, but then I thought…

“Are they not bored of hearing the same story by now?”

For some reason negativity is drilled into human nature, particularly me.  Whenever something good happens I don’t just accept it and be grateful for it, I have to find something to counteract that euphoric feeling and question my right to happiness.

When you’ve had people in the past who have said…

“Why you? What makes you so special? I could do that; anyone could do that.  What do people want you for?”

It hurts, and hurt is hard to shake off when it’s easier to add fuel to the feeling of inadequacy.

It’s funny though, I never say no to a speaking opportunity; even with the memory of being stuck in a taxi for four hours with an impending explosion of brain matter that could rival the stench of a million babies nappies in a confined space, still at the forefront of my mind; I did get quite excited about going to Dundee again.

I had three rules!  My rules were as follows…

  1. Do not get an ear infection.
  2. Do not get fibre induced acne on face.
  3. Do not have a Colitis flare up.

What happened? I hear you ask…

Nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  I had no ear infection.  I haven’t eaten anything fibrous in about three months so my face is clear; and my colon has decided to take a break from torturing me – although I did look into the possibility of grabbing a pack of Tena Lady, just in case.

When I arrived in Dundee I had most of the afternoon and the evening to occupy myself.  The very nice man on the reception desk asked me where I’d travelled from and what I was doing and then said…

“Oh you’re here for the uni.  Are you a teacher or a professor?”

I laughed, I did, I laughed and I said…

“No but I’m doing a talk.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Mental health.” 

“So you’re teaching something then, let’s see if I can find you a nice room.”

He wasn’t kidding.  I went up to my room and opened the curtains to see the Dundee skyline and the soft waves of the sea.  That evening I pulled the armchair in the corner of the room to the window and watched the faraway lights twinkle and I thought…

“After last year, I deserve this.”

A room with a view…

The next day when I stood in front of the 45+ people doing their final year of their counselling masters degree, I thought,

“I must be doing something right.”

When they nodded their heads, when they laughed, when they looked sad or disappointed, thought,

“I must be saying something right.”

When they gave me the applause I always shy away from I thought,

“I must have done something right.”

When the class ended a few of the students queued to talk to me, to hug me and say thank you, I admit part of me was still reluctant to accept their kindness and their emotional generosity. 

Death by hot chocolate…

That afternoon as I killed time until my I had to catch my train home, I found a pancake house and had the biggest, most calorie filled, fattiest hot chocolate I could find and I thought…

Isn’t this what I wanted?  Isn’t this what I set out to do?  When I took the steps to become a public speaker, isn’t everything I have achieved over the last ten years exactly what I wanted to achieve.

I wanted to make an impact.  I wanted to prove a point.  My point being, that I could achieve something if I put my mind to it. 

As I write, this I still hear that negative voice inside my head saying…

“People will think you’re full of yourself.  They’ll think you shouldn’t be given these opportunities.  There’s someone out there who is better than you.”

And maybe that’s true.  But I don’t give into my ailments just because something uncomfortable has the potential to happen, so I won’t give up on trying to better myself because something inside me says I might not be good enough. 

The truth is, will any of us be good enough for ourselves?

Over the last few days, maybe even just the last few hours; I have learned that the only thing that really holds me back in life is myself.   It’s me who tells me I am not good enough so it’s me who is responsible for my actions.

My kind of sunset…

The morning of my talk in Dundee I sat in my hotel window with a cup tea and I looked out at the red and orange sky as it reflected off the water.  All I could hear were my slurps, but knowing how hard I have worked to get to where I am in life, despite everything that has been against me, I couldn’t help but think, I can’t teach anyone anything…

…but I can tell a story.

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Reading time: 10 min
headphones and iphone

Exactly three years ago in 2020 I was obsessed with Panic! At the Disco.  I was convinced Brendon Urie was communicating with me through the lyrics in his songs. Every single song had a personal meaning meant for me and together we would conquer the fate of the universe.  Only trouble was, it wasn’t real … I was having a Bipolar episode.

See that’s the trouble with Bipolar, it’s a tricky little customer.  It disguises itself as something enjoyable, something innocent and ten out of ten times the onset of mine is a fascination with music. 

It starts off as a song, and in 2020 it was…

“High Hopes”

…I looked on iTunes and over the course of two months I downloaded every song, every album, every collaboration Brendon Urie had ever done on to my iPod and listened to Panic! at the Disco and Panic! at the Disco only.  I’m serious, every bus journey, train journey, lunch break; even the working day was consumed by Brendon Urie’s voice and his disjointed lyrics that I made sense of in my head to suit my purpose…my mission.

Panic at the Disco release gravity defying video for 'High Hopes' |  OUTInPerth | LGBTQIA+ News and Culture

I know it sounds crazy.  I know it’s impossible to comprehend and I’m not sure I can even explain it; but this isn’t the first time and it certainly wasn’t the last.

I have always been addicted to music.  When I write stories I have music in my ears that helps me to set the scene and create the personalities and sometimes the appearances of my characters.  When I was at school I would sit in my bedroom and listen to the Top 40 just waiting for a song by Ocean Colour Scene or Kula Shaker to place.  I went to sleep listening to Meat Loaf through my headphones and in PE I would internally sing the words to…

“Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad”

…to help get me through the bleep test (remember those?).

Music has always been there, it’s something constant, something dependable that never failed to pull me out of the holes I was sucked into. 

When I was bullied I’d close my eyes and picture Crispian Mills knocking on the door of my house and saying to parents…

“I’ve come for your daughter and I’m going to take her away and make life wonderful.”

When I listened to Simon Fowler sing…

“The Riverboat Song”

…I wasn’t the spotty swot people picked last for their hockey team.  I was clever and popular with perfect skin.

The music I listened to made me feel everything I wanted to be and as a result played into the hands of Bernard the Bipolar brain.

When I was fifteen my GCSE English teacher gave the class a piece of homework.  He said…

“I want you all to go home tonight and pick a song, look at the lyrics and tomorrow I want you tell the rest of the class what they mean.”

…Well I had a whole cheerleading squad in my head shaking their pom poms because this! This was my idea of homework.  I didn’t care about Shakespeare, MacBeth was grim and as for The Lord of the Flies, well, William Golding badly needed to up his game if he was going to compete with my entire cassette tape collection of Indie and Rock music!

Meat Loaf Music Cassettes for sale | eBay

I must have sat with my Walkman for hours, listening to every Meat Loaf song word for word, writing down the lyrics, reading them, thinking about them and pondering what they meant.  In the end I couldn’t choose just one song, so the next day I went to my English lesson which of course was the last lesson of the day; the only lesson I’d been looking forward to all day!  I sat in my seat next to my friend with three A4 pages completely covered in Meat Loaf Lyrics. 

I was ready!

But the rest of the class were not so ready.  It turned out there was only a handful of us who had done our homework.  Not only that but I happened to be the only kid in the class who had more than just one lyric going spare.

“Katerini, how many songs have you got?”

“Give us a song Kat, you’ve got loads there.”

“Kat, can I have one of your songs?”

Out of the kindness of my heart and probably revelling in my sudden albeit temporary popularity, I ended up dishing out five or six of my songs thinking…

“It doesn’t matter, I’ll definitely get asked for a one.”

…purposely I saved the best one for myself because I’d had every single word under the microscope the night before and by now I was…

A musical genius.

….so there I sat, all smug and excited; pleased with myself that not only had I done my homework to the best of my ability, but as my teacher asked everyone in the class I’d donated a song to, to then dissect their chosen lyric, I very quickly realised that I had done everyone else’s homework to the best of my ability too.

I have never forgotten my disappointment.  The disappointment that no one in the class said…

“Actually Sir, this is Katerini’s work.  I didn’t do my homework so I stole part of hers.”

I was disappointed that I didn’t get picked, again, only this time instead of being on a hockey field, it was in a field where I saw myself as an expert. 

Back in 1998 I could not have foreseen my Bipolar diagnosis and I would never have imagined that the one thing I’d always loved and believed kept me safe, would sometimes play out to my detriment.

Sometimes the noise of my own thoughts is too loud to bear so I put my headphones on and drown out the chaos with the voices of…

Four Norwegian singers (Kurt Nilsen, Espen Lind, Alejandro Fuentes, Askil Holm) who I later imagined were talking to me through their live albums…

“Hallelujah Vol 1” and “Hallelujah Vol2”

…together the five of us were going to save the world.

I would listen to the same song constantly, memorising the lyrics, writing them down, translating them into meaning that was only visible to me.

I wrote stories where Alex Band (The Calling) was the definition of my lead character and his music was the soundtrack to the plot.

In my late teens and early twenties Puressence was the cure to my depression.  When I closed my eyes and listened to…

“Standing in Your Shadow”

…I would feel less invisible.

At that age of twenty-two I had a second try at the third year of my degree and I stayed up until four in the morning putting songs on a tape that I would listen to while I tried my best to write an essay.

At seventeen Buffalo Tom were the only band I listened to for a month because I only knew one other person who knew who they were.

In 2014 I hugged every single member of The Overtones after their concert and they had no idea who much that meant because I was in a really dark place and their smiles made my cold heart feel warm again.

“Seahorse Perfect”

…by Astrid – a band I’d loved in my sixth form days and became part of the soundtrack to my first year at university made sense of the grief I had for a friend I’d lost.

City and Colour were my go-to in days of confusion because Dallas Green’s voice was like a whisper of comfort over a bed of rain filled clouds.

I have a rational reason for every single musical obsession I have ever had…

…until now.

About four years ago Luke Bryan popped up on my YouTube feed with his song…

Luke Bryan sings 'Drink a Beer' with two fans at Hartford concert

“Crash My Party”

…a few days later I downloaded every single song, album and music video he had ever done on to my iPod and I created a playlist that I added to and amended and over the course of two months I didn’t listen to anything other than Luke Bryan.

I’ve never been a big fan of country music, in all honesty it irritated me.  All that talk of dirt, whiskey and riding bulls called Fumanchu, I didn’t get it.  I couldn’t relate to it and I’ve never liked the look of cowboy boots; they’re really not my style.  But I have to admit, country music itself, it’s actually a grower and Luke Bryan became my guilty pleasure.

In January I bought a digital radio and stumbled on Smooth Country.  Well that was it, it was like a switch!

Ping!

My little office at work was filled with an array of joy and misery combined.  My world was consumed by husky male country voices all singing about Whiskey and God and ploughing fields of corn; and suddenly it wasn’t annoying.  Suddenly country music was the best thing I had ever heard…

…and then it became the slippery slope of a musical Bipolar decline.

I fell in love with the voices of…

Florida Georgia Line

Chris Stapleton

Thomas Rhett

Randy Houser

Nate Smith

Randy Travis

…and then I heard…

“God’s Country” by Blake Shelton

Blake Shelton Takes 2019 CMA Awards to 'God's Country' [WATCH]

…an hour later I had downloaded every single song, album, collaboration he has ever done.

I made him his own playlist, in fact I made him three.  I put the same songs on the same playlist six times so I didn’t have to wait too long to hear “God’s Country” again.

Then I made playlists for all of the country singers I’d downloaded.  I had a…

A full list

A quick list

A short list

And a…

Cherrypicked list.

At work I waited for the same songs to come on my radio.  It’s an obsession, a compulsion, it’s an addiction.  It’s a feeling that leaves me empty and on edge if I don’t hear the voices of those singers singing the lyrics that I have to make sense of.

That’s when Bernard stepped in and took away every little bit of enjoyment of listening to music and gave me a mission that I had to complete but every time this happens I am never told what that mission is until I find it in the lyrics.

What Bernard doesn’t realise is, country music is fairly self-explanatory.  You can’t find much more meaning in drinking beer in bars and picking up girls in pick-up trucks.  Country music is about country life, it’s fun and it’s sad all at the same time.

People like to ask…

“What caused the episode?”

My answer is simple…

“Nothing.” 

Maybe my brain wanted to get my attention. Maybe it was bored of being sensible and something to get its teeth stuck into something different.  Maybe this time it was in the shape of a…

Cowboy Hat Illustrations, Royalty-Free Vector Graphics & Clip Art - iStock

…cowboy hat.

In the middle of my episode when I was desperately trying to find the meaning in Blake Shelton’s song…

“I’ll name the dogs”

…someone said…

“There are meanings in every song you’re listening to, just not the meanings you’re looking for.”

Three months after my fascination with country music started, I’m still downloading songs and making playlists but I don’t feel that Luke Bryan or Blake Shelton are trying to communicate with me anymore.  But if I’m honest, that’s both a relief and disappointing.

My happy place is music. My version of serenity is relating to a singer’s words and finding comfort and distraction in their songs.  My iPod is my journal, it bears my soul; it’s something that can put me at risk but more often than not it keeps me safe.

When everything around me is a maze of chaos and noise I can immerse myself in the idea of ploughing maize and catching crayfish.  In my head I can dance in a barn and drink whiskey with farmers, drive pickup trucks and chew on straw.  I can have faith, be comfortable in a checked shirt and not worry about the accidental holes in my old jeans.

I can drink beer out of dixy cups and party in a field of corn and as I sit here now, I find absolutely nothing wrong in any of that!

So now that my Bipolar episode is passing and my head is becoming clearer; now I can look at myself in the mirror and not wonder who is staring back at me because now all I am is a listener. I am a country music fan and I am proud to just be Katerini and…

…addicted to Blake Shelton.

Dedicated to everyone who helped me through this latest episode. Thank you for the late night messages, checking in, indulging my obsession and keeping me safe. If it wasn’t for all of you we could be looking at a very different picture xx

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Reading time: 11 min

It’s right about now that I’m supposed to say…

“…happy new year!”

So there, I said it. 

And what better way to start off 2023 than with a potentially depressing blog? 

I know I’m supposed to list all the resolutions I’ve made and announce my declaration of how I’m going to change and therefore save the world this year, however I stopped making new year’s resolutions about ten years ago when I realised I wasn’t actually fulfilling them.  Talk is cheap my friends.

So, I am not starting the new year off as I wish to continue.  This blog is just a… let’s say… a reflection, of something that happened last week. 

Get a beverage guys and lets see what I have to say for myself…

May be an image of 2 people

Allow me to begin…

It was Wednesday 21st December 2022 when I phoned mum and said…

“Mum, I need to go into town after work and do some Christmas shopping.  People are buying me presents and I haven’t got one to give them back.”

At 2:30pm mum picked me up from work and we ventured into Bolton where there are zilcho shops but, desperate times call for desperate measures.

Like 90% of this country’s population I went to Primark to get my friend a present I knew she would love and I was just standing in the queue that was as per usual fifty miles long, more windy than a successful snake on a 1990’s mobile phone game – ask your parents kids, they’ll know what I mean – and I was just messaging my friend in Belgium about the postcard he sent that now resides on my ever growing “Wall of Happiness” at work.

The Wall of Happiness

I was minding my own business with my phone in one hand, expertly tapping away, my other hand holding said present and to my left I saw the definition of a…

“…chavtastic family…”

…with what seemed like fifty dishevelled kids, one prospective powerless grandparent and a lone ranger parent with a mouth like a toilet equally as powerless, trying to regain some form of control over her disobedient herd by hurling relentless colourful language at them which only fuelled them into further mischievous antics.

From the corner of my bystander eye, I saw one kid throwing the mother of all tantrums, another one running around like a frenzied T-rex on crack, a third persistently smacking the oblivious grand parent in the leg and a girl throwing a round pink ball at the display of Christmas trinkets no one needs but always buys because it’s under a quid and potentially useful, in some way.

I turned back to my phone, I finished my message and I was just about to submit my four letter word on Wordfeud when I spotted a small figure in front of me which I thought nothing of until I saw a pink thing drawing closer, heading straight for my face, then…

BANG!

Something solid smacked me right in the mush, my top lip.  All I said was…

“Ow!”

The pink thing landed in my arm and rested there like the victim of a horrible trauma and as I placed it on a shelf next to me and noticed it was a bath bomb I automatically thought…

See the source image

“That’s gonna leave a mark.”

When I looked up again the bath bomb thrower looked at me and quickly ran away, vanishing into thin air and everyone else around me said absolutely nothing.  No one asked if I was okay so maybe no one saw anything, maybe it’s not that big of a deal? But then my tongue did a bit of investigating of my top lip and straightaway it found a slit on the inside of my mouth followed by the undeniable taste of blood.  I pressed a tissue to my lip and sure enough there was a red patch and I thought…

“…seriously?”

It was already beginning to swell and the first thing I wondered was…

“…how the hell am I going to hide a burst lip now that we don’t wear masks at work anymore?”

Not only that but how big was this fat lip going to be?  I’m no oil painting anyway and a burst lip was not going to go in my favour!

I had no one with me and the unsavoury family had disappeared.  I asked the family behind me if they saw what happened, but they looked down to the floor and denied all knowledge.

With my lip still bleeding I took my place at the counter still pressing the bloody tissue to my lip and I said to the girl behind the plastic Covid screen…

“A kid just threw a bath bomb at my face.”

And she said…

“Aww.”

Maybe it wasn’t that big of a deal?  But as I turned away holding my paper Primark bag, my lip still bleeding, I felt the emotion creeping in.  So I did what any grown up, independent 40 year old woman would do and I retrieved my phone from my coat pocket with my shaking hand and I called…

“Mummy”

Mum raced around the corner like a bat out of Hell – sorry, once a Meat Loaf fan, always a Meat Loaf fan.  The first thing she did was examine my face stating that it didn’t look as bad as it probably felt and then she apologised for not being there to protect me and fight my corner. 

Straight away I thought, I’m 40.  My mum should not be needing to protect me, but lip was still bleeding and at this point, in the presence of my superhero mum, I cried.

I felt like a child again.  Like a teenager who was hounded by horrible insensitive and nasty bullies who thrived on the misery they inflicted on their unfortunate victims… on me.

I was humiliated! Humiliated by a five-year-old tearaway and I couldn’t do a single thing about it and I couldn’t help but wonder…

“Why me? Again, why me?”

Out of all the people in that ever-growing Primark queue, why did that child single me out?  What made me deserve having a bath bomb thrown at my face?  What did I do?

Is it because I look a certain way?  It is because I look like this on holiday and not a supermodel.

I have no words for myself

Is it because my hair is turning grey and I don’t do a single thing to change it? Or is because I love looking at the toys in IKEA and picking out what I might buy if I had a kid of my own?

May be an image of 2 people and people standing

Am I reading too much into it?  Could a small child really be that calculated?  Or was I just in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Regardless of the answer to any of those ponderings, it doesn’t change the fact that it takes just one tiny thing to bring a whole truck load of stinking rubbish to the surface and as I sit at my kitchen table, an adult, with a job and a husband and a cat we treat like a toddler, I question…

“Why do I feel fourteen again?”

Caked in self-pity because I am a ball of powerless energy that cannot change what strangers choose to see.

You might say…

“It was just a little girl.”

And that’s right, she was just a little girl; but at this point this goes far deeper than a small child acting out with no moral code.  For me that bath bomb wasn’t a bath bomb.  It was a protractor, a ruler, a 300 paged science textbook; it was the rock that a boy I liked threw at my face because I was too repulsive to even acknowledge.  It was every name I have ever been called by anyone who hated the way I look, the way I talk, my likes, my dislikes… my beliefs.  It was the undo-er of all things to come undone and I can’t help but think that even though we move on from our past, we never really come to terms with it; maybe we just bury it for a while.

In 2023 I am supposed to find a moral to this story.  A ray of hope somewhere; something that kicks off the new year with that positive mental attitude people are constantly harping on about…

So how about this?

The biggest lesson I have learnt so far, is that the journey to self-discovery and self-acceptance is not a short one.  It is long, drawn out and painful and enlightening all at the same time and even though I will never look at a bath bomb in the same light, ever again; I am grateful that it was the inside of my lip that burst.  I am thankful that the swelling and the bruise were only slight and cleared up within in a couple of days and I am relieved it was only my lip that was burst so my eyes and my teeth are still intact.

Even though my 40-year-old pride took as much of a battering as my lip, I have learnt that burying our bad memories isn’t always the answer.  Sometimes we need to remember what we have been through so that we understand why we have the strength we have. 

I may not want to recall the feelings of protractors and rocks flying at my face or the names I was called back in the day; but now I know, in order to remember why I am who I have become, I need to remember how I got there and it is not because…

…of bath bombs and breakables…

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Reading time: 8 min

I had a little blog break.  I’ve been busying myself with my fictional project and turning my cat’s life into the life of an Instagram and Facebook superstar.

I also acquired Covid for the very first time which has left me isolating like a hermit but giving me the option of whether to wear a bra or not. I have immersed myself into countless hours of terrible television and hot sweats in the midst of this ridiculous heat wave…

…since when did this country do summer???

God dammit!

When the little red line came up on my covid test last week I wondered how I would spend my five days of isolation.  The first two days I was more or less bed ridden anyway but when the cold sweats and the aches that made even my eyeballs ache disappeared; I did wonder how I would spend the rest of my time.

So, I cleaned the house.  Then I packed my suitcase for my holiday in October, and now, seven days into isolation – because three covid tests later, it’s still in there playing footsie with my lungs – I have watched nearly three seasons of 90210 on Amazon Prime, one too many benefits documentaries on YouTube, far too many crime drama’s on ITV and BBC and today I pimped a notebook with fairies from a sticker collection my friend gave me for my fortieth birthday back in June.

Pimped my notebook

Tonight I decided to eat my dinner in my back yard; the sun had more or less disappeared and even though there was no breeze I wasn’t about to break a sweat.  So I sat on my garden furniture, put my feet up and popped my headphones on and listened to City and Colour while Winifred pottered about the yard around my feet chasing flies she couldn’t catch. 

I’ve spent this last week on my own for about 99% of the time – don’t get me wrong Matt is in the house but he’s negative so we’re trying to keep it that way. 

Believe it or not I haven’t done much thinking, until today.  When I did the third test I phoned mum and I whinged and I whined and I complained and I kept saying…

“I’m fed up.”

“I’ve had enough.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“It’s like furlough all over again but without the redundancy.”

“I haven’t had a hug for a week!!!”

That was the biggest one for me.  Not having a hug.  Because I love a hug.  A hug is comfort, it’s validation, it’s congratulation and it’s something that says…

…everything will be just fine.

Tonight, as I sat outside in my back yard, watching Winifred have a chat with the gnomes, I had an epiphany.

The girl loves an audience

I acknowledge I have more than the potential to be a drama queen and today I fulfilled that potential.  This morning my complaints were all about me.  I’ve been stuck in the house, I couldn’t to go work, I’ve had to cancel on friends, I couldn’t co-facilitate the Bipolar support group, I haven’t seen my mum properly in days! All of that is valid and true and I do believe I have a right to be fed up…

…but only to a point. 

In the midst of my whinging and whining I forgot Covid-19’s rap sheet and I forgot about the last two years.  I forgot that people have lost their jobs and their livelihoods.  People lost their homes…

…they lost their lives! 

So I reminded myself how horrible 2020 was for the entire world; but this time I put myself in someone else’s shoes and told myself that I was lucky I lived with someone.  I was lucky that I got to spend those seven months on furlough with my elderly cat because at the time I didn’t know those would be the final months that we would have together…

…if a cat could be a soulmate, I swear that Milly was mine.

No photo description available.
Milly 2000 – 2020

I reminded myself that despite redundancy I came out better off with a better job than I thought I would ever have and despite my reluctance to turn forty I have, when I know of others my age who haven’t made it.

Most of all I looked at myself – well, I looked at my slippers – and I said…

“What exactly has Covid done to me?”

Apart from the isolation all I have to show from the actual illness itself is a croaky voice and a cough that only occurs when I talk – some might not necessarily think that’s a bad thing.

Whenever I get that negative result I know I’m walking away from Covid with nothing sinister.  I still have my taste and smell – Mum had it back in October and she still can’t smell my bag when I empty it in her toilet.  Now that is bad! 

I may have a heavy chest right now but I’m not struggling to breathe.  The cold I had lasted twenty-four hours, the skin on my fingers and eyeballs isn’t sensitive anymore and the aches are long gone.  If Covid comes back to bite me then I’ll hold up my hands I’ll say it was worse than I thought but at this point I’m one of the lucky ones…

I haven’t had a hug for a week; but I know I’ll get one soon…

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Reading time: 4 min
The handy work of Glenys Spathis

Over the last three days I’ve discovered that life can be a combination of three things…

  1. The good
  2. The bad
  3. The ugly

Want to know why?  Well sit comfortably guys because I’ve got a three-part story to tell – but not necessarily in that order. 

The Ugly

Now I’ve made it no secret that my stoma has been a little more than problematic over the last three years.  I know I’ve talked about rectal brain matter and prolapsed intestines, not to mention constipation and you all know that Wilomena blows up to the size of a tennis ball so it must come as no surprise that we’ve been waiting for the last two and a half years to sort this out.

About a month ago – almost three months after attending A&E at Wythenshawe hospital, a letter dropped onto my doormat informing me that my face-to-face appointment with Ms Telford (creator of all things Wilomena) would take place on Wednesday 15th December 2021. 

The appointment was at 3:30pm, so what’s the best way to spend half a day before we have to go to the hospital?  Go Christmas shopping at the Trafford Centre with mum, of course. 

What did I buy, you ask?

A bacon sarnie and a bottle of baby shampoo – absolutely nothing Christmas related whatsoever but we did have a nice morning together and it is the perfect place to kill time when you’ve got something that’s make or break hanging over your head.

Let’s cut to the chase now because no one needs to know that as we drove to Wythenshawe Hospital I had to ask mum to stop at Sainsbury’s around the corner so I could use their toilet for a nervous wee.  This appointment was a long time coming, it’s been like climbing the Himalayas (I’ve never climbed the Himalayas but I’ve heard its pretty steep) so as I sat in the vacant waiting room trying not to hyperventilate under my mask, clutching the strap on my rucksack and fumbling in the front pocket for my phone, I looked around and I got a glimpse of Ms Telford.  It was relief!  She was here! It was real!  It was just like the moment when you’re at a concert that you’ve been waiting all your life to go to and the lights dim, the crowd goes wild and the singer comes on and you think…

“…I’m here!  We’re in the same room, we’re breathing the same air…”

That’s what it was like seeing Ms Telford in a corridor, it was like seeing Cher in concert!  With this in mind my nerves kicked in.  Now I knew that she wouldn’t be doing the initial examination but she would pop in at some point to check and then clarify things but even so, I couldn’t help but panic. What if they didn’t look at Wilomena, what if they didn’t look at anything?  What if they did the same thing everyone else has done and they just said…

…absolutely nothing.

Last Chance Saloon – Self-Titled | Album Review – Blues Blast Magazine

It’s hard to describe what the last chance saloon looks like, but I’m pretty sure it looked like this appointment.  I’d been through every other avenue and got nowhere.  The GP’s told me to lose weight. They said I wasn’t putting my bag on properly.  The stoma nurses told me all stoma’s look the same, mine was no different.  They said my stomach muscles had dropped – I don’t even think that’s possible but I went with it because they’re supposed to know what they’re talking about.  They’re all supposed to know what they’re doing! 

I can’t explain what it was like sitting in that corridor waiting to see someone whose role it was to find out what actual problem is…but this is a blog so I’ll try… It was like being an X-Factor finalist waiting to see if you’re in the running for Christmas number one, 50/50.

I was called into the room by a really tall man with a kind face and he said my name wrong but I didn’t care.  I walked into the room and he introduced himself as…I have no idea…  I’m really sorry but his name flew right over my head and I feel awful because he was so nice so let’s call him Mr Surgeon, because I do remember that bit, he said he was a surgeon.

The first thing Mr Surgeon said was…

“We were supposed to see you in January.”

(and he didn’t mean 2022, he meant 2021!)

I said…

“It’s okay, we can blame Boris for that.”

He said…

“This is our fault, it shouldn’t have taken this long, I’m sorry you’ve had to wait.”

Inside my head I said…

“Don’t cry, do not cry!”

We sat at his desk and before he could say a single word, I took out my phone and I said…

“I’ve got pictures!  I’ve taken pictures and a video of what my stoma does and no one else has looked at them.  Do you want to see them?  Do you want to see the pictures?”

My phone was literally shaking in my hands and I felt ridiculous.  I was not on trial, but it felt like it.  I was not in an interview, but it felt like it. I knew that if he didn’t see it for himself, if he didn’t look at the photos on my phone then I would be leaving the room with the same thing that I’ve left every single other room…nothing.

So he looked at the photos and then he stood up and he said…

“Let’s have a proper look then.”

I thought…

“Eh?”

I said…

“Do you want me to take my bag off?”

He said…

“Yes, let’s see what it’s doing in there.”

I took off my bag and true to form Wilomena was bulging like an angry bloated garden worm and I thought…

“Oh thank God!”

Mr Surgeon had a look, he poked it, prodded the area around it and nodded.

“Okay you can put your bag on now.”

At the sink I sorted through the swabs and a clean bag with my stupidly shaky fingers, he had a look at the computer screen and then turned back to me.  He explained that the stoma had prolapsed and it was always a risk of stoma surgery anyway.  The option to fix it is it to re-site the stoma, so build a new one, but it’s still a possibility that the same thing will happen again. I had to weigh up the option of whether or not I wanted to risk it. 

As I stood by the sink with a naked Wilomena flopping about out like a really inappropriate and badly designed Christmas bauble I said…

“I’m not a hyperchondriac.  I am not making this up and I am not making this out to be worse than it is.  I love this thing, but this thing hurts!”

And he said…

“No, I know that.  There is a very real problem despite all the other letters pointing to it being in your imagination.”

My eyes filled up with a river of tears.  Can you imagine what that felt like? 

It was humiliating.  In my imagination?!  It was more than soul destroying, I was completely destroyed.

I waited about ten minutes to see Ms Telford.  She swooped in like a caped crusader and straightaway she said…

“You’ve waited too long for this.”

Then she looked at the photos on my phone, she looked at me, poked around the edges of my clean bag and said…

“I would never have given you a stoma this big.  Let’s refashion it.  Let’s give it a facelift.”

(basically I don’t need a new one, she can just fix Wilomena and she can stay where she is)

When I told her about the colon problem she said…

“What have you used in the past?”

I said…

“Nothing, the stoma nurses and the doctors say to just ride it out.”

Ms Telford said…

“That’s rubbish, there’s all sorts of things you can try before we decide to take your colon out, but we’ll runs some tests to check and see how damaged it is.”

I told her a surgeon at Bolton hospital told me would never have given me a stoma and oh my god I cannot begin to describe what the atmosphere in that room felt like.  It was disbelief and horror mixed with a million apologies that wasn’t their responsibility to make.

When Ms Telford and Mr Surgeon looked at me for a final time she said…

“I’m going to put you on the list for a re-fashioning.  I don’t know when it will be but you’re on the list now.”

…and there was that sound again, the voices of a thousand angels singing; and they said…

Angels Singing Actual Footage | The Angel's Medium

You’re in the right place now.”

As I write this I know I could be waiting for Wilomena’s facelift for years but in some way it doesn’t matter because now I know I’m finally being taken seriously; now I’ve proved I’m not a hypochondriac and I am not being dramatic.

I think it’s fairly obvious that the professionals who wrote the previous letters were distracted by my Bipolar diagnosis and you can argue the case against that but when you’ve been sat in my shoes for a long enough time, it will only take a few seconds for you to agree with me.

This blog is not about feeling sorry for myself because you should know by now, that’s not my bag (literally).  This is about turning something ugly into something pretty; and that’s exactly what Wilomena will be when she’s had her facelift.

The Bad

My mum comes from a family of around eleven aunties and uncles and sixteen cousins.  When she was growing up she lived opposite two of her cousins David and Graham who I always thought of as uncles; they might never have known that but I did.  I thought a lot of both of them because in my eyes they were the opposite of my dad, they were kind, they were open minded and I never felt judged; I always felt accepted.

A few years ago I was having a whinge to Graham, I can’t remember what it was about but at the end of my rant as he was drying his hands on the tea towel he was holding, he leaned again the sink and he said…

“You know what that is Kat?  It’s all part of life’s rich tapestry.”

Appletons Tapestry Wool Hanks ~Special Order Only - Royal School of  Needlework
Tapestry apparatus

I don’t think I’d ever heard anything quite as profound as that and I can’t think of anything I’ve heard since that beats it.  When he passed away a few years ago, that was the one sentence that I made sure I remembered.

David passed away a couple of weeks ago with his funeral set for Thursday 16th December 2021.  At the funeral the eulogy was a recollection of the man he was and all of the incredible things that he did; things that I didn’t know about.  It was sad, really sad and it was a reminder that people leave us regardless of how much we want them to stay.

When I was a kid David used to ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always answered…

“A writer, like Enid Blyton.”

I remember showing him the battered exercise book I was writing my first novel in aged eleven.  My dream may still a dream but it was supported and whenever I was in hospital battling against Bernard the Bipolar, David and his wife Joyce wife always sent me a card.  Graham sent postcards when he went on holiday and I still keep them all as bookmarks in my notebooks as a reminder that I can still be whatever I want to be.

The Good

All things public speaking is a little like a river run dry right now, that is until the 6th October happened.

I’m on LinkedIn but I’m rubbish at it.  I don’t know how it works, I don’t really know what it is and I forget to post stuff on it.  Whenever I receive a message it’s usually someone wanting to train me as a speaker – already got that, thanks – or the want me to speak at a massive conference in Paris but I have to pay my way to do it.  So on the 6th October when I received a message from Nico Bains I automatically assumed it was the same sort of thing.

Oh how I was wrong!  And I love it when I’m wrong about these things.  Here’s the link to the project he’s working on with his brother Ryan:

https://www.flowstateofficial.co.uk/pages/workout-for-mental-wealth-1

We had a couple of messages and then a call and I felt a tug, right in my soul.  Their focus is mental health and fitness and finding the right kind of fitness that benefits you and your own mental health.  I did tell him, I was honest, the only time I do any kind of exercise is when I’m running for a bus; when he said that didn’t matter and that he just wanted me involved in some way I said an automatic yes!  I’d just lost my friend and the day we had the first call it was her funeral the day after.  I thought now more than ever was the time to stand up and do something. 

Covid is killing people in far too many ways and it doesn’t look like anything is going to change any time soon so rather than doing what I’ve been doing for the last twelve months – waiting for it to pass – I thought it was time to take back some control.  Nico has a vision of what he wants and he’s found a whole stack of people to take part in this massive project with the intention for it to reach people across the whole of the world.

Long story short, Nico and Ryan came up to Manchester from Luton on Friday 17th December to film my story following the story of another person. They hired a studio just on the outside of the city centre that was up about five flights of stairs – now that’s exercise right there!  I took my mum with me – obviously, my roadie – I had no idea what to expect, I had no idea what I was doing but I had to look professional, however being in front of a camera is not my happy place.  I am far from being a Love Island contestant, my hair is falling out left right and centre, my dress was bulging on one side because Wilomena wanted in on the action and the minute this filming session was finalised, a giant spotty blob blob thing formed itself on my chin – I mean really!

But did any of that matter?  In the end no, not really, because I loved every single second of it.  Nico and Ryan are two of the most genuine guys I’ve ever met.  They asked mum if they could call her mum and for the rest of the afternoon we were like a little family; everyone trying to right the wrongs of the mental health world.

For the first time in months I felt part of something that was outside of work.  I was accepted, not just based on being a mental health speaker but also as an individual, the kind of person I am, for real. And this is just the start, this was just the introduction to my tiny part of their huge project and I can’t wait for the next one. 

These guys are travelling across the country to collect the stories from the people they’ve got involved and they’re asking for nothing but our time and that right there is what I call…

Nico and Ryan: good things come in different sized packages

…self-less.

In truth the last three days have been exhausting.  Everyday I have learned something new.  I’ve learned that even with a physical problem, a real black and white problem, a stoma that cries out…

“Hey!  I look weird and I make Kat hurt!”

…I am not believed because I have another illness that you can’t see.

I’ve learnt that we don’t appreciate what we have until its gone.  We don’t say thank you enough to the people who make a difference in our lives and we don’t realise that the dreams we have can actually play out; they just might look different.

I’ve learnt that good people do exist.  LinkedIn is not always about selling something to someone.  It can be about taking part and working together for a cause that will always need people to plough on through because it never gets easier. 

It never gets easier, but people can get stronger.

The last three days have been an array of life changing events and emotions and not just for me.  There are a lot of things I don’t understand about life and every day I try to wrap my brain around how the world works but, if there is one thing that’s for sure and one thing that I do know; it’s that everything we do, everywhere we go, whatever comes our way; it’s all part of …

…life’s rich tapestry.

Dedicated to David and Graham, for being the inspirations that you never knew you were.

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Reading time: 15 min
Back in the day when I had a healthy thyroid gland a head full of hair…

It’s Saturday night… I’m not even going to try and dress this up anymore…next to me I have my tipple of choice, decaff tea, a two-litre bottle of squash because my drug of choice in the name of Lithium makes me thirsty and a piece of pumpkin cake smothered in cream cheese frosting – I actually had to eat a piece just for the photo, at least that’s what I’m telling myself.

Friday nights rock

Matt’s just gone to the cinema with his nephew so I’m home alone with the cat and a heated blanket because my house is freezing even with the heating on.

Before he left he asked me what this blog is going to be about and I replied…

“I don’t know yet…”

…which is true, I don’t; but off the back of falling into the bath the other week I’ve been thinking about a few things. 

I know I mentioned that a friend passed away in September and since then I admit I haven’t been the kind of self I like the world to see.

My friend was superwoman.  She was my idol, my Bipolar idol –  you can all keep Stephen Fry, I don’t need him because I had my friend – she was my Bipolar Mum.

Bipolar is a funny thing; it’s selfish and cruel and mean and it takes no prisoners.  It spares no one and doesn’t give two hoots about the carnage it leaves behind. 

On all the writers courses I have ever been on the tutors tell you to never use cliché’s, but Bipolar Disorder is just one massive cliché. 

You can have an episode and you miss out on months of your life and you say…

“Where has the time gone?”

You might make it through the hospital admission and in your Christmas card to your family you might say…

“I love you to the moon and back.”

And my personal favourite is one that I have yet to use…

“And they all lived happily ever after…”

Growing up I had a vision of what my life would be like and it went a little like this…

Dreaming big…
  1. School
  2. 6th form
  3. University
  4. Travel the world
  5. Meet a boy who plays the guitar in a band
  6. Get married
  7. Have one child
  8. Become a famous writer
  9. Live in a tiny village and ride a bike with a basket on the front
  10.  Die happy!

Nowhere in that list did crippling mental illness and misery appear.  It was not on my radar; it was not allowed and it certainly was not welcome because I had dreams, I had desires, I had a whole load of things I wanted to do with myself like graduating with my friends.  I wanted to throw my cap in the air and have a group photo with all of the people who had soldiered on through the three years of hard slog coupled with the parties and the crazy nights out that were never intended to happen but they just did.  It was supposed to be three years, it should never have taken me six.

I wanted to live in Edinburgh, a place that felt like home from the very first second my foot touched the platform ready to do my first Fringe Festival job in 2002.  I love that place, its energy, the creative chaos; it was something I’d never seen before.  I made life long friends, I saw things I would never see in Bolton.  I was a different person and I lived my best days there so was it too much to ask to just hang on to that and keep it? 

Gilded Balloon Box Office Assistant 2002

I wanted to travel the world.  In 2006 I went to Australia for six weeks and it was the trip of a lifetime.  I saw my Fringe Festival friends again and I lived in those six weeks the life I had always wanted.  Even though I  was diagnosed, I was physically scarred and I was teetering on the edge of an episode because I never really knew if my medication was right or not and I was still wondered if I really needed it when I felt well. 

Fringe Friends 2006

When I came home from that trip I made plans to go back on a working holiday visa; but Bernard had different ideas.  I was going on a trip, that was for sure, but it wasn’t to Australia…a locked ward on a psychiatric ward was as far as I was ever going to get.

Bipolar Disorder robbed me of the things I wanted most in the world.  It took from me…

  • Contentment
  • Satisfaction
  • Simplicity

Losing my friend didn’t put things into perspective; it tipped everything upside down and made me question every single relationship with every single person I have ever known.  Because at the hands of Bernard I have lost so many friends, people that I admired, people that I adored and would have fallen backwards in the bath for!

In the last few weeks I have asked myself…

“How embarrassing was I?

Norway 2003

When a friend who I thought loved me got engaged I could not have been more happy for her.  It was all she had ever wanted; to meet her prince charming and stop kissing frogs.  But when I was excluded from every celebration that took place in the run up to the wedding I was hurt – actually I was more than hurt because I understood her reasons why.

How do you introduce your friends and the family of the man you’re about to marry to a person who is the epitome of depressingly single?  She doesn’t have a job and she’s spent however many years going in and out of a psychiatric ward like the revolving door to a cheap hotel?  How do you explain to every successful person in the room that this is the kind of person you are associated with and you didn’t really want to invite them to your nuptial celebrations because it’s shameful to have someone so unfortunate in your life, someone who doesn’t match up to the rest of your acquaintances?  

“Don’t worry, I get it.”

But…

…How bad of a person was I?

Zakynthos Greece

Did Bernard make me bad as well as embarrassing.  I know I would sometimes look at my reflection and I’d wonder who the hell was staring back at me but, was I bad?  I know I was unrecognisable at times, different to the person I once was but was I really bad?

Was I a danger?

I know that I had a tendency to hurt myself but were the people I loved and adored worried that I might have the potential to hurt them?  When they had children did they think I was a danger to their child?  Or was I just too difficult to explain? 

Was I an embarrassing conundrum?

May be an image of one or more people, people standing and outdoors
I’ve always wanted to use that word…conundrum.

Now I don’t mean to hurt or upset anyone who reads this; that is not my intention.  This is just something I have to write because it’s been spinning around in my head since Bernard made an appearance nineteen years ago and I know I am not the innocent party in all of this.  I would even go as far to say that I have done exactly the same.  I put my hands up in the air and I will openly admit – because I am all about taking responsibility for my actions – I have cut people out of my life simply for self-preservation in order to move on from a chapter of my life that I don’t want to be reminded of.

I’ve said awful things about people… and I meant them.  I have lied, I have been a coward and I have run in the opposite direction of proposed happiness because I believed that I wasn’t entitled to it because of the person I had become.

A few years ago I said if someone was to put a pill in the palm of my had and say…

“This will take away your pain, this will take away Bernard and he will never come back.”

…I would take that pill and I would swallow it down with or without water and I would kiss goodbye to the illness that Michael Douglas calls…

“…a terrible disease…”

…and I would not look back my friends!  I would not look back.

In that room someone said…

“Even though it’s made you who you are?”

I thought…

“WHAT?!?!?!?!”

I was so insulted!  So I said…

“Bipolar is not there to be your friend; Bipolar is there to kill you.”

I know I upset people with those words because they implied that I would happily give up everyone and everything that had come my way since the illness or disease came in to play.

You know what?  The implication is an accurate one, I would. I would give up everything because it would mean having a simpler life and I would give up everyone I know because I believe in fate and I think if you’re meant to meet people you will meet them somehow; it doesn’t have to be because you have an illness.

My comment wasn’t well received and I was reprimanded for it but I still stand by what I said because I meant it but; there is no magic pill.  I can’t give everything up and I can’t get back time I feel I’ve lost nor can I get back the people that I still think about, still miss and still love.

I look at my life today and I can tick off four things on my childhood list and let’s put it this way, that’s more than what was predicted for me at the time of my diagnosis.  Sometimes lists aren’t always the things we should live our lives by.  Sometimes life just doesn’t go our way and no matter what we do sometimes life is mean.

But I am not ungrateful, I am not ashamed and I am not sorry.   I am thankful for the people who stood by my side and didn’t give up on me when they so easily could have.  I am grateful for all the opportunities that have come my way in recent years and I would not have been able do to those things if I had given in to Bernard’s demands and I’m not ashamed of where I’ve been or the people I met within those places. 

Over the fifteen years that I knew my friend she taught me how to spot the signs of my illness because on more than one occasion she knew I was ill before I did.  She told me that I could still be a success, it just might look a little different to how I imagined it to be.  She told me that Bipolar Disorder is a learning curve; it’s test after test after test and a constant reminder of what we have lost… but on the flip side it’s a reminder of what we still have and what we have in spite of it.

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Blackpool 28th September 2021

I’m happy now, believe me I am.  I know reading this it might not sound like it and in the last few months through my anger and my grief I lost sight of how to live the way my friend did for so many years.  I concentrated so much on every bad thing that Bipolar does to a person that I forgot that it doesn’t have to beat you.  

So now, even on my most self-indulgent and self-absorbed of days I promise to remind myself…

…that all that I have lost has given me everything I have.

Dedicated to my friend Sheila.

You will always be my Guru, my inspiration and my teacher. All I can say is I’m sorry… but I promise I won’t let it beat me.

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Yesterday I fell backwards into the bath.  It’s my own fault; I was sitting on the edge of it cutting my toenails and balancing my feet on the edge of the toilet seat – never let it be said that I am not a classy girl, I do things in style – I must have been day dreaming or something – about what I’m not sure – but in my Primark pyjamas I’m must have moved ever so slightly and within a teeny tiny second I found myself battling gravity, flailing my arms about, my fingers clutching desperately to my Tweezerman nail clippers – like that’s the most important thing right now! – really hoping that…

  1. I don’t bang my head against the tiled wall…

And…

2. Look like a complete muppet.

Well I didn’t accomplish either of those things but I did get stuck.  My bathroom is not the biggest and neither is my bath, so found myself wedged at the bottom of it with my legs dangling over the edge and my toes dipping into the toilet bowl just scraping the water – again, I have nothing but class.

As I sat there I tried to call out for Matt to pull me out of my predicament but I’d shut the living room door so he couldn’t hear me.  In the end it was a complicated process of manoeuvring myself, twisting, reversing, shifting, turning – maybe there’s hope for me yet, if I’m ever able to drive in this lifetime that was a three point turn, a parallel park and a reverse around a corner all in one!

What’s my point?

Well, life isn’t very kind right now, in all sorts of ways and this is not about looking for sympathy; its really not, but the truth is, a lost a friend a couple of months ago and I didn’t deal with it all that well.   

I have lost myself.

In the middle of my grief and my guilt I lost what I thought my life was like. I lost the image of what I wanted it to look like and the one thing that I can usually count on, my written word; I lost that too. I contemplated shutting the blog down and just leaving it and I kid you not, I was so close to following that through but, my friend Renae told me…

No photo description available.
Edinburgh 2003

“You will find your voice again.”

…whether I have or not is a different matter, but right now there are words on the page and that’s a start. 

Back to the bath…as I’m being crushed between the sides of it I thought to myself…

“This is hilarious, but dammit! There’s no one here to see it!”

And then I thought…

“I can’t wait to tell Renae about this.”


And that right there is my point.  I found my situation funny; it was laughable, it was amusing.  I fell in to an empty bath while I was cutting my toenails! and even though my world is consumed by darkness; I am still grateful for the moments that make the edges of your lips curl upwards in a vague reminder of how to smile.

Today this is the point of this blog.  I have not been in the greatest of head spaces for a few weeks and I apologise for my behaviour.  I am plagued by Wilomena problems and the debilitating interruption in life that Connie colon likes to chuck into the equation – you know the drill, three days of phantom diahorrea pains and then a volcano of mush that looks like the equivalent of human brain matter coming out of an orifice that isn’t supposed to be in use anymore!

The other day I was sitting on the toilet – don’t pull your face, we all do it – while I was waiting for the brains to come out and in tears I kept thinking…

“How can anyone love this car crash?  How can anyone want to be in my life when every day there is just one disappointment after another? How can Matt love me?!”

Part of me was near to giving in…

Let Wilomena do whatever she wants… I don’t care anymore!

Let Connie colon fanny around in there shedding her bits off…I don’t care anymore!

Let Bernard the Bipolar just rip my sanity from the walls of my skull and we’ll call it quits… I don’t care anymore!

Well, I’ve had a few days of feeling sorry for myself, and I do still feel sorry for myself – I’m not going to lie – but I know I have two choices…

  1. Shrivel up and give up?

Or

2. Put my brave pants on and crack on.

I’m choosing to put my brave pants on.  It’s not easy and it’s just guess work and my only saving grace is my sense of humour.  Life is not always funny.  In fact it’s very rarely funny at all and it’s solely down to ourselves to create our own happy place and that’s something I’ve been doing my entire life.

When I was a child I wanted to be a comedian so I made up jokes that no one else found funny…

Knock knock

Who’s there?

Table

Table who?

Table leave the table…

…I can only apologise…

When I was in primary school I wanted to be an impressionist and my passion, my obsession at the time was Coronation Street; I wanted write it, I wanted to act in it; I just wanted to live it… So I memorised the voices, the accents and the movements of all of my favourite characters and I performed them.  I performed them for my family, in the playground for my friends and I captivated the attention of an entire room at Brownies every Tuesday night relaying my rendition of Audrey Roberts and Deirdre Barlow.

On coach trips with my Brownie pack, I was always the one to start off singing There Were Ten a Bed, only I started it off with ninety-nine and it was a mission to see how far we would get before Brown Owl stood in the aisle of the coach and yelled out…

“Right! Enough!  There’s one left in the bed, tell it to roll over.”

I had people laughing in the palms of my hands, some even had tears streaming down the sides of their faces.  I made up sketch shows, I was a writer, a director, a Greek dancer and I tried to teach my friends the Zorba only I hadn’t fully paid attention in the dancing lesson at Greek School (that’s not a lie, my brother and I genuinely went to a Greek School every Saturday) so I just kicked my legs up a bit, ran from left to right a few times, did a swish and made my face look like I was really concentrating because I was thinking to myself…

“…one day there will be a real Greek dancer in this room and I will be shown to be the fraud that I am…”

From the age of about fifteen I was a massive fan of the Manchester based band Puressence.  Somehow they were massive in Greece and from 1992 to 2013 and I saw them live nine times – yep, I haven’t even seen Josh Groban that many times! – not only was I in complete awe of the singer but I lived for his lyrics so when the band split I was ever so slightly disappointed.

Puressence – 1992 – 2013

Now fast forward to September 2020 when I’d just got my current job, I had a day of online training and it was just me and the trainer on Teams.  He asked me if my name was Greek and he went on to say he used to be in a band and they played a lot of gigs in Greece.  I got half way through the day when I thought…

“Band in Greece.  Band in Greece? Could it be???”

After the break I asked him…

“What was the name of the band you were in?”

He said…

“You won’t have heard of us but it was Puressence…”

To which I replied…

“Are you kidding?? I have every album and CD single you released from 1996! I saw you play live nine times!!!!”

When I told my friend that afternoon he said…

“Did you not recognise him on camera?”

I said…

“No, I fancied the singer, I didn’t look at anyone else.”

James Mudriczki – 2004(ish)

I love reliving that moment because it brings me joy.  You very rarely get to meet your heroes and sometimes the ways in which you do are far from what you ever imagined. 

When I started my job the very next day that was the ice breaker.  When people asked how my training was I could answer their question with a tale that was so bizarre it opened the door for a million more questions.

In 2019 I booked tickets to see James Mudriczki (Puressence lead singer) performing as a front man for another band; due to Covid the gig was moved to three different venues and four different dates. 

The final destination

I haven’t seen this guy sing since 2009 and he’s knocking on a bit now – No offence James, I’m nearly forty so it’s inevitable for both of us – I took Matt with me who was extremely reluctant and I used the classic “date night” tactic that people seem to practice these days and off we went.

Date night

It was like being an indie music fan back in the 90s.  I was standing in the smallest venue I’ve probably ever seen any band in, which obviously meant there was a chance I would get to meet said lead singer, so I said to Matt…

“Look for a guy with grey-white hair and funky glasses.”

When we looked around, every single man in the room was still trying to master the art of Paul Weller’s grey-white hairstyle with added funky glasses while others were still wearing the kind of coat Liam Gallagher has been wearing for the last 25 years.  But one thing was for certain; there was absolutely no risk of being trampled on in a mosh pit… because every person in the room bar was probably at risk of damaging a hip or knee replacement. 

Standing next to us there was a girl with a guy who was clearly twice her age and you could just tell that they probably met in some dodgy bar where she was trying to pull off maturity and he was trying to convince himself and everyone else in the room that even when you’re 40+ you can still spin lines like…

“Come out with me, I’ll take you nice places for dinner and then we’ll go see a band who have albums three times older than you…”

James Mudriczki – 2021

As I was looking up at James Mudriczki singing with the same ridiculously amazing voice that he always had, I noticed the sadness from my youth has been replaced with something different… It’s still sadness – in some way – but I can try to take the reigns on my unhappiness whereas I didn’t know how to do that when I was younger.

I may feel mental and physical pain and that’s down to circumstances, but my biggest fear; my ultimate, terrifying, awful, horrendous nightmare is that I could give up on myself and become everything that I have always fought against; because if I did that, it’s game over.

Over the last few years I have learnt one thing… if you can find laughter in a world that is more often than not, far from being funny; then you’re half way to being able to survive everything it throws at you.

In every uncomfortable or questionable situation I find myself in I always try to find something funny about it in order to get through it. Now,  I am not a comedian.  I am far from being an impressionist and my feet lost all sense of rhythmic ability many years ago so  I am not a Greek dancer. I am not everyone’s cup of tea, but one thing is for sure; whenever I am in doubt, when no one else is laughing and all I have to rely on is myself…

…at least I think I’m funny...

Christmas 2005

Dedicated to my friend Renae. You have given me so much encouragement, support and love and you have no idea how much I love and admire you. I don’t know how long this will last but, I think I found my voice.

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Australia 2006
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We’re celebrating! Believe it or not…

Have you ever been asked that fateful question?

“Where do you see yourself in ten years time?”

Well I haven’t.  But I’m pretty sure if that question had been asked ten years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to answer it.

Truth be told, ten years ago my future looked and felt very different to my current reality.

In 2011 I saw myself falling into one of three destinies…

  1. Death
  2. Existence
  3. Saviour of the universe.

I know they range in desired qualifications and it’s difficult to explain how the third one came about but let me try.

Bipolar disorder doesn’t come with a script.  You don’t get a synopsis with your diagnosis and you don’t get a manual to help you deal with your symptoms.  It’s like being a kid at the dinner table; you have to eat everything on your plate even if you don’t like it and you have to use whatever utensils are in front of you regardless of how big or clumsy they are because that’s all you have.

As my illness unfolded throughout the years I experienced a range of symptoms that evolved and grew in intensity; they morphed into shapes that were the beyond my capability to comprehend and they left me damaged like a lost and beaten animal cast aside on the side of the road.  I know that sounds dramatic but when Bernard the Bipolar cast a spell of a dark depression, all I wanted was death.  When I was climbing out of that depression a mere simplistic existence was the most desirable outcome that I could picture for myself.  And in the throws of mania I was cursed with torturous voices no one else could hear.  I saw things, shapes, people, colours and smells that no one else around me could sense – try explaining that to your mates over a pint. 

I couldn’t explain it, I couldn’t understand it and because of the absence of any kind of Bipolar instruction manual the only thing I learnt how to do was perform the art of…

“…I am completely fine…”

…and not a single soul would question me because to this day I can look and appear perfectly fine when in fact I am dancing with a faceless demon that takes no prisoners and spares the lives of no one.

On the 9th September 2011 I had been dancing with that demon for weeks and I had no idea.  My lack of sleep gave me no indication that I had anything to worry about.  My increased energy levels were a blessing because they made my twelve hour working day easier to cope with and nothing, absolutely nothing inside myself told me that the messages I was getting from the singers on my iPod were in any way detrimental to my mental health.

It’s funny; looking back at that last paragraph it just screams out…

“…MANIA MANIA MANIA!!!”

On Friday the 9th September 2011 I had a phone conversation with my psychiatrist (at the time) Dr Miller…I have never forgotten that call. 

With a tight chest, my eyes streaming, I remember I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t speak but I remember him saying…

“You need to talk to me Katerini because I can’t see you until Monday.”

I said…

“I’ve got special powers and I don’t know what to do with them.”

He said…

“Go to A&E and I’ll send someone from the crisis team to meet you there.”

Following those few sentences I found myself an inpatient for four and a half weeks.  I was almost sectioned and I spent my days writing the plans of how I was going to save the world because Chris Daughtry, Meat Loaf and a number of other singers were all communicating with me through the songs on my iPod. 

They told me I was the saviour of the universe and I was the one person in the entire world who had the brains and the ability to create a plan of action to save the world.  All I had to do was create the plan and let David Cameron do the rest…

…I’ll just leave that there…

In 2011 all I had in hospital with me was a tiny radio.  No phone, no iPod, no internet access; nothing but my portable radio and a pair of potentially crusty earphones.  All I wanted to listen to was Josh Groban and Meat Loaf but they were rarely played on the radio so I tried my best to remember the lyrics of my favourite songs and I tied them in with my save the world manual so it would be easier for me to explain how things would work.

My lifeline…

In the first week of my admission I gave my “manual” to Dr Miller and he said…

“…What if this isn’t possible?  What if you can’t save the world?  What if you’re just ill?”

I said…

“…then this no way for a person to live.”

He said…

“What do you think we should do?”

I said…

“I want a Lobotomy.”

And he was trying his absolute best not to smile as he said…

“You know we don’t do those anymore.  What if you died?”

I said…

“Then you would know not to do it again.”

He could see I was deadly serious, there was no smile on my face and I was not budging on my save the world manual either; I was deadly serious about that too.  But the one thing that made this admission different to the previous five was the feeling of it being make or break. 

This was the worst one, this was the one that I didn’t see coming, this was the one where I would look back and I would say…

“…I don’t know how I survived that.”

This was the admission where my friends and my family would look at each other and my mum would say…

“…I don’t know how we’re going to get her back from this…”

BUT…

…this blog is not about dredging up unpleasant memories. This blog is a celebration of me being hospital-free for ten years!

You can argue you against me if you like but for me this last ten years is almost like being sober or being clean.  Hospital is not an addiction but it is a curse and it is impossible to return to a normal life without just a little bit of help. 

When you’ve been contained on a ward with people you would never normally encounter and your daily routine is driven by the allocated times that the tea trolly comes rolling out of the kitchen, it’s hard to know what to do when you can suddenly go wherever you want to go and eat food you don’t think is poisoned by the hospital staff.  When I had my phone in my hand it was hours before I could decide on who I wanted to text first.  As for my iPod…that took a little bit longer to fire up.

That last admission was like a long-drawn-out horror film.  The last horror film I watched was Insidious – awful. It’s like watching that on a loop, you get used to seeing the same things every day, but it doesn’t get any easier to endure.  But what made this admission different was my psychiatrist. 

Hand on heart Dr Miller quite possibly saved my life.  He was firm and he was to the point.  He challenged my beliefs and my ideas and despite me arguing against his educated assumptions, I liked him.  I have never had another psychiatrist quite like him and I know that everything he did for me, before, during and after hospital was just part of his job description, he has no idea of the effect he has had on my life since then.

In that first week of my admission he had in his hand my save the world manual and he had spent a good fifteen minutes (unsuccessfully) trying to question everything I’d written and suddenly he said…

“…Katerini, I will get you the life you want and the life you deserve.”

I thought that was such a beautiful and kind thing to say, but the life I wanted was the very manual he was telling me I couldn’t have.  In that moment he reminded me where I was, a psychiatric ward, and he told me to think about why I was there, how had it happened because then maybe we could find a way out of it.  He said…

…you have to learn about your illness Katerini, so that you can take control of it, rather than it, taking control of you.”

I’d never heard anything like this before!  No one had ever said this was an option.  I had no idea that it was even possible to take control of something that was so debilitating and all consuming.  When I left the review room that day, I walked back on to the ward; I saw the drinks trolly with the wobbly wheels, the TV was blaring, the patients were scattered around the lounge room sleeping in chairs, pacing the floor, there was a nurse playing chess, a support worker on obs and a student doing her best to talk to someone who really didn’t want to talk to her.

I looked around that room and I thought, this is my reality.  This is where I am and…I don’t think I want to stay here.

Now don’t get me wrong, I still thought I could save the world, this realisation wasn’t magic.  I simply thought if I could change my mindset slightly I could get out and I could still meet David Cameron and do what I needed to do, but take back some control.

My guide to saving the world…

During those few weeks Dr Miller changed my meds, he tweaked them, he listened, we agreed, we disagreed.  He was strict, he made me cry, I got really cross, had a hissy fit and left the room, only to have a change of heart and apologise minutes later.  I was not an easy patient and anyone who knows me as I am today finds it difficult to believe that I could ever have been the person I used to be.  But that’s the nature of Bipolar, that’s what mental illness does, it changes everything about you beyond any recognition.

One thing Dr Miller did that I absolutely hated and I had a visible tantrum over – I might as well have sat in the room with my arms and legs crossed and spat a giant dummy out in protest – he referred me to community care.  Oh god help everyone in that room.  He said…

“How do you feel about being referred to community care?”

I said…

“No I don’t want it.”

He said…

“Well I’ve already referred you.”

I said..

“Well can you unrefer then please.”

He laughed (the cheek of it) and said…

“I’ll find you a good one.

I said…

“Well you‘d better, because otherwise I won’t talk.”

See what I mean?  Completely unreasonable.  But you know what?  That was the best thing he could have ever done for me.  He didn’t mess about.  He knew I was awkward and headstrong.  I’d kicked community care to the curb countless times over the years.  I’d refused social workers and psychiatric nurses entry to my house on account of their uselessness.  I’d been offhand and rude, arrogant and stroppy and I had no intention of changing this side of my behaviour.  As far as I was concerned the system was working against me, trying to keep me in a box where I wasn’t allowed to work or have friends or relationships.  I was scarred from the words said by social workers six years before this moment and as far as I knew; that kind of attitude hadn’t changed.

Enter Aisha, my community psychiatric nurse…in my presentations I call her my caped crusader. 

See the source image

When I met her for the first time I was still an inpatient and she made the biggest mistake she could possibly make.  She was fifteen minutes late… so even when she said hello with a kind smile I didn’t care.  The first thing I said to her was…

“You’re late.”

Even when she apologised I still didn’t care.  I’d had to wait, I couldn’t go anywhere but that wasn’t the point.  We had an appointment arranged and she was late so that did not bode well for our future together.  I went on to say…

“I don’t want this.  I don’t want you, I don’t need you and I’m only in this room because Dr Miller said I have to be and he won’t discharge me unless I comply.”

I said exactly those words.  I was horrible.  I was a nightmare.  I was that one customer everyone dreads serving in a restaurant because even though there’s nothing wrong with the food they still find fault with just about everything.

See the source image

Credit where it’s due though, Aisha handled me with expert hands.  She was a breath of fresh air in a stale room and within twenty minutes she reigned me in, told me the truth and basically gave me back my dummy.

Aisha was the one person who corrected all of the wrongs I had been told in the past.  She wasn’t there to tell me to stop working.  If I wanted to do something in life she was there to support that.  She was there to follow through on Dr Miller’s promise to get me the life I wanted and the life I deserved.

This was all I wanted.  No one had ever told me that I could ever live a happy and fulfilled life with a mental illness.  So I apologised. 

A week later, on the day of discharge, I apologised to Dr Miller.

You said you’d find me a good one and I think you might have done that, so I’m sorry if I was rude.”

I had Aisha as my CPN for nine years.  She changed my life, she really did.  She taught me how to take control of my illness when I had no idea that that was possible.  She educated me on the medication I was taking and helped me to manage my working and social life, making sure I had a balanced mind.  She taught me how to recognise my symptoms and the possible triggers surrounding them.  I was a person, not a diagnosis.  I never felt judged or belittled.  I felt accepted, for the first time in years I felt human.  Without Aisha’s help and guidance I would not be here to tell this story.  I would not be the person I am today and anything that I have achieved since 2011 would probably not have been possible.

As I walked out of the doors of K3 in October 2011 I looked back as they locked behind me and I promised myself one thing…that I would never walk through them.  No matter how hard life might be, I promised myself that I would never be an inpatient again.

Over the last ten years I have:

  • Worked a full-time job
  • I met a boy
  • I bought a house
  • I got married
  • I became a public speaker
May be an image of 4 people, including Katerini Edgington-Spathis and people smiling

I swear this blog is not about blowing my own trumpet, but if I’m honest not one of those things would have been possible if I hadn’t recalled Dr Miller’s words and made the decision to take control of what was going on.

In 2021 I know I rely heavily on medication to keep my sanity in check and my rigid routine isn’t for everyone, but the lack of caffeine, being tee-total and cutting people out of my life in order to lead a better one has been worth it.

The blood tests, the scrutinising psychiatric appointments, baring my soul in therapy that didn’t really work and having to give up the possibility of a driving licence in exchange for a bus pass is worth it.  It’s all worth it because when I wake up to the sound of my alarm and I stand in my shower listening to Smooth Radio I know it’s my shower. When I ride the tin can bus to work it’s because I know where it’s taking me and I know I have a purpose for the next six hours.

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The Rivington Unit

And when I walk past the Rivington Unit every day, that flicker of a moment when I remember the other patients I met on the ward, the ones who held me afloat, the ones who made it and the ones who didn’t, that momentary sadness is worth it because I know where I have been, and I know where I am now.

But most of all, I never forget to remind myself of how lucky I was ten years ago to have had the medical team I had.   I’m not looking for a medal or a round of applause, I don’t deal well with praise so this is not a plea for congratulations and I’m not trying to seek attention – which coming from a public speaker who can stand in front of hundreds of people and talk about herself for over an hour is kind of hard to believe I know – but believe this, I’m not saying…

“…Look at me, look at what I’ve done…”

…I’m not.  All I’m saying is, if you really want to achieve something, if you want a better life, then it is doable. It’s about taking control and deciding if what’s being laid out in front of you is really what you want.


A life yoyoing in and out of hospital, living in a world consumed by delusions of being the saviour of the universe, exhausting mania and crippling depression was not a life I would have chosen for myself.  Growing up I never really knew what I wanted because I never really knew if I’d be around to actually have one. 

Life is hard, for all of us.  And I will never say that taking control of Bernard has been easy, no it hasn’t!  I’ve had episodes over the years, bad ones, I’m not joking.  I’ve had medication changes, I obsess over music on a daily basis and I am always one song away from wondering if whoever I’m listening to is trying to tell me how to save the world.  That never goes away.

In the last two years I’ve learnt that you can never know it all.  Bernard changes and he gets ugly and he gets big and sometimes I panic and I feel like a failure because I think to myself…

“…how the hell am I going to get through life if this keeps happening?”

When I left hospital in 2011 I had no intention of ever going back, so every single day I remind myself that I am not who I am because of my mental illness; I am who I am despite my mental illness, and this…

…is the best of my intention...

May be an image of 1 person and smiling
Got me a t-shirt

Dedicated to Dr Miller and Aisha. Should you ever see this please know that I am grateful for everything you did for me and still do to this very day. You might not know it but you play a huge part in my speaking career and one day I would love to have you both in my audience, I promise I won’t embarrass you…

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Reading time: 17 min

I had a whole blog planned out for this weekend. I’ve mad notes throughout the week and I was really looking forward to writing it… but plans change. Maybe I’ll get around to the main event tomorrow but for now, let me set the scene for this blog right here.

It’s almost 8pm on a Friday night and in true Katerini style I am sat in my pyjamas with tea in my blog writing mug. 

There are no chicken crisps this time but I do have a couple of chocolate eclairs in the fridge that mum bought for me – thanks mum. 

The sad thing is, right this second I can’t stomach those eclairs.  I’m looking at them and my eyes are saying…

“…yes please!”

…but everything else in me says…

“…not right now love.”

Why?

Well, take a seat guys because this will either make you roar with laughter or you’ll end up closing your browser in search of a more appealing subject.

Everyone knows I have a stoma and everyone knows her name is Wilomena.  What most people don’t know is that Wilomena is not very well and hasn’t been for quite some time.

I knew there was a problem about two and a half years ago when my little weird button shaped blob turned into a tennis ball poking out of my tummy.  It was massive!  It twisted and it grinded and I felt sick and the only way I can describe the pain is by asking you to imagine what it might feel like if someone had the fist of a giant and they were squeezing your organs and crushing them…then letting go…and then changing their mind and crushing them again.

I knew this wasn’t right, so I saw the stoma nurse and she said…

“…everyone’s stoma sticks out.”

I said…

“But mine didn’t look like this before.”

She said…

“They change, it’s normal.”

But the pain wasn’t normal.  And neither was it’s appearance so I went to the GP.

He said…

“Lose some weight, it’ll feel much better.”

So I did.  Still felt the same.  Then I got a mystery infection and I was admitted to a surgical assessment ward at the Royal Bolton Hospital but they didn’t look at it and they didn’t treat the infection.  The surgeon didn’t do anything except say…

“You’re too young to have this type of stoma.  If it was me, I wouldn’t have done it.”

Well thank the lord it wasn’t him!  Not to be dramatic but I’m pretty sure I’d be dead if my life was in his hands.

I asked another GP to refer me back to my surgeon at Wythenshawe.  She did…she referred me to the wrong surgical department…

Long story short, welcome Covid! And I’ve been waiting to have a face to face appointment with my actual surgeon since March 2020.

Has time become a healer?  … No.

Has my stoma changed? … No.  It still looks like a freaky tennis ball.

Am I still in pain? … YES! I am! I am still in pain and guess what?  Barely anybody knows because I just get on with it. 

I’ve been waiting for the day for another trip to A&E because without treating the problem it was inevitable and I know that due to Covid, no one is really getting the care they need and if you don’t complain you don’t get seen.

DISCLAIMER: If anyone is eating their midnight snack or drinking your morning coffee, or whatever you’re doing right now; this bit might not be for you and I am not offended if you do decide to close your browser but I say this every time.  This blog is for truth, my truth.  And I’m not about to tell any lies when it comes to my health or my life in general because while I may not tell people on a daily basis how pants I feel, this is the space for you to know that.

If you’ve ever had Diarrhoea pains you’ll know how awful they are and last Sunday night that’s what I had.  Let me tell you now…when you don’t use your bum like a normal person, that feeling is weird!  I still have my colon and sometimes it wakes up and it decides it needs to get rid of bits and pieces that are clinging to its walls and the only way of doing that is by pooping like a normal person.  Sounds simple doesn’t it?  But god!  It takes hours, days even, and it just wipes me the hell out. 

I’d been looking forward to the bank holiday weekend all week. Three days off work, a couple of lie ins, shop for a skirt for my uniform.  But no, my bowel had other ideas.

With every hour of Sunday night and all day Monday the pain just kept on coming and I felt sick, I didn’t eat, I could hardly drink, I was cold, hot, cold, hot…

It got to 11pm on Monday night and I just couldn’t take it.  Nothing was coming out and everything hurt, all over.  With every rectal strain (sorry) Wilomena was the size of a tennis ball with the threat of bursting into flames… 

…so it was a trip to A&E.  Wythenshawe A&E, where I knew I’d be seen.

Credit where it’s due, Wythenshawe Hospital has a very civilised A&E department.  I mean, yes it was a Monday night and not much was going on and there were very few people in there, but it really was quite nice. 

Covid hasn’t made life easy and every single person in that A&E department was waiting on their own. I’ve never had the experience of going to any hospital appointment on my own, I’m lucky that I’ve always had someone with me so this was a whole new ball game. I had to fight my own corner and put my brave pants on.

I admit having a clearly visible problem probably went in my favour.  I was triaged within 20 minutes, bloods taken in 10 and a cannula shoved in ready to party.  I waited about an hour for them to get the results and after that they popped me in a little room with a bed, a blanket and pain killers and the nurse said…

“Get some rest and the surgeon will come and see you in the morning.”

You know when you’re being looked after, you know when you’re being taken seriously and as I was lying on this really awful bed, completely alone and no idea what was about to happen to me my bum hole opened the flood gates and released this horrendous gunky, sludgy, chunky stuff that looks like brain matter and the stench! I am so sorry; I have never encountered a dead body before but I’m pretty sure something died inside me at some point because that was the kind of smell that was coming out of my bum crack!

As well as the pain, the confusion and by this time the delirium, all I could think was…

“…what time should I call my manager and tell her I can’t come into work?”

At 7am (ish) the door to my little room opened and in walks the surgeon –  Dr O’Connor.  He works directly with the surgeon who formed Wilomena – Ms Telford, so this felt like a good start!  A really good start.  He was young, but that was okay because we’ve been through this before so it’s all good.  He had read my notes and he knew all about my stupid GP and the ridiculously long wait for a face to face appointment with Ms Telford and he said…

“…I’m so sorry, it should never take this long for a face to face appointment, even with Covid.”

I already loved him!  The first thing he wanted to do was whack my bag off and take a peek at Wilomena to get to the root of the problem.  Just like that!

“Let’s take your bag off and see what’s going on in there.”

So standing in my Sainsbury’s pyjamas and my beehive hair that’s forgotten what a brush looks like, and baring in mind I’ve just excreted the brains of a million corpses that have been lying desolate in my colon for god knows how long, I take off my bag. 

True to form, Wilomena decided not to play ball this time and she looked like a perfectly normal stoma.  Seriously!  Of all times to mess around, she chooses now to look sheepish!  But Dr O’Connor wasn’t phased.

“Let’s lie you flat and take another look and see what’s going on with the other end too.”

If you have read my first blog about what I had to endure in order to get Wilomena, you will remember the ridiculous tests that I had to have.

Here’s the link if you want to remind yourself: http://blog.bipolar-with-a-stoma.co.uk/2020/12/05/wilomena/

As a result of those tests I have lost any feeling of embarrassment when it comes to being examined.  When you’re desperate for help, you end up accepting that help regardless of anyone’s gender, so when the nice, young, male doctor had to pop his finger up my bottom I didn’t even flinch.  At this point I was more concerned about the need to brush my hair than I was anything else. 

But the best thing!  The best thing in the whole wide world was the moment when he had to insert his finger right though the hole of Wilomena’s little mouth.  It didn’t hurt.  Not at all.  Despite what you might think, having part of your insides on your outside it doesn’t actually have any feeling.  You can cut your leg and it hurts but squeeze your intestines and you won’t even flinch.

I only noticed some kind of feeling when he found the problem…

I can’t for the life of me remember what the medical term was that he used but when he was having a poke around he found a twist or a knot in part of my small intestines which has prolapsed and is pushing against Wilomena.  This makes her bulge and stick out and explains why she’s so deformed.

So I need another operation to fix it and possibly another stoma formed (don’t worry, I’ve already decided on a name) and along with that I’ll probably need my colon removed.

Don’t be sad.  Please don’t pity me and don’t tell me you’re sorry for me because right now I’m not sorry.  Just like it was four years ago, this is a solution to a problem.  It’s not great and it’s not ideal…but you know what?  It’s life, it’s my life.  Don’t get me wrong I am angry at my stoma nurse, I’m insulted by one GP and fuming with the other and if me and Covid ever meet on a night out I will throw a drink over its head for messing up the world.

Now you might be wondering what choking on a carrot has got to do with Wilomena and a dodgy colon?  Well, I came home from hospital on Tuesday morning and I’ll be honest, it wasn’t pretty.  I was pretty much a vegetable on the sofa the whole day and more or less the same on Wednesday.

I hate having to take any time off work and I kept thinking…

What about the petty cash?

What if they run out of paperwork in the office?

Who’s going to do the order?

What if something needs reporting like a broken sink or a dodgy doorknob?

But my other worry was I had some training on Thursday and I didn’t know that it was open to me because I’m just the admin so I was really really happy when my manager put me forward to do it. So I went. 

Admittedly I felt a bit out of my depth.  I am not a medical professional and maybe as an admin I should know my place and stay in it, but sometimes in life we get opportunities that come our way and no matter what box those around us think we should stay in; it really is up to ourselves to decide what opportunities we think we might benefit from.

Usually I hate any kind of training that’s out of the workplace because there’s always a break and a lunch break and I’m always left to my own devices but this was a little different; I knew all the people on the course and I was included and it was really nice but…man I felt lousy.  My back hurt, my stomach hurt, Wilomena was back to her tennis ball self, I was hot and cold and I really didn’t want to eat any food…but you know when your body says…

“…I know you don’t want to but you really need to just feed me something…”

…so I bought those little carrot sticks with the houmous dip and I was actually really looking forward to them – I know that sounds weird – and when the lunch break came around I decided to just stay in the room and munch on them.  Then the course leader, who I really like and really respect and would have really loved to have a conversation with, asked me a question just as I put the first carrot stick in my mouth and a tiny tiny tiny tiny, I can’t stress enough how tiny this piece of carrot was that lodged itself in my throat and I just started choking – not like Heimlich choking but bad enough to need to leave the room and try and cough it out. 

The toilet was right behind the room so I didn’t want to cough like a Covid patient, I wanted to cough like a lady and not like I was coughing up a demon or another dead body, but attempting to do it discreetly just made the whole thing worse.

By the time I was able to go back into the room, red eyed with a voice like a T-Rex people were filtering in and word of my choking catastrophe was spreading.  Not only was it spreading but the discussion was going on for what felt like a really long time.

All I could think was…

“I’ve just spent a night in hospital.  I’ve just had a really young doctor stick his fingers up my jacksy and then down the hole of my knotted stoma.  I need my colon taking out, I don’t know when that will be and until that happens I’m going to have to put up with pain and bits of dead people falling out of a bum hole that forgets how to work!  So in the grand scheme of things…choking on a carrot is the least of my problems right now.

That was the first time I felt sorry for myself.  Only a little bit, but I did, I felt sorry for myself.

I went back to work today and I got on with my usual job.  I still feel a bit pants and when anyone asked me where I’d been I did tell them the truth.  People said…

“Why haven’t you said anything?”

“You must be in a lot of pain.”

“I didn’t realise it was that bad.”

The truth is my stoma pain isn’t anyone else’s pain.  I don’t like to whinge, I don’t like to complain and as a result of that people have no idea.  I do exactly the same with Bernard.  When I’m having a Bipolar episode no one knows because most of the time I can appear completely normal. 

I have this – opinion, I guess – that me complaining or airing my health problems makes no difference to anyone else’s life, they can’t do anything about it so why tell them? I would rather concentrate on their pain. I don’t for one second want people to stop telling me how they’re feeling because you do matter and your health matters to me and I will do whatever I can to make you feel better.  I will, that’s a promise.

I didn’t intend this blog to be so long but maybe I needed to get it out more than I thought.  Maybe I need to acknowledge my situation and accept that I need to take better care of myself and just let people help me if they really want to.

I wish I’d come to this realisation weeks, months, maybe even years ago…

...before choking on a carrot…

Dedicated to Dr O’Connor. You may never see this and you may never see me again. But thank you for doing something. Thank you for being the only medical professional who took action and didn’t let me down. Me, Wilomena and my colon will remember you with great fondness, always.

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Reading time: 15 min

By my bed I have a book I call my “Bedtime Rant Book.”  It was my mum’s idea, thanks mummy.  Whenever my thoughts plague my sleep she has always told me to write them down before I go to bed in the hope that it will free up some space in my brain so tiredness can take over that space and ensure a restful sleep.  You know what?  It works!  Well, most of the time; some of the time. 

Thanks go to my good friend Premal for picking this up for me in Thailand…

Sometimes it’s nice just to write down my thoughts and the next day look over them and say…

“Yeah, today isn’t as bad as yesterday.”

Or

“Today is worse than yesterday, but now I know why.”

Or

“Damn I’m such a drama queen!”

Or

“You were right to be mad Kat! Watch out world there’s a hurricane a comin!”

I know I’ve written some raw material here on this blog, probably some of which has never left my lips before because sometimes writing is easier than speaking.  Sometimes when I’m “not so good” I will send Matt a text message from a different room in the house to tell him I’m not coping, sometimes that’s just the way it rolls.

The piece I’m about to share I wrote last weekend and I know it’s raw and I know it’s close to the bone but it’s something I want to get out there, maybe people can identify with it, maybe it will just open a few eyes; or maybe…maybe it will just smack me in the face as a massive error in judgement. 

Whatever this turns out to be, it will be exactly what I promised this whole blogging idea to actually be…

My truth, my undeniable misfortune and if it’s not a lesson I can learn from myself, maybe it will be a lesson for others to not be afraid of the darkness; because the only way to face any kind of darkness is to admit that it’s there.

It’s common knowledge by now that November 2019 was the start of a ridiculously long Bipolar episode.  Ten months that thing went on for!  It wasn’t my worst but hell it was lengthy, I won’t bore you with dates, times and symptoms but, when I was all caught up in my musical delusions and my sleepless – and I mean really sleepless nights, to the point where watching Kenneth Branagh’s four hour long Hamlet was a decent way to pass the time – I had only one other vice…

…my creative brain…

My brain tells me what to think, the creative side of it tells me what to write for one reason and one reason alone…

…survival.

From the 11th May 2020 until this very day, and probably for some time to come; “Dancing in Puddles” has been my air, my release and as cheesy as it may sound, my saviour.

I don’t know what I had in mind when I started to write it.  All I know is I was resurrecting a bunch of characters from my childhood novel and recreating the pain I inflicted on them back in 1994.

In 2018 I spent a year writing a novel with another group of resurrected characters that I made sure felt pain and turmoil.  But when I finished it I needed more.  It’s the burden that comes with having a creative mind.

Back in 1994 I called my novel

“The Waste of a Person”

…because that was me. 

I thought if I wrote about a girl who tried to kill herself multiple times, then I wouldn’t want to do the same.  When my life didn’t get any better I renamed it, quite simply…

“Life”

…and I made terrible things happen to that girl because I couldn’t do them but I could write them.

Poor Shebah Hamilton (my lead character) and I guess her friends too, I may have given them a rest for twenty-two years but bringing them back to life was easy.

Last year I felt pain and I didn’t know how to channel it and writing was my only vice.  I’ve had virtually nothing that I gave to Shebah.  My dad isn’t dead, he didn’t have cancer and he wasn’t killed by my mother with a pillow over his face.  My mum didn’t abandon me at the age of sixteen and my older brother didn’t follow suit because I don’t have one.  I haven’t tried to kill myself eighteen times even though I may have wanted to, maybe even planned it.

I gave Shebah a group of male friends because when I first created her I didn’t have any.  I gave her visible panic attacks, horrendous scars and a long sheet of silky, beautiful hair because mine is thin, frizzy and turning white.

She might not know it but she’s beautiful and I’ve always wanted to be able to sing so I gave her the voice of an angel.  She’s a performance poet and performs like an OSCAR winning actress who can give Meryl Streep a run for her money.

I brought Shebah back to life because even though I’m happy, sometimes I’m still in pain…

I’m in pain because I’m not normal.  I wish I was but sometimes life is just too hard.  Sometimes all I want to do is close the door and walk away because trying to be a better person just isn’t possible.  Sometimes changing my behaviour is just too difficult.

It’s hard to explain to people how hard it is trying to be normal or trying to make life less difficult and believe it or not when you’ve achieved the things people said you never would; trying to keep up the mirage of normality is even harder than it is living up to the expectation of nothing.

Sometimes writing is like taking a pill for something that hurts.  It’s like paracetamol for my words.  If I have a bad day so does Shebah.  I can make her cry at the drop of a hat because there’s no plan, no plot, no formula.  If I hurt so does she.  I can give her a panic attack on her best day and I can make her fall to her knees in invisible agony because that’s just how I feel inside. 

“The waste of a person”, “Life” kept me alive in my teenage years and the I guess “Dancing in Puddles is my survival technique right now.

I started it because no one will see it.  I write it as an outlet.  I feel it because sometimes I think, when I’m gone maybe someone will look inside the chest my notebooks are housed in and they will understand how hard it is to constantly feel abnormal in a normal world.

People always say…

“…what’s normal?”

…but come on, we know the simple answer to that question.  Normal is acceptance.  Normal is doing the things you’re supposed to do.  Normal is achieving the things that are laid out by everyone around us.  Normal is not feeling different.  Normal is not having to make a up bunch of characters to inflict emotional torture on to because you can’t deal with your own.

When I started writing “Dancing in Puddles” I wasn’t sure how long it would be, but so far it’s filled nine notebooks and it will probably fill many more.

At this point, if it’s the only piece of fictional writing what comes out of my pen then that’s just fine and I’ll attempt to give off the illusion that sometimes life is only slightly difficult and I get through it by only getting my toes wet…

…but that’s not true.  Sometimes I’m not dancing in puddles…

…I’m drowning in them.

When I speak to an audience I always end with the same sentence…

“…life doesn’t end because of mental illness; life starts the second you take control of it.”

In our lifetime there will always be quicksand that we have to wade our way through.  Some of us just get a raw deal but it’s not about sinking, it’s about how we deal with it that really counts.  Even on my darkest days, I try to remind myself of that one sentence because I know that it will pass and it will pass because every day, every single one of us has a…

…dance in puddles…

Dancing in Puddles

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Reading time: 7 min
2000 and 2021

I once wrote a poem, twenty-something years ago and I called it “Shadows on Llandudno Beach” it was my only poem because when I showed it to someone they said…

“…it’s terrible.”

Surprisingly I wasn’t completely devastated by their criticism and this was simply down to the fact that I disagreed. 

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder and whilst my poem may well have been “terrible” I worked hard with those words and like everything I write, it came from my soul so to me those words were beautiful and that’s all there is to it. 

When I was eighteen, I applied to go to university in Bangor.  They had a creative writing degree that I desperately wanted to be part of but in a nutshell, it didn’t work out and I went to York St John instead. 

I remember mum driving me and my brother all the way to Bangor to see what the town was like and after that she said…

“Let’s go to Llandudno on the way back.”

I remember we parked the car and as soon as I opened the door the sea wind hit my face and all I could hear were the seagulls diving in all directions and the water washing over the rocks at the bottom of the beach.

That day in 1999 I ate chips, I had an ice cream and I got pooped on by a seagull which really annoyed me because I was wearing a brown suede jacket and it was my favourite.  But I also fell in love with Llandudno and I told myself that one day, when I was old and grey and a successful author I would open up my own B&B and I would live there surrounded by the wind and water and poopy seagulls and I would be happy.

In the summer of 2000 after our A level results and we were just a few weeks away from the next chapter of our lives my friend and I decided to have a day out.  She’d never been to Llandudno and I missed it so we took a little coach ride from Bolton to Llandudno and there was no mistaking it, we were the youngest people on there, we were surrounded by beige army but it didn’t matter because we knew where we wanted to be.

That day was perfect.  We walked along the pier, ate chips, drank tea in an old fashioned tea shop, we shared a bag of candy floss and we walked along the beach and picked out rocks.  My friend was an artist so we dug out some of the larger rocks and made holes so our bums were more comfortable and she sketched the landscape while I wrote…

“…Shadows on Llandudno Beach.”

That poem was about my grandma.  Whatever I wrote my grandma always read it and she always said she loved my words and one day I would be just like Danielle Steele – credit where it’s due, Ms Steele is a highly successful author so I was never going to deny that compliment.  My grandma died in 1998 and everything I wrote after she died was for her, every short story had her presence in it, the smells, the taste the sounds were all related to the parts of her that I missed. 

My literary inspiration…

In 2000 on Llandudno beach as I was looking out at the sea in front of me I knew I was about to take on a whole new life experience and I had to somehow put my pain on the shelf and move forward. 

That one poem was my goodbye to my pain and a hello to a better life.

Back in 2000 camera phones and selfies were unheard of.  I don’t even think I had a mobile phone at that point, all I had was a Nikon camera with a winding film barrel that had a maximum of thirty pictures and you needed a degree in engineering to load it successfully.

We had no idea how to do a selfie so to document our trip we took turns in taking pictures of each other on the pier and on the beach and even then this was the height of excellency because some of our other friends didn’t even have a camera.

When I flick through the remaining pictures I have of that trip there’s one of me standing awkwardly on the pier.  I look at my eighteen-year-old self, thinner, better hair, better eyesight, no stoma and completely unaware of anything to do with any kind of mental illness.  I remember thinking how grown up I was, I was on a day trip with my friend and I was about to move away from home to university and that was the best thing because I could escape from all the difficult bits in my life at home and move forward.  I knew I was running away; I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t.  I thought that taking myself out of an equation was the answer to all of my problems, kind of like closing your eyes and saying…

“…if I can’t see you, you can’t see me.”

I had no idea what was laid out ahead of me.  I had no idea that the pain in my writing was going to get a hundred times more painful and I was completely unaware that if you start running from one thing, you have to run faster to get away from the next.

That day in 2000 the only thing important to me was finding a music shop I had been to the year before and how could I eat my chips without getting pooped by a seagull again?

I started my new job last year at the end of September and in that time I’ve only had a few days off here and there.  I’ve always said I don’t like having time off if I’m not going anywhere.  A holiday to me is not sitting at home, it’s leaving the town and going to a new one.  It’s leaving the god damn country and your feet getting lost in sand; it’s talking to someone in a different language and telling them you have no idea what they’re saying…

Well, we can’t really do that at the moment can we?  We can’t just pack a bag and hop on an Easy Jet flight and sit and drink Sangria in the sun and not worry about checking the pockets of our coats for the million masks we seem to be accumulating.  I was holding out in hope that circumstances would change and this would be allowed so I could book two weeks off work and head into the sunshine but I’m still waiting for that.

I didn’t realise that not having any considerable time off work would cause any problems.  Things were difficult at work for a lot of people but I maintained the fact that I was not affected by anything that was going on…

“…strong as an ox me.”

I forgot that stress takes all forms and actually I was bothered by other factors and it wasn’t until the last minute when I found myself on the phone to my psychiatrist and he’s dishing out Zopiclone – to help me sleep because I seem to have forgotten how to do it – that I realised I needed to take some time out and practice that…

“…self-care…”

…thing the world seems to have adopted. 

I’ve ever been one for self-care, I’ve always looked at it as a bit of a hippy dippy mindfulness drivelly idea and gone down the…

“…suck it up and just get on with it…”

…route but…well I’m wrong aren’t I?  Yes I am.  We all need a bit of self-care and mine took the form of…

…an overnight trip to Llandudno with Mum.

I’ve never known what actual self-care is supposed to look like.  I know it’s things like…

  • Going for a walk
  • Pampering yourself
  • Being in touch with your friends and family
  • Maybe it’s being by yourself
  • Eating but not overeating
  • Exercise
  • Watching TV
  • Being away from social media

I’ve reached the point now where “sucking it up” isn’t working and I have just less than a week off work to bring myself up from the hole that my unconscious seems to be digging. 

So when we arrived in Llandudno, the wind whipped my hair around my face and the air smelt salty with just a hint of seaweed and the beach famously littered with rocks and stones, I knew instantly what my kind of self-care was going to look like.

Our hotel The Marine, was on the front of the promenade, it looked grand but the inside reminded me of that song by The Eagles, Hotel California…

“…you can check out any time you like,

but you can never leave…”

It was worn, beaten, the breakfast was misleading and the shower filled up with water so high around my feet that it was like a paddling pool in there before I could slide the door open and escape.

We were on the second floor and we had a seagull pay us a visit on the windowsill, we named him Seymour.  We trawled the length of the beach looking for interesting stones to add to a collection that is growing in number but lacking in purpose.  I found a crab shell and popped it on the end of my finger and made it say…

“…hello!”

…to mum.  On the pier we looked at all the weird and wonderful stalls of complete trash but….what is one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. 

Say hello Mr Crab…

I took a picture of the infamous Zoltar and realised that unless you’ve watched the 1988 film “Big” you will never understand the fascination. 

We sat down on a bench and looked at the queue going into the amusement arcade and then we tried to spot the exact point that I stood in twenty-one years ago so I could recreate the moment and the memory.

The new picture tells a thousand stories.  In 2021 I have less hair and what I do have is skipping being grey and just turning white.  I have varifocals now, an ostomy bag, Bipolar Disorder, crap kidneys, a dodgy Thyroid and a whole heap of life experiences I could have lived without.  Standing in that spot reminded me that this had once been my happy place, this was where I was really free.

For our evening meal we went for a Chinese, I googled…

“…best Chinese in Llandudno”

…a restaurant popped up and it made no indication that we needed to book so we just rocked up – like you never do these days – and requested a table.  The nice lady dressed in a skimpy black number and black patent leather knee high boots and barked at us…

“Will you be done by seven o clock?!”

It was ten past six so we nodded and suddenly she whips out a thermometer shaped like a pistol and points it at my forehead like a highly trained assassin in a Bond film and shoots… my temperature is fine, I am allowed to eat.

I was allowed to eat but I should have been less adventurous and more predictable because instead of ordering my usual chicken curry or the satay chicken I went for the Char Siu Pork.  I didn’t know what this was, I thought it was the contents of a Char Siu Bao but I was wrong.  It tasted like chopped pork in gravy on a bed of bean sprouts I can even touch because Wilomena will kill me!

Char Siu Pork…

So when the lady asked how was my Char Siu Pork I freaked out a little bit because I’ve never been asked specifically if my specific meal was good or not?  And I just thought…

“…is this a test?  What do I say?”

…I could have said, I should have said…

“…yeah yeah it was great.  It tasted just like a marinated pig in bucket of beef Bisto…”

But I told her it was nice, it was lovely.  It wasn’t lovely, but what was lovely was having a walk through the town while the entire United Kingdom was getting ready for one single football match.  We passed by an antiques shop that had three monkeys dressed as spacemen, a nail bar with my best friend’s name on the front so I took a picture for her because she’s about to have a baby and she can’t really move. 

Then I turned around there was a giant statue of Alice in Wonderland but she looked incredibly constipated because at the back of her she had a gigantic house stuck up her bottom!

A different kind of constipated.

That night I slept the whole night through, no sleeping tablet, no distraction, I just slept (right after Love Island). 

It turns out, my kind of self-care is sea air, picking up rocks and eating pork soaked in gravy.

Found one!

My kind of self-care is laughter, texting a friend in the ad-break of Love Island and writing my never ending story on a slightly lumpy bed with a seagull tapping his beak at the window.

My kind of self-care is a change of scenery and going back to Llandudno reminded me of the person I was.  The little eighteen-year-old who was already unhappy but had no idea how bad things were going to get. 

When I sat on the beach looking out at the sea again, twenty-one years later, wiser than I could ever have imagined, I didn’t need to write anything; all I needed to do was get rid of the troublesome things that have been filtering in recently.

So I’m practicing self-care, by getting rid of the…

…shadows on Llandudno beach…

Dedicated to Doris Mullineux. My biggest literary fan, I hope this makes you proud xxx

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Reading time: 12 min
My face says it all…

The other day someone had an iffy tummy – I can’t drop names because they would never forgive me for outing their unpredictable bowel movements but please note, it wasn’t me…

When I checked to see if Anonymous person was feeling better I said…

“…you’ve got such a funny tum.  What’s going on in there?”

They replied with…

“Turmoil.”

I have to admit, despite having a degree in English literature and linguistics my vocabulary is not as extensive as it probably should be because I am not the shiniest button in the sewing tin, so shamefully I had to look up the definition of “turmoil” which is:

A state of great commotion, confusion, or disturbance; tumult; agitation; disquiet: mental turmoil caused by difficult decisions.”

Now before you all jump ship and close your browsers, this is not an English lesson.  I could never subject you to that especially when I’ve spent all of my writing life breaking every grammar and punctuation rule in the book.  I don’t care if my writing reads wrong because I don’t use my commas and my semicolons appropriately.  I know it annoys the hell out of every single literary expert but you know what?  I like starting a sentence with “but” and “and” because I’m not at school anymore and no one can stop me.  And if my writing reads wrong it’s because I’m writing the way I would speak in a conversation not the way a GCSE English textbook tells me I should.

At university I remember studying the poems of e.e. cummings.  While I was never any good at interpreting his poetry I was fascinated by the fact that he refused to use capital letters in his work.  I didn’t really care what he wrote about or how ground-breaking his words were, I just remember wishing that I had the balls to do something as revolutionary and exciting as he did and have the means to get away with it.

Breaking the rules of the written word.

I don’t know why but I kept thinking about the word turmoil and I tried to think of things in my life that relate to it.

For example, if turmoil is having to make difficult decisions then last weekend when I had to choose between a Bakewell tart or half a raspberry cheesecake it was really difficult because, what if I ate one but still wanted the other?  Would the waistband of my jeans still be slightly slack or would I have to take a trip to H&M for a larger size?

Half a cheesecake and a Bakewell tart

On Monday I looked out of the window when I was getting ready for work, the sky was a bit grey and even though my weather app said it was going to be a dry day, I wasn’t 100% convinced.  The difficult decision was, do I wear boots in case it rains so my feet don’t get wet?  Or do I risk it for a biscuit and wear the new Converse Matt bought me for my birthday?  I also wanted to wear my denim jacket but I worried about it not being warm enough; I get cranky when I’m cold and that’s not fun for anyone.

When I’m deciding what to cook for tea I sometimes look at my freezer and I see the three bags of stir-fry veg calling my name…

“…eat meeeeee.  Eat meeeee Kateriiiinnnniiiii!”

Do I do what they’re telling me and bung a bunch of frozen veg in the pan?  Or do I remind myself that Wilomena does not digest healthy ingredients and I should look in the mirror at the remnants of the fibre induced acne and remind myself of the repercussions of what fibre does to my face.

Back in 2015 before I got married, I remember sitting in the examination room with the surgeon.  She asked me if I had children and did I plan to because the operation could affect that possibility.  I’d been in pain and misery for far too long a time for me to consider what she was saying so I chose Wilomena over children.  Whilst this might be a tumultuous decision for most, I didn’t register it at the time.

A few weeks ago I was in a bad mood.  I went into Bolton for a mooch and popped into Hotel Chocolat.  Usually I’d buy a bar of dairy milk but I was feeling a bit rich so I went into the most expensive chocolate shop in the town and spent, probably 10 – 15 minutes looking at chocolate that I probably wouldn’t like and probably wasn’t worth the amount on the price tag.  But there was an offer on and it was £10 for 3x strips of 6 truffles and the hardest part was deciding which to buy because what if I bought one of them and it wasn’t very nice because then I’d have wished I’d bought a different one?

The dictionary says turmoil is…

a state of great commotion…

…but what’s the definition of commotion?  Sometimes I make a playlist on my Ipod and I have to have a song on there a certain amount of times otherwise I get agitated if I don’t hear it. 

When I’m writing a novel I picture it running like a film and I pick out songs that would appear on the soundtrack so I listen to them as loud as they will go so that nothing but the action between my characters creeps into my head.

When Matt plays stupid shooting games on his Xbox I have to leave the room because the awful noise of guns makes me panic and I don’t understand what the appeal is.

I can’t stand at a concert because the thought of getting embroiled into a mass of drunken moshers is not my idea of fun anymore.

I’m dreading the work’s night out on the 24th July because I’m terrified that I will turn back into STA Kat who was boring and lifeless and never went on any nights out because I couldn’t relate my sense of fun to the people I was with.  So do I step back and just stick to who I am on the ward or do I take the plunge and make an attempt at stopping history from repeating itself? 

If I make my life out to be an illusion, will that work well for me?

Maybe turmoil doesn’t have to be to the letter of what the dictionary says.  Maybe turmoil can be defined in all sorts of different ways.  Turmoil can be the toss-up between a cheesecake and a Bakewell tart.  It could be making a life changing decision where someone always loses.  Maybe turmoil is swapping one loud noise for another so that peace can be restored?

When you look at the definition of Turmoil we’re given an abundance of other words that all have their own meaning attached to them…

…commotion

 confusion

disturbance

tumult

agitation

disquiet…

If those words are the definition of “turmoil” then in my own personal dictionary, all the word turmoil amounts to is…life.

Because in life we’re faced with tough decisions that dictate how we live in the future.  We’re surrounded by people who try our patience and we allow them to mould us into shapes we never wanted to be. 

We find ourselves in situations that are beyond our control.  I would never choose to be “mentally ill”, that choice was taken out of my hands. 

I take medication that has botched up my thyroid and corrupted my kidneys because I value my sanity too much to risk losing it.

Some days are a blessing, some days the only thing I have to worry about is which pair of Converse to put on my feet. 

Sorrento, somewhere in the sky…

Just like I always say, we are all different and one person’s turmoil will always be different to that of another’s. For some it might be chipping a newly applied gel nail at the start of a night out. Or it could be debating on whether it’s safe enough to donate a kidney to a loved one.

Sometimes the best part of the day is sweating over the small stuff because it’s a break from dealing with something bigger…

And as I’m writing this my washing machine is on the go.  I’ve just looked at the weather app on my phone, it’s 19 degrees and mostly cloudy but when I look out of the window the sun is shining…

British weather…

…should I hang out my washing?  Or should I keep it in doors?

…now that’s turmoil.

Dedicated to the person who had the iffy tummy….

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Reading time: 7 min
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Non-alcoholic birthday drink from about three years ago

Birthdays… I flippin hate them.  I stopped having birthdays when I turned twenty-nine because didn’t want to turn thirty.  As soon as I hit twenty-nine I automatically spent the next 365 days panicking about turning thirty because in 2011 I looked at my life and I was disappointed. 

I was single – but so was Josh Groban so there was still hope.  I lived at home with my mum -which truthfully I didn’t mind because I was fed, watered and cared for and that is not a crime.  I also had a job that was more like hole in the head than it was rewarding (again, I’m really sorry to the guys I used to work with, I mean no offence), so life wasn’t exactly bleak but it was less than promising.

16th June 2013

In 2011 I scraped by when it came to self-love, it was more like self-loathe, self-pity and just get on with life because nothing was going to change anytime soon.  I didn’t realise at that point that I was the one responsible for making those changes and there was no magic fairy who was going to swoop in and make me confident, successful and beautiful; it might have worked out for Cinderella but in the real world we’re not as fortunate, so for 365 days before I hit the thirty mark I looked in the mirror and thought…

“…oh god, we’re one step closer to the end of the line.”

Just thinking about the change in digits filled me with dread. 

By now if you’re a regular to my blog you’ll gather that life has been somewhat unkind and while most of it I probably couldn’t change there were aspects where I wish I’d owned some “brave girl pants” and given life the finger and just said…

“Back off bad stuff…don’t rain on my parade!”

In hindsight I wish I could have done that, but hindsight is one of those things that I believe only comes with age.  I look back and I know that I had to turn thirty in order to learn this lesson.

When I was a kid I had a party every year.  I was lucky, I had all my friends over and my mum put a spread on, she made party bags and everyone went home feeling happy and fulfilled.  Every year I looked forward to the cards, the cake and the presents – Don’t lie to yourself, everyone loves getting a present!  But when I turned sixteen I sat my GCSE history exam.  At eighteen it was my Communication Studies exam and at twenty-one I was depressed as hell, on the verge of a Bipolar diagnosis and pretending to ride the waves of normality when there was nothing normal inside my head. 

As time has gone by birthdays have just become less important.  They’ve become something I want to avoid rather than address because every year I’d feel the beady eyes of those more successful than me and they would comment and say…

“Have you not got a boyfriend yet?”

“Are you still working at that place?”

“Do you not think you should be moving out by now?”

Comments are comments but those who make them who are reading this bear in mind, they burn because every time you question my social circumstances based solely on my age it makes me embarrassed to be me. 

I had friends who didn’t invite me to their hen do’s and wedding celebrations because, how can you introduce this person you know who has a mental illness, a poxy job and no one to love her, to your friends and family when this is not a pity party and this person is pitiful. 

I stopped celebrating my birthdays with friends because I didn’t think anyone would want to celebrate it with me; I concentrated so much on the negative side of my age that I never saw anything worth celebrating.

The only thing with birthdays is, you can’t escape them.  You can’t hide because somewhere, someone in the crevices of the life you wish you didn’t lead, knows the date you were born and…

…BAM!

You’re reminded who you are.  I blame social media.  It’s littered with positive birthday wishes and photographic evidence of pure joy that turn into poison arrows thrown directly at your aching heart.   

So when I hit the big 3-0 I took the day off work to avoid the attention because the idea of being in an office full of people who were confident, popular and birthday savvy made my head sweat and gave me heart palpitations.  

The only thing I wanted to do was sit in a darkened room, watch Smallville on DVD and pretend I was going to marry Michael Rosenbaum because he was also single and I’ve got a thing for bald men.

Image result for lex luthor smallville
Sorry, not sorry

I’ve never been mature, I think I’ve always had a young head on my shoulders and living at home I didn’t have the responsibilities that other thirty year olds had.  Because of this I looked at all the photographs of joy on Facebook and I felt like I was being left behind.  My friends had partners and children, they were buying houses and getting career promotions and while I feigned my support of their wholesome milestones, I wanted to crawl into the packet of millionaire shortbread I was eating and die a fattening death.

But I had a friend who wouldn’t let it slide and in the end I was glad she didn’t.  Janice is a big birthday celebrator and she took me out to lunch, we ate a ridiculous amount of food and I felt loved.  I didn’t for one second feel inadequate about having a rubbish job or not having a boyfriend; I was just someone eating a tuna melt panini and a Mediterranean salad.

My Mediterranean salad

Every milestone birthday people say…

“…life starts at…

30

40

     50…”

…but all I can say is, which is it?  Or is this just to make the unfortunate feel better because they haven’t achieved what they wanted to achieve in life and if we give them another decade to have a bash at it they might just manage it? 

I don’t know…

…what I do know is, I never really started living until I turned thirty-one – thirty is a blur, I have absolutely no idea what happened within that twelve months.  Thirty-one was the year the cloud of emotional doom faded.  I met Matt (admittedly we met because I was having a Bipolar episode and a friend convinced me Match.com was a good idea) and I started to feel that bit more comfortable in my own skin and I read Electroboy by my friend Andy Berhman.

For years I’ve felt like I’ve missed out on all of my twenties because I was always ill.  I was up and down and all around, I was in and out of hospital, over medicated and trying to cheat the beast by messing around with my mood stabilisers.  I didn’t think it was possible to take control of a mental illness. 

Andy is also a big birthday celebrator, I could never understand why but I realised through talking to him over emails and letters; that when you’re dealt a really rubbish hand of cards, instead of looking at what you haven’t got, you have to look at what you do have because sometimes; we’re just lucky to even be alive at all.

For his birthday I sent him a rock I picked up from a beach in Croatia

I’d like to say I put this into play and that since the age of thirty-one I’ve become a massive birthday celebrator, but that would be a lie…

I think I got more comfortable with birthdays up to about the age of thirty-six because when you hit this one, you’re closer to forty than you are to your youth and those old friends harbouring social expectations on your lifestyle make a return and pass judgement on the things you still haven’t got and still haven’t done.

Looking back I would love to tell my younger self that…

…it’s perfectly okay to not have a boyfriend, because boys smell!

…it doesn’t matter if you have a rubbish job, the point is you have one!

And…

…make the most of living with your parents because trust me, the second you buy a house you’re gonna be as poor as hell, so enjoy having some pennies in your bank account because they won’t be there for very long!

To this day I don’t do birthdays, I would rather it slip under the radar and just get on with life and wait for it to pass me by and yesterday’s 39th year was no different.

For this one I didn’t bother to take the day off.  In my new job I actually wanted to be at work, I didn’t see the point in taking a day off for a six hour shift.  I had planned to keep schtum but I let it slip to one person and by the end of my working day I left with a bunch of flowers and a card signed by all the patients and the staff.  I might have wanted to my day to pass by unnoticed but in the end I was happy for the attention and their genuine appreciation of me.

My work family

These days I find birthdays hard to deal with because I look in the mirror and I see things are different; my hands have changed, my hair is growing white instead of grey, I dress like I’m still a student and my lack of maturity is an alien being inside my head. 

Where once I believed I was being left behind by my peers, I now feel like I’m waving goodbye to my youth and I will never get that back…

…but…

…life is journey.  It takes us on different paths and none of them are ever the same because people are not the same.  I am slowly learning – very very slowly – that we still have to live life even if we feel like we can’t and maybe birthdays shouldn’t be about getting older, maybe Andy is right, they shouldn’t be about what we have and haven’t got…

…perhaps…

…I should put a different spin on my birthdays and celebrate the real meaning behind them because birthdays are about being born.  They’re about becoming a person; so maybe my next birthday should be about being lucky enough to have a life and to surviving it so far?

This is what I will try to remember, because now I’ve got…

…364 days until I’m 40…

Dedicated to everyone who reminds me that birthdays are a good thing.

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Reading time: 9 min
I’m putting this image here now because even though this blog is hard to write, there is light at the end of it…

It’s June, it’s summer, it’s 22 degrees outside and it’s hot!  For most people it’s the time to whip off your top and slap on that suntan cream and bask in the glory of that big fat ball of fire in the sky.  

Summer makes people smile, it brings them together and it’s a chance to get our legs out of our jeans and give our arms the ability to break free of the sleeves of our woolly jumpers because nothing beats the feeling of the sun on your skin.  It’s glorious…

…unless you’re a self-harmer…

I’ve never written about this subject.  I’ve never documented it in a journal or gone into the intricacies in one of my presentations.  It’s a section of my life that I’m not proud of but it’s a part of me that I can’t hide.

I’m not looking for sympathy or even understanding, especially when it’s something that I don’t fully understand myself and I can’t pinpoint a reason or event or a pivotal moment where I…

“…made the decision to hurt myself…”

…but I can say that when your life is consumed by self-hatred and confusion and you have no concept of mental illness or what it even looks like; when all you want is to be able to feel something, then pain is sometimes the only thing that makes sense because how can you feel joy when all you feel inside is pain?

I know very little about self-harm.  I barely know anything about my own variation of it, except that in the moment, in those few minutes, I felt relief.  I was relieved because I could see something that hurt and I was also relieved because the pain I felt echoed the pain in my soul.

In my early to mid-twenties I would dip in and out of the self-harm habit, just like I would dip in and out of hospital.  When Bernard the Bipolar brain was medicated and caged within the realms of sanity I didn’t feel the need to hurt myself.

When I look back on my self- harm history I can only describe it as moments of madness that made sense at the time.  It was desperation, it was like drowning in a lake of cement and it was the one thing that pulled me out.  It was a few minutes of blind self-inflicted rage, self-pity and a way of pleading with life to just stop! Stop what it was doing and just make sense again.

In the moment I didn’t think of the future.  I didn’t think to myself…

“What do I do when its sunny outside and everyone is taking their tops off?”

“What do I do when I want to roll my sleeves up to wash my hands and there’s someone stood next to me who doesn’t know I struggle?”

“What do I do when I meet a boy and he sees these hideous scars?”

In the moment I didn’t think…

“What do I do when I get a job and there’s no aircon in the office and I’m frying like an egg.”

I didn’t think…

“What do I do in eighteen years’ time when I get another job and I’m working with patients who have done the same thing but they have no idea that I am anything other than Admin Kat?”

In that moment, at the age of twenty I didn’t think of the future; I didn’t think of the future because I didn’t think I had one. 

Contrary to popular belief self-harm was not a form of attention seeking for me; how could it be when I had to go to incredible measures to hide what I have done to myself because no-one really understood it.

It’s been long sleeves at social gatherings so people don’t stare.  I put my arm behind my back when I’ve been at the end of a row of people and a photographer makes a spontaneous appearance.  I make up elaborate and ridiculous lies like…

“I used to be a Piranha fish tamer.”

“I had an altercation with a seriously angry cat.”

“It’s an unusual birthmark.”

“It’s a new form of tattoo art.”

(No one believed any of them, can you believe?)

Mr Piranha Fish

It took me years to find the courage to roll up my sleeve at my last job.  In the end the defining moment was the office was just to damn hot and I couldn’t take the heat.  People stared, they whispered, some even stopped speaking to me for a while; one person refused to make me a cup of tea because they didn’t want to touch my self-harm infected mug.

I had a friend once who told me I was in the running for being her bridesmaid but she had to make a decision on what would look better on her wedding pictures.  Unfortunately the dress she’d picked out for the bridesmaids didn’t accommodate a hideously scarred arm.  I had another friend who told me it would be better if I could cover my arm so that she wouldn’t have to explain the state of it when we were supposed to be having a nice evening out with her friends.

Once I tried to explain to someone how difficult it is to keep up the act of normality when life is constantly throwing curveballs in your way to make it less normal.  They said…

“Well you made that choice, now you have to live with it.”

They are of course right.  Whatever spin I put on this, eighteen years ago I made a decision to hurt myself and that decision has affected my life ever since….

But…

Had I not made that particular decision, the only one I was left with would have been a whole lot worse because…

…I would not be here to tell the tale.

Twelve years ago I may have braved the office with my naked arm but when I started public speaking in 2014 everything I did to every single audience was done in long sleeves.  I would sweat, my skin would itch and I would stand in front of the crowd and tell my story but I would never bear my arm. 

Long sleeves

I was ashamed.  When you’ve spent so many years being made to feel like a leper because of the things you’ve been through and the decisions you’ve made, it’s difficult to get out of that habit.

On the 5th May 2019 I went to see Rose McGowan do a reading and interview about her book Brave.  There’s something about Rose McGowan that I’ve always admired.  When she was in Charmed I wanted her hair.  When she became a voice for all genders in the Me Too movement I admired her bravery and her courage.  She’s someone who has suffered but she’s never given up and that’s what I admire the most.  She uses her pain to give others the courage to carry on.

The Lowry – Salford

Anyone who worked with me at the Edinburgh fringe festival will tell you that I can talk to anyone, actually everyone who knows me will tell you that, but my Edinburgh friends will tell you that when it comes to talking to celebrities I shrivel up and die and I turn into a ridiculous gibbering idiot who can’t form sentences… and for a public speaker it’s not a good look.  But in 2019 I was not going home without my copy of Brave being signed by Rose McGowan.

So I stood in a queue for 45 minutes, which didn’t feel like 45 minutes because I spent the entire time texting my mum asking her…

“What the hell do I say?”

It was a warm day and I’d walked into the Lowry dressed in a woolly jumper and my winter coat, so coupled with the fact that I was nervous I was also getting that jittery sweaty look…but let’s cut to the chase…

I got to the front of the queue and this beautiful person was sat in front of me and she asks me what my name is and we start talking about Greece and where my family is from because she’s just been to Greece and then…she clocks my arm!  She clocks it because in my Sweaty Betty panic I rolled up my sleeve for some temporary bare skin relief but I forgot to roll it back down before I was stood in front of her.

In that moment I had two choices, tell her the piranha fish story or…

…just tell her the truth.

So I said…

“I have Bipolar but I’m a public speaker now.”

She said…

“Do you show your scars when you speak?”

I said…

“Never.”

And I will always remember her reply because it was a lightbulb moment.  It was like a rough sea becoming calm or the clouds parting after a storm.  It was peace resting on a troubled soul.

“You should show them because you survived them, you should be brave.”


With tears in my eyes I nodded and I said…

“I will, I’ll be brave.”

And she said…

“I’m proud of you, I’m so proud of you.”

I wish I had a picture of myself being wrapped in Rose McGowan’s arms when she said those words, but even photographic evidence can’t explain what I felt in that moment.

It was validation from a complete stranger.  It was permission to stop being ashamed of my behaviour and a reason to move on from it. 

I look at my arm sometimes and… guys it’s a mess, so some days I am still ashamed but other days I think to myself…

“Damn right Rose, I survived them!”

So now in my presentations I talk about it and no matter how cold it is in the room I whip my top off or I roll up my sleeve and I strut that stage and do what I’ve always tried to do, I try to make people proud.  I try to make Rose proud.

Short sleeves

I’m not saying any of this is easy and sometimes when life is really difficult and things don’t make sense, the urge is still there and I’m not proud of that; but I am proud of the fact that I manage to resist that urge.

These days I try to write it out.  I try to write blogs or I rant in my designated “bedtime rant” notebook.  I write stupid fiction where I make the lives of innocent characters miserable because it makes me feel better, it’s a release.  I have an abundance of notebooks in my little library that are filled with the deaths’ of the most beautiful people of my own creation but they die because they are part of me, parts of myself that I couldn’t save at the time.

At work I was chatting with the drama therapy student and he asked me what write I about, was it romance or sci fi or crime? That kind of thing.  But I couldn’t give him an answer, not properly.  I couldn’t give him a simple answer because there’s more to my words than just a genre.

Since the age of eleven my words have only ever been a way for me to cope with the world.  They give me air by suffocating my pages.  My characters represent the parts of me that are still here and the parts that are gone.

As I’ve got older and hopefully wiser, I’ve found ways to channel those feelings of self-loathing, sometimes I’m not always successful but writing this particular piece right now has helped me understand the way I’ve been feeling. 

I’ve spent the last four hours writing this – believe it or not – and now I know exactly what I write about…

I write about darkness and I write about light, because…

…in order to survive, I write about pain.

Now I am brave…or try to be.

Dedicated to Rose McGowan, although you may never see this you gave me the courage to be brave.

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Reading time: 10 min

Today’s blog is not about having a mental illness or about public speaking off the back of it.  This blog is about the little bits and pieces that make me Kat, the things that I hope people like about me and I like to think when they laugh at those things, they are laughing with me, not at me; so if you are laughing at me, go away.  This is not for you and I’m not being rude but I don’t want you here.  Sorry, not sorry.

When I was a kid I watched the film “Babe”, it was about a piglet who became a sheep dog(pig) and after seeing this all I wanted was a pet piglet.  Unfortunately, with a dog and cat already being in the household it was a profound “no” when I asked my parents if I could have one.  So instead of an actual pig, my family bought me endless pig related items, pencils, pencil cases, pig ornaments, notebooks, mugs and anything Disney that had Piglet plastered all over it.  This went on for quite some time until the obsession faded and something else took its place.

In 1993 the film “Cool Runnings” hit the big screen and I remember sitting in the cinema with my sweets from the corner shop because even in the 90’s you had to have a money tree growing in your back yard if you wanted to eat at the cinema.

I don’t know what it was about that film but the whole thing just filled me with joy.  Yes it was a film about a Jamaican Bobsled team and it was hard to relate to the specifics but, I saw something deeper.  To me it was a film about being different and tackling discrimination.  It was about hope and ambition and never giving up.  More than anything though, it was about believing in luck, so when Sanka pulled out his lucky egg my first thought was…

“I gotta get me a lucky egg!”

I asked mum to make me a hardboiled egg and I painted it with felt tip pens and I took that egg everywhere I went because I truly believed that if kissing an egg could bring Sanka good luck, then it would do the same for me. 

But one day it accidentally fell out of my pocket and I couldn’t find it anywhere.  Not only was I devastated that I’d lost my lucky egg but a few days later when I opened the door of my mum’s car, a hideous rotten egg smell invaded our noses and it was pretty clear where my lucky egg had disappeared to.  But I kid you not, twenty-eight years later I still love eggs.  In charity shops and gift shops I look at the marble eggs and I admire their beauty and sometimes I wonder if I gave them a little smooch would my luck change? 

Years ago my dad worked abroad and whenever he came back he brought me a gift.  It was notebooks or a T-shirt, once he even brought a chocolate camel made from camel’s milk, that was an experience. The best thing he ever bought me was a porcelain egg, I think it was a birthday present.  Now my dad never ever remembered any of our birthday’s, he remembered his own, obviously, he never forgot that; so when he gave me a really posh looking box and this beautiful egg was inside lying on a bed of silk I have to say I was surprised, but I was grateful and I was touched and I thought…

“…maybe he does actually love me.  Maybe he might even know me.”

I never asked him and I will never know where that egg came from.  Was it a present for one of his many women and they didn’t want it?  Was it something just lying around the house and he thought…

“…crap I’ve forgotten her birthday again.  I’ll just give the egg.”

I don’t know, but that egg is the only thing I have that my dad ever bought me and no matter where it came from I will always treasure it because I like to think it’s special.  I tell myself that maybe he went shopping after work especially to buy me a birthday present, maybe he saw it and maybe he thought…

“Katerini likes eggs.  She might like this one.”

I don’t care where it came from…

Everyone who knows me knows that I like to name things.  Whether the object has eyes or not I will give it a name and a personality.  If I cook a chicken I sometimes I call it Pete or Gerald and I pat it like a pet before it goes into the oven, not that I put my pets in the oven, I don’t I swear!

If I have plants in my house I usually name those too.  I have tiny spider plant in my kitchen called Sindy, I have a succulent on my bookshelf that my friend made for me and I named it Jeff.

When another friend bought me a Venus fly trap for my birthday, the first thing he said was…

“What are you going to call this one?”

I said…

“Verity.”

When my friend Jan retired from Band I picked a rock from a beach and decorated it with eyes, I gave it a feather boa and in her card I explained that the rock was a drag queen named Radovanka.  I know it’s bizarre and what 30 something year old decorates a rock and gives it a personality?  But no matter how childlike it might have appeared, I know Jan will have appreciated the gesture and it will remind her of me because this is just the kind of thing that I do.

I love the art of drag.  I love the idea that a person can transform themselves from one thing to another and you can be so far from your usual self that no one would recognise the original. 

I love that drag queens are completely uninhibited and I admire their daring nature.  I worship their cheek and their beauty and the work that goes into creating something so incredibly beautiful.

When I watch RuPaul’s Drag Race I sometimes wish I was brave enough to be a more flamboyant and braver version of myself.  I wish I could wear sequins and high heels and have a mass of hair extensions; but it doesn’t matter because people have embraced my obsession with the uniqueness of drag queens and now I have books, mugs and memories that tell me my friends accept my fascination because they accept me.

I love music.  It’s probably the one thing that I couldn’t live without.  I can’t sing, I can’t play an instrument and I don’t dance – unless you count happy dancing in your head as dancing? But I don’t think you have to be musical to appreciate a good tune. 

When I was a kid I would sit with my head phones on and play one of my many Meat Loaf cassettes on my Walkman and I would sing along with the lyrics straight from the leaflet and I would look for meaning in the words.  I never found any in Wasted Youth but for me the title was enough.

When I was at high school I was in love with Crispian Mills from Kula Shaker and besotted with Simon Fowler from Ocean Colour Scene.  In the mid-90s Indie music was all the rage and I thought if I bought every album, every single and every magazine they were in I would be one step closer to meeting them and them falling in love with me.  Let’s face it, my teenage years were clouded by bullies at school and something similar at home so is it any wonder I wanted Crispian and Simon to save me? 

At the weekend I would get up early to see them on T4 and I secretly stayed up late for Later with Jools Holland.  I taped every Top of the Pops, every TFI Friday and every televised festival they were ever on and I watched the video so many times the tape snapped and it was game over for Simon Fowler at Glastonbury 1996.

I had a couple of books solely written about the journey of those bands through the years.  When Kula Shaker won a Brit award I sat with bated breath and waited for Crispian to say something profound and inspiring…

He said…

“Be subversive and prosper.”

I had absolutely no idea what either of those words meant but I vowed that I would do it!

Inside the Ocean Colour Scene book the very last sentence was a quote by Simon Fowler…

He said…

“If you stick with something you believe in, then things just happen to you.  Simple as that.”

Simon Fowler

I wrote that quote on a piece of paper and I stuck it in my tin pencil case so that when I was at school I had some form of future to believe in. 

I never met Crispian or Simon but I named two of my goldfish after them and I guess that’s as far as I will ever get.

In 2011 I found a random Josh Groban album on my iPod.  I was on my way to my very first Psychology therapy session and on the train I was freaking out…until I heard Josh sing “You Raise Me Up”.

That night I downloaded every album, every single and every video he’d had ever done on to my iPod and I ordered all of his CD’s so that I could add those to my collection too.  I also fell in love with the guy and I believed we’d get married and I would take my cat and we would move to New York and we would live happily with Josh and his dog Sweeney.

Pack your bags Mills…

(I was single, bite me)

I learnt every word to all of my favourite songs and whenever I was stressed or I needed a distraction or even if I needed to focus my mind; I would sing the words to Awake, Changing Colours and Hidden Away.

Some think it’s funny or a bit pathetic and I guess it is because by this time I was thirty.  But when you’re in hospital and you have no phone, no iPod and no access to the things that save you; then you can thank your lucky stars that you remember the words to those songs because they’re the only thing that will get you though a stint in a psychiatric ward.

When it comes to Josh it’s not actually doom and gloom.  I’ve seen the guy perform four times and I won’t stop there.  I remember when I first started listening to his music my mum was probably getting a little concerned or bored of my obsession and she said…

“You know you’ll never meet him.”

I said…

“Yeah I know.”

In 2013 my friend got the three of us tickets to his All That Echoes tour and we were sat four rows from the front of the stage and I sat on an aisle seat ready to grab my man.  It was a week after my 31st birthday so I made a sign on an A3 piece of paper stolen from work (sorry STA, sorry not sorry) and I wrote…

“It’s my birthday, please sing Awake”

Can you imagine how my heart felt when he saw that sign and we had some form of conversation that I have no recollection of because I all I could think was…

“I just met Josh Groban.”

Josh Groban All That Echoes tour Manchester Apollo 2013

Now people send me clips of him singing on the Muppets and my friend made me a birthday card that was addressed to…

“The Future Mrs Groban.”

Mum once emailed Sunday Brunch when he was a guest and asked if he could say hello to me through the camera.

There’s nothing wrong with having a dream or an obsession, if it gets you through life then who is anyone to take that away?

Last week at work someone said…

“You’re so creative, I’d love to have your brain..”

Straight away I thought…

“You wouldn’t!  90% of the time I don’t want it.”

A few days later someone said…

“Oh Kat I love how your brain works.”

I thought…

“Why?!”

I don’t know if it’s the environment or the people I work with or maybe it’s just me being me that’s made the difference, but the more I display my little eccentricities the more I realise people actually like me and whoever my Secret Santa was, they got me down to a tee.  They bought me a really pretty mug that sits in my hand like a bowl and they bought me a really funky lunch box because they’d seen a worn out looking one sitting on my desk and they thought it needed replacing.  I’d been in the job three months and people could already tell what kind of person I was…a tea drinking lunch eater.

A couple of weeks ago I was telling a friend I didn’t know what to write about in my blog and he said…

“Gelato!”

I thought…

“Bit random.”

My friend has known me for twenty-two years and he knows my love for ice cream.  He knows that on holiday it is not only an essential part of the experience but an essential part of my diet.  A holiday is not a holiday if I don’t have at least one ice cream a day because I love sitting by the pool on a hot day eating a Croatian cornetto and I love going out after my evening meal having saved enough room in my belly for three scoops of Italy’s best Gelato.

I’ve been to Venice four times, possibly five – I can never remember – and as soon as we hit St Mark’s Square, after hiding from the pigeons and taking pictures of the bands playing at the most expensive café’s in the country, I head straight for the gelato place on the corner and I always have one scoop of chocolate and one scoop of stracciatella and then me and mum will sit by a wall and we say…

“I love this place.”

Don’t say it…we know.

I am sometimes clumsy, I fall over all the time.  Once I was in Wales and I was climbing a hill up some stairs that were basically rocks in grass.  I was licking my cookies and cream ice cream and failed to pay attention to the main task in hand and I tripped.  On my way down to the ground all I could see was my cornet heading for the floor and my internal voice crying…

“Nooooooo, not my iiiiiccceee creeeaaaam…”

I remember pulling myself up, looking at my splattered ice cream on the grass, like a dead body in a crime scene and the cornet in my hand that was in perfect condition but empty.

In that fall I managed to slice my finger, graze one knee and bruise the other and as my mum wrapped a tissue around my bleeding finger I just looked at the ground and said…

“…my ice cream…”

My mum is an angel, and she gave me her ice cream to make up for mine…I was twenty-nine. 

Having a stoma sometimes limits the kind of food you can eat.  I have a fibre intolerance so anything fruit or vegetable is either a no go or I have to doctor it.  If I want a grape, I have to peel it.  If I want an apple then I peel that too.  Carrots have to be mashed or raw and anything green usually looks at me and says…

“You’re having a laugh aren’t you?  Do you want to end up in hospital?”

I love oranges, I love satsumas and sometimes I can get away with eating them but Wilomena does not like anything with a skin on it so my best option is to eat tinned fruit.

At work I like to crack open a tin of mandarins and pour them into my mug along with the juice and eat them with a spoon.  Don’t knock it, this is the only way I can get my five a day while sparing Wilomena a trip to A&E.  When I got my new mug from Santa someone said…

“Is it big enough for your mandarins?”

In life sometimes the only route to happiness is to listen to what we want along the way.  For me it’s having a soundtrack to life.  Having songs on my iPod that mean something so whenever I feel down or out of touch with reality, I have a reminder that life does have the potential to be good.

These days I don’t need a lucky egg. 

Sanka

I used to believe that luck was just another version of the impossible but maybe it’s not.  I don’t believe that I met Josh Groban purely based on luck.  I met him because I was determined enough to try and its since that moment that I realise Simon Fowler was right…if you stick with something you believe in things really do just happen.

Everything in this blog are the things that make me me.  Not weird, not quirky, not strange.  These are the things that make people think…

“Kat would like that.”

“That’s very Kat”

“Kat, I thought of you when I saw this.”

I’m known for wearing scarves and jumpers.  I’m known for naming things that can’t breathe or see and I’m known for making the best out of a bad situation, so I live life the only way I know how…

…with one scoop of gelato and a tin of mandarins.

There’s too many people to mention in this one so this is dedicated to everyone who loves me for being me and allows me to be just that.

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Reading time: 15 min

In 2000 I was a first-year student at university living the way most students do – before Covid-19, obviously – I went to pubs, I drank pints and once I got over the initial overwhelming craziness of a club scene, I did that too.  Yes, once upon a time people, I was a happy go lucky, inhibition-free, fun gal!

I had a housemate, Tammi, who helped guide me through those first few months of adapting to student life and we spent many a night in York drinking in pubs and bars.  We would wander home, religiously stopping by the infamous burger van “Effe’s” for chips covered in Mayonnaise. 

Germany 2001

The walk home was always the same, past Effe’s, past the Greek restaurant (no idea what it was called but I did go, once) and past a pub that was always blasting out music by a local band or a karaoke singer belting out The Eagles, Meat Loaf and Cher or Bon Jovi. 

Meat Loaf

I remember one night we stumbled past with our chips and there was this kind of psychedelic, experimental sound with a sort of gentle wailing tone of voice accompanying it.  I remember we turned to each other; our eyes wide with an expression of surprised bewilderment.  Neither of us could believe someone had the balls to get up in front of a crowd of people and do whatever it was that they were doing that night.  I remember Tammi said…

“Sounds like a student with an idea and a speaker.”

Never in the twenty-one years that have passed have I ever heard anything as quick witted and genius as that one sentence and it has stayed with me ever since.  Every time I hear psychedelic music or a whispery wailing voice, I think of Tammi, and our chips.

In February 2020 my speaking was really beginning to take off and I was at the point where people were requesting me.  I was in a position where I could charge a fee and once I sent out my first invoice I guess I felt that I’d gone past the goal I initially set myself.

I was happily overwhelmed and I know that might not make sense to some, I can only compare it to the feeling I had walking through the doors of The Gallery night club in York where I would stand in wonder, deafened by the music and the smell of alchopops that had spilled onto the floor.  My shoes would stick to the carpet and if I hadn’t consumed enough Fosters I would question if I had enough courage to dance to Chesney Hawkes, The One and Only because it would mean letting go and just being me.

Not kidding, I drank the lot!

When I danced in a club I opened myself up to being judged.  How I moved on the floor determined how I was received by the roomful of strangers.  Where were my arms going? What was I supposed to do with my legs, did my feet have to leave the floor because if they did I couldn’t tell them where to go because I had no idea.  I had shoulder length hair that my friends told me to swish and I would say…

“How do you swish your hair?”

Twerking was unheard of back then, people just moved about and smiled at each other.  The dancefloor was overlooked by a circular banister where people would watch the intoxicated dancers, some looking for their missing friends, others on the hunt for fresh meat. 

On the dancefloor we were performers.  We were judged on our clothes, how straight our hair was and we showed the viewers from above our best moves in the hope that someone liked them.

When I started public speaking I opened myself up to the same kind of judgement.  When you’re stood in front of a group of people, no matter how large or small that group is, they have judged you before you’ve even opened your mouth.

When I joined a speaking club in 2014 I was a blank canvas.  I had no idea where my arms were supposed to go or what to do with my legs.  I straightened my hair but I didn’t swish it.

I was in a different kind of club with a group of people who had never encountered someone with a serious mental illness.  They were upper class ladies who were members of Bolton Golf Club, the men were in the Free Masons and everyone had extravagant holidays and really posh cars!  I imagine they wore dinner jackets and smoked cigars like the cast of Downton Abbey and week by week I would ask myself…

“Why am I even doing this?”

…I was a girl who wore a multi-coloured maxi dress to a black and white themed night on a cruise ship and was suitably chastised for it by my fellow diners (I guess you had to be there, but this is the ultimate faux pas in cruise ship dining etiquette.

It took me a while to pluck up the courage to tell my speaking club companions why I was there.  After a few months I grew big enough metaphorical balls and divulged my past and declared my dream to speak openly about life with a mental illness. 

Baring my soul to strangers

In that one moment, as I stood behind the lectern, my fingers shaking, my heart pounding I looked at them…and I saw the same expression of surprised bewilderment that I’d exchanged with Tammi fourteen years before.

Right there and then, I was the…

…student with an idea but no speaker.

…I came to the realisation very quickly that my public speaking venture was not going to be an easy one. 

When I came first place at the North Pennine Area Speech Contest I talked about drag queens and people laughed.  When I spoke at the speaking club, amongst the same people and talked about my mental health they made twisted expressions of horror and I knew then that people are not always understanding or encouraging; people are not always kind.

From that experience alone I realised that what I wanted to achieve was something worth doing.  No matter the expression on the faces of the audience I would speak out, even if it was purely to annoy the people who didn’t want to hear it.

When I first started out my nerves were all over the place, everything about me broke into a sweat.  My hands would shake, my heart would rattle my rib cage like a crazed inmate running a tin cup across the bars of an American jail cell.  My mouth dried up and I’d get a scratchy throat, it just wasn’t a good look. 

When someone I used to work with asked me if I ever felt nervous before went on stage I said…

“Yes! Massively nervous.  I’m a train wreck.”

She said…

“What’s the point then?  Why bother if your nerves are that bad?”

I said…

“Because fear is not a reason to stop doing something.”

…plus, the more opportunities I got to step on stage the more practice I got.  My nerves are still there but I’m not scared to get up and be honest in front of people.  I actually thrive on that nervous energy.  I like it when my heart races!  I enjoy the pounding in my chest because I know what I’m doing is right.  If I’m holding a mic and my palm is sweaty I just hold on tight.  If my mouth dries up I take a minute and I sip water from a plastic cup and I say…

“Excuse me while I water my tongue, it’s like a camel’s armpit in there.”

My trusty plastic cup

I can have fun with my nerves because I remember when I did my first speaking bootcamp with Richard McCann, he told us…

“Never tell your audience you’re nervous.  Because then they’ll see it and they might never have noticed before.”

I try to give off the illusion that I know what I’m doing when really I treat every single presentation like it’s my first because even though I’m not a blank canvas anymore, every audience in front of me is fresh meat.

People automatically assume that large audiences are scarier than the smaller ones.  But honestly?  It’s small audiences that absolutely terrify me.

When I speak at BAND in the Recovery training sessions I have my name on a screen and I fire up my PowerPoint and I stand in front of an audience that can range from two people to up to sixteen. 

Tiny audiences are the biggest challenge.  As a speaker eye contact is key, you have to look at people to get them to engage and feel like they’re part of your story.  But if people are shy and they don’t want to look at you, how you do know if they’re even listening because they just look bored? 

Sometimes people don’t want to listen and I can spot a bitter audience from a mile off.  They usually cross their arms when I walk into the room.  They question the relevance of my presence.  What could I possibly say that will make any difference to their everyday life?  What is the actual point of me?

About three years ago I did a presentation to sixteen people.  I’d been with the group all day but I never mentioned I was going to be speaking after the lunch break.  When I got up to speak I put my plastic cup on the table in front of me, I got out my clicker that I’d never actually used before and I felt like a proper pro!  But the atmosphere in the room changed instantly.  I could feel the resentment coming at me like a pack of English Foxhounds, they eyeballed me, their lips curled with distaste and I thought…

“Ooh, tough crowd.”

Most people who know what I do will know that I start off my presentation by explaining who I am and what I’m like and what I was like growing up.  I call myself weird and strange and I show them pictures of the dreadful jumpers and hideous dungarees I wore as a teenager to try and hide myself from the world.

The Sweater Shop

I’d been doing the same speech for about three years; I’d showed the same slides with the same pictures and no one had ever taken offence and I had never been cut off mid flow so that someone could point out how much of a terrible person I was…

“You can’t say things like that!”

“You can’t use words like weird and strange, its offensive.”

I’m offended. Is anyone else offended?

“You’re being nasty to everyone who wears those jumpers and they might like them.”

…you know that term…

“…rabbit caught in the headlights…”

…that was me.  I floundered and I swallowed the lump in my throat and I said with as big a smile as I possibly could…

“I’m really sorry, I’m not trying to be offensive. Maybe I wasn’t clear enough.  This is just to paint a picture of me, I’m not referring to anyone else.”

When they said…

“But what makes you so special?  Any of us could stand up there and talk about ourselves. Why are you the one doing it?”

I felt like the Titanic.  A sinking ship, only everyone on board had been rescued and I was left frantically running around looking for some form of floating device so that I wouldn’t drown in my increasing self-pity.

I’d like to stay it stopped there, but when someone stood up thirty seconds later to make themselves a coffee and I had to shout over the boiling kettle that was just to the right of me, I thought…

“Heck, this really is a tough crowd.”

When that person returned to their seat I lowered my voice but I had to turn it up again moments later when another person decided they too fancied a coffee. 

I can cope with most things.  I have a pretty thick skin by now.  You can tell me I’m ugly, you can whisper about how horrible my jumpers are, point out that I am the most uninteresting person you have ever met and that you will die of boredom in my presence!  That is fine my friends! Fill your boots and I’ll throw in a few more insults to help you along your way.  But the most hurtful thing in that room, the one thing that tipped the poisoned arrow right at my heart was when the person who had been a bit thirsty and really needed their coffee stood up and said…

“I’m not listening to this.”

…and they took their coffee and they left the room.

Holding on for dear life

I am extremely lucky that this has only ever happened once. In six years I have only ever had one soul destroying audience and to be honest I am grateful to them. In that room there was contempt, there was hatred and I have no idea how I got through the rest of my speech when from start to finish it was just one big disaster. But it opened my eyes to a challenge that I hadn’t prepared myself for. I knew in advance that I was facing a group of people who understood mental illness.  They had either experienced it themselves or they were close to someone who had.  I can actually understand their initial doubt of why I was there and I get why they wondered what made me so special?  But its not about being special is it?  It’s about looking at a situation and saying…

“What can I do about this?”

When I stand in front of an audience its not about boasting about who I am because I am well aware that I have nothing to boast about.  I didn’t start public speaking for Instagram followers or Twitter attention; (I don’t even know how to use Twitter!) I stand up to speak so that I can tell people…

“No! It is not okay to be told what you can and can’t do according to a diagnosis!  It is not okay to be pigeonholed because you have a mental illness.  And it is not okay to take this lying down.”

I love public speaking because I’ve been able to meet a million varieties of people.  I have done so many incredible things and the best thing, the best feeling, the ultimate achievement through all of this is looking at my audience and seeing them cry, hearing their laughter, seeing that show of hands when I ask them…

“Does anyone like Milky Bars?”

…because then I know I’m doing a good job.

When I speak to teenagers I know I am playing with fire.  I know they could quite easily rip me to shreds and send me home crying.  But I love teenage audiences.  I love them because they’ve got cheek!  They like to test the boundaries but what they don’t realise, when they’re raising their hands for every question I ask them and I know for a fact they have no idea what I’m talking about, I love that, because it helps me and it shows me that they’re actually listening (so more fool them!).

Zac’s Bar 2018

Not everyone likes me, oh I know that only too well! Not everyone wants to listen to me, I know that too.  But I also know that when you’ve been dealt a tricky hand of cards you can do one of two things…

Give up…

Or

Grow balls…

Trees growing balls…ish

February 2020 was the last big presentation I did, pre-Covid.  It was to around one hundred and fifty students at Bolton College.  I had to shout really loud because I’d asked for a mic and a speaker but when I got there they said…

“Sorry, we couldn’t find one.”

I was getting a bit tired of going to places, usually schools and colleges and them not having the equipment I needed, even when I’d asked for it.  So in the summer when the restrictions were eased I decided to pull my finger out and invest in the things I needed.

I trotted down the HW Music Megastore in Bolton and I got fully kitted out by Bob and Richard with a mic, a speaker and all the connecting bits in between.  The store is amazing and I half wondered what the hell I was doing in there surrounded by guitars and drum kits.  At the top of the store they have a mini theatre and studio where they set up the equipment and they showed me exactly how to use it. 

The stairway to Heaven… I’m sorry I couldn’t help it.

In June I was still climbing out of an episode and I’d lost every bit of self-esteem I had, so when Bob handed me the mic so that I could test it out I had to pretend that I knew what I was doing.  I had to feign confidence and remind myself that I wanted this and that I could still do this!  Richard showed me how to set up the speaker and he said…

“Right, try it out and see if you’re comfortable.  This is how you turn up the sound.”

I stood there, in the middle of the stage, staring up at around two hundred empty seats with two guys on either side of me waiting for me to speak.  I looked at the mic in my sweaty hand and the speaker at my side and I thought…

“Now this is getting real again”

Six years ago I wanted to tell my story and I wanted to make people laugh and cry along the way.  I believe that I’ve done that and those are my successes.  It’s not always smooth sailing, I still get people in the audience who hate me, but that doesn’t put me off.

In life you can never know it all and everything we experience is a learning curve…

…I am not a student, but I had an idea and now I have a speaker…

We are ready!

Dedicated to Tammi for the most genius of statements and for our friendship.

Also dedicated to Bob and Richard at HW Music Megastore…I’ll be back for that equipment refresher when I get my next gig!

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Reading time: 16 min

A few years ago a friend gave me a tiny plant pot holding a stem with a leaf attached to it and told me how to grow it.  The same friend gave me a Venus Fly Trap for my birthday once because I’d always wanted one.  I did my best, I did everything I could for it, but there was just no way it was going to survive (I sound like a surgeon when they’ve lost a patient on the operating table).  I am not green fingered in any way but lucky for the leafy stem it had a better start in life.  In the office there were two of us watering and nurturing the plant we later named Penny Plant.  The number of stems increased and more leaves came to life, it grew so well that it needed re-potting so I brought Penny Plant home so mum could re-pot her for me – you didn’t think I could do it did you? Really!

After that Penny never made it back to the office, she found a new home and over the last…I don’t even know how many years, we’ll call it seven…Penny Plant has thrived!  The other day I looked at her and I said to mum…

“Is that the plant that Premal gave me?”

When she said…

“Yes”

…I took a picture of the plant and sent it to my friend.  He has no recollection of ever giving me the stem with a leaf on it, but he did say one thing…

Penny Plant

“And there’s your next blog title.  It all starts with a little leaf and a stem.”

I haven’t written a blog for a week or so because I felt like I’d run out of steam with it.  There’s only so much you can write about before people start thinking…

“Oh god, not another soul sucking, dramatic diatribe about the trials and tribulations of having an unfortunate brain and a bowel that doesn’t give a crap, literally.”

So, no people.  This one is different, this one is about how lucky I am and how I should remind myself of this because when life feels unfair I forget that it could be so much worse.

I’ve done a fair few blogs now and I’ve dedicated all of them to people along the way who I respect and love and I want them to know that for whatever reason they have carried me through times when my head is contemplating sinking beneath the water.

Up until now there’s one person who, obviously I’ve mentioned, but I haven’t dedicated a blog to and maybe now is the right time. 

Life before varifocals

I met Matt at the tail end of 2013.  I think I told him about Bernard the Bipolar on our third date.  I expected him to either not know what it was or look horrified.  But I got neither reaction because he knew what it was – well, he knew what the word meant.  No one really knows what Bipolar is until they’ve witnessed an episode unfold before their eyes because no two Bipolar people are the same.  So the fact that he knew the meaning behind the word was brownie points for him and a relief for me because I didn’t have to do the generic spiel straight from Google.

In 2016 we’d known for a while that I was going to be crapping in a bag pretty soon after we got married and to be honest I only asked him once if he was going to be okay with this – because obviously I was going to look slightly different, but when you’ve had self-harm scars decorating you left arm for the last 18 years, a poo bag under your jumper is the least of your worries.

In my eyes it was a case of…

“This is how it is…deal or no deal?”

…turns out it was deal.  We had no idea what was in store for us, we knew nothing about ileostomy bags or stomas or anything to do with pooing in a bag in general because this was a physical ailment, this was unchartered territory; so we did what we’re good at, we made it light hearted and it worked.

Now with that out of the way let’s get one thing straight.  This is not about being the Bipolar one in a couple.  This is not about being the one who can’t control her farts because when you have a stoma it’s just not possible. This is more than that because I am a person and being Bipolar and having a stoma does not make me who I am.  They may be the reasons why I am a public speaker and why I write a blog but I am not a public speaker 24/7 and if I wrote more than one blog a week I would get really bored, really quickly and so would you. 

This is about the driving force behind why I do what I do and probably a big aspect of who I am today.

May be an image of Matthew Edgington
He didn’t like the hat

It was 2014 when I decided I wanted to be a speaker.  It was in my head for weeks and the need to explore the possibility of doing it was like a ball of fire in my chest.  I knew I had a voice that wanted access to the things I’d been through but I didn’t know how to do it. 

In the past I’ve had fleeting ideas of adding something into my life to make it a bit more meaningful or more exciting.  On occasion I’ve thought about joining an amateur dramatics group but pretending to be something I am not not has never come easy and I left my acting shoes with my GSCE drama exam.  I’ve also wanted to try out stand up comedy but stand up comedy is the same thing as writing a novel. 

People say…

“Everyone has at least one book in them.”

…well I’ve written many but it doesn’t make them good! And everyone can tell a joke but it doesn’t mean you’re funny.  

I usually sit on my ideas and if they pass the threshold of about two to three weeks I know I’m serious.

In 2014 I didn’t know I wasn’t going to poo in a bag so my voice was solely going to focus on being bipolar.  This was mental illness, this was before Heads Together, before the Be Kind brigade was born and it was a gamble.  I wasn’t a volunteer anywhere, I had no direction, all I had was an idea.  I’d already told mum what I wanted to do but I had a boyfriend who knew nothing about this and I was going to be standing up in front of groups of people and literally outing myself to the world – because at this point I didn’t even post on Facebook that I was Bipolar, 90% of the people I worked with had no idea this was the case so this was a massive deal, this was actually make or break because if I was with someone who didn’t approve of me speaking out about my mental illness, then who was I with at all?

I vaguely remember the conversation; I think I said something like…

“I want to try out public speaking and talk about being Bipolar.”

…I had a big spiel prepared to back up my plan so I could convince Matt that this was a good idea and this was something I should do and it was needed because back then it looked like Kerry Katona was the only female Bipolar person out there and she was making a mess of it (sorry Kerry).

It turned out I didn’t need my spiel because the first thing Matt said was…

“Yeah do it.  It’s a really good idea, someone might learn something from you.”

I remember I said…

“Really?”

He said…

“Yeah, I support you.  I’ll always support you.”

I’d already fallen in love with him after about a week of knowing him but when I heard those words it happened all over again.

May be an image of 2 people
Vienna 2016

This is what my friend was talking about with the leaf and a stem.  I had an idea, a tiny nugget, a little leaf wafting in the wind and I didn’t know if it was going to grow into anything or if it was going to flop like a bored and deflated balloon but the point is, I had someone believing in me and it was without question.  It wasn’t reluctant, it wasn’t a case of…

“Well I have to, even though I don’t really want to.”

Mental illness and poo are two of the things in this world that we’re not supposed to talk about and over the last few years I’ve been asked a number of times if my husband is okay with me doing the things I do.  Every single time I say yes and almost 8 years into us being together it’s become a no brainer.  I get offended by people asking this question because to me it’s like asking someone…

“Does your boyfriend mind that your eyes are blue?”

“Does your partner care that you’re taller than him in heels?”

“Is your husband not offended by the big mole on your face?”

…because I have always believed that whoever I was going to end up with, if anyone at all, they would love me for who I am and not the bits about me that I cannot change. 

May be an image of 2 people and people smiling

Now let’s not go painting a picture of a saint here.  Matthew is just as whacky as I am.  We spend our days irritating the hell out of each other, joking, sniping, shouting…

“You’re a poo face!”

“You smell!”

…up and down the stairs.  At night I’m certain he swallows some form of demon and he’s damn lucky I haven’t put a pillow over his face because his snoring is something so far out of this world even as a writer I have no idea how to describe it.

I hate that he drinks energy drinks and eats pre-packed burgers because one day he’ll die and when someone says…

“I’m so sorry about your husband, what was it that killed him?”

I’ll have to say…

“A can of Red bull and a microwaveable burger.”

Red Bull Energy Drink 355ml (Sugar levy applied) | Sainsbury's

We drive each other crazy and we are complete opposites; he’s a sports freak, I read books.  He’s got an Xbox, I don’t even know how to switch it on.  He likes Black Adder and Bottom and I can’t stand Rowan Atkinson or Rick Mayall.  I like Crime Drama, I’m not gonna lie.  I’m creative and I can’t explain it.  My communication is terrible and where my silence is supposed to speak volumes, I find it rarely speaks at all.

The smushy smushness of our early days dating may have fallen by the wayside but two lockdowns later we’re both still alive and no one has been murdered – yet, there’s still time my friend.  These days the best thing about life is being woken up on a Saturday morning with a cup of tea and a bacon and egg McMuffin.  It’s having pasta made for me when I can’t figure out what to do with myself and being given a framed picture of the cat the day after she died to make me feel like she’s still there. 

No photo description available.
Milly

Life is good when someone tells you you’re pretty first thing in the morning when you’re grumpy and literally look like a troll.  When your entire wardrobe is consumed by jeans and jumpers it’s a gift from the Gods when that special someone doesn’t mind that you don’t own a pair of heels and you’ve never worn mascara (sorry ladies, that’s true).  When the only opinion he has about your appearance is what your glasses look like and that’s because he’s an Optical Consultant, that’s an opinion I will take!  And sometimes it really is the thought that counts, like when you discover the genius of South Park twenty-five years too late and one tiny comment of…

“I’d love a t-shirt with a picture of Butters on the front.”

47+] South Park Butters Wallpaper on WallpaperSafari
Butters

…probes him into spending ages trawling through Amazon to find one.  And when you’re looking through your CD singles from the 90s and you discover that you’re missing one The Montrose Avenue single from 1997 and your favourite independent music shop can’t find it; it really does take a special someone to track it down on eBay for you and surprise you with it.

The Montrose Avenue ① : KENNEDY 音楽の館
The Montrose Avenue

Admittedly sometimes I feel like he doesn’t pay attention to life.  I feel like he’s not that bothered and I end up thinking that all the stuff I have on my plate, all the mayhem I have to deal with, I have to do on my own. And sometimes I discover that I am wrong.

Last week we were in the kitchen and there was some form of creepy crawly on the wall near the window…

(NB – if anyone is pro-creepy-crawly-life please look away now, this is not for you, come back in a couple of sentences)

…Matt pointed out the little blighter and in true Kat style I did a bit of a squeal and told him to squish it (I’m sorry, I did warn you).  In the next breath, as he disposed of the unfortunate creature’s carcass, he said…

“It always amazes me even with all the stuff you have to deal with and how strong you are, you can’t deal with flies.”

May be an image of 1 person
Dreaming big

Maybe my strength is my own misfortune.  Sometimes I just need looking after and I don’t know how to voice that.  Maybe it’s time I learned because whichever way you look at it, our weird and wonderful life together works and as I write the last few sentences, I have my iPod on loud and I’m listening to A Day to Remember – Everything We Need.  I would never have heard of this band had I not met Matt so look up the lyrics and you’ll know what I mean because when I can’t voice my own thoughts, I’ve always found that music can.

So despite our differences and our disagreements we are a team, we’ve always been…

“…team Edgington/Spathis”

May be an image of 2 people and people smiling

…and if life has taught me anything, it’s that big things grow from something small, it all starts off with a little leaf and a stem…

Dedicated to Poo Face…love you, you smell, Poo Bum xx

(Also dedicated to my friend Prem, thanks for the plant)

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Reading time: 12 min

By writing this blog I am either going to be a massive hypocrite or it will be a monumental action in the movement of the game of life. 

We all play the game, we’re all pieces on a chessboard; we all move the marker on Ludo and we all fight for that one special piece when it comes to Monopoly – for me it was the dog, I don’t know about anyone else.

Whatever your chosen piece for a boardgame the rules are the same…

Win win win!

Don’t try and lie, it’s true, no one enters a game to come last, no one wants to lose, we all want to come first and stare at the people behind us from the finish line and feel even just a miniscule of satisfaction so that we can tell ourselves…

“…this time, we did not fail.

No one ever says…

“Well done for coming last.”

They always say…

“You tried your best.”

But if we’re honest with ourselves, what we really hear is…

“You tried your best…BUT IT WASN’T GOOD ENOUGH WAS IT???”

I’m not being mean, it’s just my version of reality and if you disagree with me that’s absolutely fine.  I am not naïve enough to think that what I’m saying is the truth because it might not be; it might just be my own opinion but to some extent, it is just as valid as yours.

Today I didn’t intend on writing anything.  I was going to have a weekend off from blog writing because all I’ve said this week is…

“I’m running out of material.”

But am I?  Who knows?  I’ll let the reader be the judge of that one.

In just over a year I’m going to be forty – god it kills me every time I say that, simply because anyone who has known me for over ten years, will know that when I hit twenty-nine I freaked the hell out! I spent an entire twelve months panicking about turning thirty.  I kid you not it was awful, I was awful!

For me, becoming thirty was worse than any episode Bernard had to throw at me.  It was worse than hospital, it was worse than losing all of my friends to an illness that I had no control over.  It was worse than being left on the single’s table at a friend’s wedding and being told you didn’t make the cut for bridesmaid because your self harm scars would look ugly on the photos (yeah I’m not joking, that did actually happen).

When I looked at my life I was ashamed, I was embarrassed.  All of my friends were in a much better position that I was.  Better jobs, boyfriends, girlfriends, they owned their own houses, they drove a nice car – they could actually drive! They had kids or were having kids or were in a position to have kids.  I had none of that that.  I was stuck in a job I wasn’t much good at, even though a monkey could do it for the same amount of peanuts – my old colleagues will agree with me, it wasn’t rocket science, again, I’m not being mean.

Everyone else had everything you’re supposed to have by the time you reach that milestone of turning thirty.  I stuck out like a poor unfortunate thumb…

Mentally ill, single, rubbish job, can’t drive, lives with her mum.

The epitome of failure in the eyes of the successful.

When I was about twenty-seven I went to the theatre with a friend.  I was working part time in a kid’s clothes shop.  We went to see Billy Elliot.  Going to the theatre always sparks of my creative side.  Once I wanted to be on the stage, then to the side of the stage and then, to have anything to do with the stage would have been lovely.  But for me, at that time I was a simple shop assistant; my friend on the other hand had a super high-profile occupation, she wasn’t a surgeon, but she changed lives. 

We were driving back from the theatre and we were talking about how good the show was and I made the mistake of saying how I wished I could be part of something that incredible.  I remember her response as clear as day…

“You’ve got no excuse to just be working part time.  You haven’t been ‘ill’ for a while now and you’ve got the time on your hands to be doing something more worthwhile, you say you’re a writer so you should be doing something with your writing.”

I remember instantly thinking – after “ouch”…

“Well that’s your birthday present gone from twenty to a tenner!”

I know some people reading this will agree with her, she was my friend telling me how it is and there’s nothing wrong with that, that’s friendship!  Well, a word in your ear…

Do you think the unfortunate haven’t heard that before?  Do you think we haven’t said that kind of thing to ourselves?  Trust me, when you feel like a failure compared to everyone else, that kind of thing is part of everyday living, it’s like brushing your teeth, it’s like flossing, pouring the milk on your cereal, tying your shoelaces on your way to your mediocre job…it’s a way of life!

Now let’s get real, the world has been throwing milestones at us long before we turn thirty.  From birth your baby is supposed to crawl by a certain time, walk by a particular age and be speaking full sentences before you’ve even thought about introducing them to the potty and if your kid doesn’t do these things, your kid isn’t half as good as the kid four doors down with the parents who have a jacuzzi in their back garden.  Don’t lie mums, I know you’ve all read those “how to” books.

The truth is, there is always someone telling us that by a certain point in your life you should be doing a certain something.

When I was sixteen I was getting ready to leave school, I was putting my record of achievement together and probably going through some form of depression at the same but the biggest thing of all was every day I would look in the mirror and I would feel panic.  I panicked because in my eyes I was sixteen and I hadn’t done anything worth shouting about.  When I looked at the contents of my record of achievement I didn’t see anything.  No Nobel Peace Prize.  No Man Booker Prize.  No Medal of Honour or Outstanding Contribution to Music Award.  Vice form rep was as close as I was ever going to get to any kind of societal recognition.  And just so you know, I was robbed of head form rep, the guy my form voted in never even went to the meetings, he was too busy smoking by the bins!

Trophy Cups 100's at Up To 50% OFF Gold & Silver Engraved - Trophy Finder

I’m not going to list my every failed attempt at a milestone, god that really would be depressing and I’m trying to turn the frown on this blog upside down, remember, this is not a space for self-pity because public self-pity is a request for admiration and ego-boosting and that’s just not what this is about. 

Today, this is me saying I’m having a bad day.  I’m grumpy.  I’m moody, I’m short tempered and I’m just fed up, I’m not going to lie. 

Today I am fed up because I have a massive spot on my face that I can’t get rid of!  I’ve tried every acne trick in the flippin book and nothing is working…

(NB – not asking for tips, trust me I’ve been fighting off mini mountains since I was ten years old)

I’m fed up because I miss my cat.  When everything else in the world was rubbish she was the one constant thing who never passed judgement.  And today, when I really need her fluffy tail in my face and her little head pressed against my chest like she was trying to listen to my heart, she’s not here.

Milly – I miss you

I’m fed up of lockdown.  I just want to go to M&S and have a bacon butty and a cup of tea with my mum. 

I’m fed up because I want to go to the bakery round the corner and get a Bakewell tart and not feel like I’m committing a crime because its not really an essential item. 

Behold, the Bakewell Tart

I’m fed up because apparently I look like I’m in my twenties, and don’t get me wrong I am grateful for that, believe me, I am.  Every night when I wash my face I look in the mirror and I am happy that I don’t have crows feet yet but when I looked in the mirror this morning I swear to god I could see a wrinkle right near my mouth!

I’m fed up because when everyone was turning thirty I felt like I was being left behind but now that I’m facing forty, I feel like I’m being forced to leave my youth behind and I’m just not ready to do that.

They say age is just a number.  They’re right, it is just a number. 

It’s…

  1. How many boys did you kiss before you were 12?
  2. How many GCSE’s did you get?
  3. How many A-levels did you pass?
  4. How many driving lessons did it take for you to get your green ‘L’s?
  5. How many times has your heart been broken?
  6. How many bedrooms has your house got?
  7. How many kids have you got?

How many times are you going to torture yourself with the answers that come up to the expectations of our everyday society? 

Because that’s all it is, it’s everyone else’s view on how we should live our lives.  We put pressure on ourselves to match up to that expectation, whether it’s what we want or not.  We still strive for it in someway and we burn ourselves with self-pity because we forget the things we’ve done and the things we’ve achieved in terms of our own lives.

I look at my thirties and I wish I’d done all of the things I have when I was in my twenties.  I wish I’d met Matt earlier so I could get married young.  I wish I had been quicker to learn how to manage Bernard so that I wouldn’t have spent my twenties trying to lead a life of apparent normality.  I wish I had been a speaker sooner and had the ability to believe in myself so that sometimes life wasn’t so hard.  Sometimes I just wish things were different. 

Having said that, I also know that what we have is never enough.  If I could drive I would love a baby blue Fiat 500.  But who’s to say that once I got my Fiat 500 I wouldn’t then want a BMW?  Then a Mercedes? Then a Porsche?

I wish…

I’ve got a four bedroomed house but I’d love a bigger back yard. 

I’m in a job I couldn’t be happier in but I want more money in my pay packet.

I’ve got hair on my head but I wish it was thicker.

I’ve got a decent laptop but now I want a better one.

I’ve got a stoma but there’s something wrong with it so I want a new one.

Truth is, we always want more.  We always want something better than what we already have.  We’re never happy with just our lot and that’s just human nature. 

We compare ourselves to others because…

“Keeping up with the Jones’s”

…is drilled into us from birth. 

Today I was writing the fiction story that I started last year.  I will never do anything with it because it’s just for me.  It’s my release and something that has kept my head above the water for months.  As I was writing it I could feel those burning, hot water, things they call tears trying to push their way through my eye sockets and I realised that I was thinking of the things that I can’t control.  I found my brain inflicting self-hatred, reminding me that I will never be normal and I will never have the things others have so easily.  I may get what I want, but it will always be a battle because life has always been a battle.

And then I thought…

“Stop it.  Stop comparing yourself to others.”

…because I am not “others”, and would I even want to be?  Would I really, honestly want to be someone that I am not?

On Wednesday at work, I was having a natter with a colleague and we were discussing how people spend their lives comparing themselves to others.  Suddenly I realised that as humans, we spend so long comparing the things we have and haven’t achieved that we forget to actually bask in the glory of the things we have.  She then quoted, probably one of the most wise and profound things that I have ever heard…

Comparison is the thief of joy – Devi Venkatesan
Theodore Roosevelt

I can’t help wishing I’d heard that when I was thirty, then things might have been different.  My friend printed that quote and it now takes pride of place on the wall facing my desk.

Today I had to remind myself of this quote and of the conversation we had because she made me realise that, although I may not have achieved all of the items on the world’s invisible achievement checklist, I have done some things others will never do.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget about what we have because we’re too busy trying to better them.  How can we appreciate what we have if we don’t even acknowledge how great it is to ourselves?  

Now before I end this, I am under no illusion that this little epiphany might not last.  I might post this and read it a week later and think…

“…poppycock…”

…delusion and illusion are part of life and I know when we think we see things clearly it’s often a moment in passing but, in preparation for that moment of self-doubt I want to tell myself and anyone else who has made it to the end of this blog…

You are an individual, you are not the same as anyone else and nor should you strive to be…because my friend…

…there is no comparison.

Dedicated to my friend at work, you turn my frown upside down, even if this piece doesn’t reflect that; thank you for making things clearer…

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Reading time: 13 min

Thirteen years ago I thought I could make it as a writer.  I thought all I needed was someone to show me the way and I thought that way was through an Arvon Foundation course. 

Just to paint a picture of what Arvon is all about, it’s basically a house somewhere remote, surrounded by fields and farm animals and the foundation owners stick about 10 of you in there with two to three professional writers and over the course of 6 days they teach you the tricks of the trade.  It’s kind of like Big Brother for arty farty people without the cameras.  There are all sorts of writing genres to choose from so you look through a brochure, pick which course you want in which teeny tiny village, look up the writers who are leading the course and you convince yourself this is what you want; this is what you need because if you’re going to be anyone in this world, this is the path to take in order to achieve it…

…or is that just me?

It’s a funny old world Arvon.  I learnt very quickly that in a room full of people who are all different from each other you can still feel that agonising pain of being unaccepted.  I say this because, at Arvon you willingly open yourself up to criticism.  You literally hand over your heart and soul for someone to look at, analyse and then dish out their constructive opinion. 

I admit I went Arvon thinking I was pretty good at stringing a sentence together but it didn’t take long for that thought to be squashed.  It was implied that my writing wasn’t good enough.  And I was told it was too dark, too bleak and people don’t want to read something that has no hope in it. 

I disagreed, and trust me, that took balls!  When you’re staring a writer in the face who is paid to put words on to paper and all you have is a few sheets of A4 with words that reflect your own pain, it doesn’t matter that life is sometimes like that.  Life can be bleak and sometimes there is no hope – but without the money in your bank account to back up that claim, it doesn’t matter what you think, it doesn’t, because the man with the money doesn’t care.  He’s getting paid to tell you your work is unreadable and as a writer you should especially steer clear of writing about mental illness because no one wants to read about it, it’s…

“…too depressing.”

Arvon left an impression.  It was a crazy week with no phone signal, and if you can’t drive there was no escape.  Everyday I felt like I was being ripped apart by a pack of hungry lions washing my limbs down with a glass of Sauvignon Blanc and it hurt!  Man it’s painful.  I am not naive and please don’t think I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for, I did.  But I also had a dream that someone might have a little bit belief in me so that I could gain a little for myself.  

Believe it or not, somehow, by the end of the week I felt like I’d turned a corner.  I’d finally connected with the people I was sharing my soul with, I was the youngest and I wanted to be liked – who doesn’t?  I took everything that was said to me on board.  I tested out all the advice about my writing and on the final night I wrote a light-hearted, comical short story that blew the socks off all them! It did, I know it did because the applause still rings in my ears and I remember being poured a glass of wine by the writer who told me my work was too bleak to put on to the page and he said…

Image result for pouring a glass of white wine

“I think you’ve found your niche.”

You know what?  I look at that story thirteen years later and I wonder what was so good about it to change the opinion of an entire room?  What was it in those words on those pages that changed people’s opinions about me when for the last five days they thought everything I wrote was too depressing?   

The answer is simple…

…I changed.

I changed because they wanted me to.  I changed the vision I had inside my head, I changed my writing style.  I flipped the coin from heads to tails and I dipped my toes into an area that I knew nothing about.  I felt like a ham sandwich in need of cheese that’s nowhere in sight. Don’t get me wrong that applause was worth it, but when the week ended what was I left with?

A bad sandwich

The course leaders said it’s good to tweak.  If I tweaked my writing style things would be different.  But in order to tweak my writing style I had to tweak myself.  I had to tweak every part of my personality and train it to think the way other writers deemed to be acceptable. 

The only problem I have with that is, nobody tells Bret Easton Ellis to stop writing weird stories that you can never figure out because by the time you’ve read all about the yuppies on Wall Street snorting coke, you can’t remember which story Patrick Bateman hasn’t been mentioned in. 

Image result for patrick bateman

No-one tells Jilly Cooper to down her writing tools in exchange for knitting needles because old ladies should not be thinking about throbbing members! 

Image result for old lady knitting cartoon free images

And it never crosses anyone’s mind that perhaps Shakespeare isn’t the greatest writer of all time because half of his plays are bleak!  They’re depressing and there’s no hope in them because 90% of the time he kills off the majority of his characters!  You just have to look at King Lear to see that.

Image result for king lear

So I rebelled, I rebelled against the professional writers, the paid writers, the people considered to be knowledgeable and qualified to tell me I’d never get a shelf in Waterstones.  I’d like to say I respected their opinion but I didn’t, not really.  So I decided, if I wanted to write a story with characters who were consumed by mental illness, then I would. 

If writing stories about mental illness is such a bad thing then doesn’t that say something about the world?  Doesn’t that say that we should be opening our eyes and our mouths and putting pen to paper to say to the world that this exists!  And it kills people!  And in the grand scheme of things this was just one person’s, opinion so tell me where the crime is!

I’ve always believed that diagnosis is simply an answer to a question, but it also fuels the fire for stigma.  It doesn’t matter how many people have a mental illness, if you’re not talking about it, then any negativity increases, it doesn’t fade.  In my early twenties I was ashamed of my mental illness.  It was a huge part of my life that I didn’t feel I could be open about.  I could only deal with it through writing and Arvon was a sharp reminder that even then the written word still wasn’t okay. 

My mum was happy to tell people about my diagnosis. I’m not sure if it was because she’d seen me completely destroyed by it and she’d had to drive hundreds of miles across the country to pick me up on countless occasions when it got too much to cope with.  Or was it because she wanted people to know there was a reason her daughter had flopped at every angle of life and Bipolar was that reason.  Or maybe she just wanted to start off the change; maybe she was ahead of the game, I don’t know.  Whatever it was my mum should have been my inspiration and it should never have taken me twelve years to realise that…

…if we do nothing, then nothing changes.

In 2014 a friend loaned me a book…

Electroboy by Andy Behrman

I hadn’t known her for very long so I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I don’t read books about Bipolar people by people with Bipolar.  But I decided to humour her and I read the first page.  That first page turned into the first chapter and then the entire book.  I’m not about to talk about the book in detail, it’s not my story to tell, but please check Andy out, his book is on Amazon, he’s an amazing Bipolar survivor, a wonderful friend and my inspiration.  He won’t take the credit for it but…

…Andy is the reason I found my voice.

At the tail end of 2014 something in me changed.  I was becoming less ashamed of having a mental illness.  I was slowly opening up to more people in and out of work.  I’d mention it in passing, I’d “like” something on Facebook that was mental heath related.  I would post something mental health related and this strange feeling started grow within me.  It was like a burning desire to do something, I wanted to change something, I wanted something to get better!

One morning when I was getting ready for work Mum said she’d noticed I didn’t seem quite myself and she asked what it was I wanted to do.  I remember putting the milk back in the fridge and I said…

“I want to be like Andy, I want to talk about my mental health…I want to be a speaker!”

There…I’d said it.  That’s what I wanted.  Right there and then in the kitchen with half a carton of semi-skimmed in my hand, was the moment that I had to say goodbye to shame.  If I was going to speak up about living a life with a mental illness, then I had a shedload of balls I had to grow and it was not going to be easy.

My family and friends would ask me what I would talk about and I know some of their lips curled when I said I was going to be honest about my mental health.  But when they asked me what I wanted to get out of it I would have to stop and think for a moment.  Because in all honesty…

…what the hell did I know?

When you decide to be a speaker you don’t wake up on the day of the decision and think..

“…woo hoo! Yeah! I’m a speaker and I know exactly what I’m doing!”

I wish it was that simple.  I joined a speaking club where I was encouraged to do all sorts of things that I had never imagined I could do.  In everyday life I would never read aloud.  I would stammer, I would flounder and then I wouldn’t be able to breathe.  The ladies at the speaking club taught me how to pause.  If you pause you can find your breath, if you pitch your voice at the right level it takes less nervous energy and if you concentrate on the pace of your speech, the flow is easier and your audience are able follow and understand everything you say. 

Those ladies pushed me to limits I never knew I had.  They had me enter the North Pennine Area Speech Contest where I talked for eight minutes about drag queens and I came first place. 

North Pennine Area Speech Contest 2015

While I was trying to find my feet in the speaking world and I was also coming to the realisation that still so many people had no idea what Bipolar is or that in actual fact, it’s not a crime to have it or talk about it.  The day I spoke about being mentally ill at the speaking club was the day I knew my time there was coming to an end.  They were horrified.  They were beyond words – which for a speaking club isn’t exactly a great advert – they suddenly lost respect for me, maybe they wondered what they had let into the club?  Whatever it was they felt, I allowed myself to be affected by it for a few weeks before I decided to leave for good.

I was out on my own, I had no idea what it took to become a speaker let alone a good one!  And let me tell you, it is hard, it is stressful, it is nerve wracking and when you open up at a bootcamp for the first time in front of 10 strangers it’s like hanging yourself out to dry and waiting for a ten-tonne truck to come and run right into you.

I did three of Richard McCann’s bootcamps and he taught me everything I know!  How to stand, how to draw your audience in, what your presentation should look like and all of the things that you should be doing to get out there and speak to the world.  He taught me that if you don’t go looking for a speaking gig, you won’t find it, because it sure as hell won’t find you.

Today’s blog is not about listing my speaking achievements.  I don’t speak out about the horrors of having a mental illness so that I can gain praise.  In the early days I would post things on Facebook to show people what I’d done, it was a way of saying…

“Hey!  I’m bipolar and I’ve done this when no-one thought I could!”

When you have a mental illness people expect very little of you.  And when you’re constantly being told that a decent, wholesome life is out of reach and you have to accept that unhappiness is 90% of your make-up; it is so hard to turn that around.  When you feel like the only person who believes in you is you; it’s hard to make that enough.

Initially I had no idea what I wanted to achieve.  I was tired, I was bored and I was so sick of the system getting it wrong for so many people.  I was exhausted from hearing stupid and ignorant comments and using words wrong way…

“Oh my god, she’s so Bipolar”

“I’m having a Bipolar moment”

“They’re so moody, they must be Bipolar”

…because that’s not really how it works, that’s not even how mental illness as a whole works. 

I was frustrated with the media world for painting all Bipolar people with one of very few brushes…

Stacey from Eastenders

Claire Danes in Homeland

Stephen Fry – because he always looks fine!

People would ask what did I have to offer?  What could I possibly speak about that people would not only give their time to listen to but also walk away having gained something from hearing the words that come out of my mouth.

You know what?  I wasn’t sure anyone could gain anything from hearing me speak.  I didn’t even know if I had a story to tell.  I’ve never really put a foot wrong in my life.  I’ve never smoked, I stopped drinking at twenty-six, I was never a wild child; even my Bipolar episodes were low key compared to others.  I’ve never been close to death, I’ve never taken a life, I’ve never been to prison, I have never done anything worth reporting. 

What I have done, is try to live my life.  I’ve tried to never give up and I’ve tried to fight a system that needs reminding that the mentally ill are still people.

Six years in, I don’t know if I’m any good; I will never be perfect and I will always pick holes at my delivery.  I probably do the exact opposite of how I have been trained and for that I apologise to Richard.  But what I do must be working because now I have business cards, a website and a blog and not only that, but I get requested to speak and that was once a pipedream.

   

Andy taught me that the best way to speak to an audience is to think of it as a conversation and he’s right.  It’s a conversation that we should be having with our families and our friends, that having a mental illness is as normal as having a cold.  It’s just like any other illness, it’s a fight and it’s a battle to take control of in order to get well again. 

When I think about why I started this whole thing in the first place, it was never about achievement.  It was about telling the professionals who aren’t listening that they need to open their ears.  It is not okay to write the mentally ill off.  It is not alright to tell people what an acceptable way of life is according to them.  Everyone is different so how can people be pigeonholed? 

I didn’t set out to change the world (contrary to my Bernard’s belief), I set out to show people how to say…

“…no! That is not okay.”

In 2008, back at Arvon, I was proud of my bleak and depressing stories and I should never have allowed myself to change because others didn’t feel the same way.  Nobody ever asked why my stories were so dark.  No-one ever took the time to wonder if there was a deeper meaning to my miserable paragraphs.  Maybe they weren’t interested, maybe darkness is something we should avoid at all costs.  I don’t know.  But I do know that change is inevitable.  I know it happens without us even noticing and over the years, especially the last six, I have changed both inside and out. 

My writing has changed.  Everything I write now has some form of hope resting within the depressing words.  I’ve made this change because I have hope in my life, where once upon a time I had none.

At Arvon people said tweaking yourself was the right path to take to gain success…well?

Consider me tweaked…

but it’s not because of you … it’s because of me.

Dedicated to my good friend Andy. You gave me the strength to get started and taught me never to be ashamed of being Bipolar. One day when the world is a safer place I hope we can share a stage and tell our stories together…

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Reading time: 16 min
Band 2017

When I go to Marks and Spencers I usually have a list and I have to stick to the list or I’ll just go wild and buy stuff that I don’t need.  As you can imagine, in M&S it’s virtually impossible to obey the written command of a shopping list and whilst I may have entered the shop aiming for a pizza, four frozen baked potatoes and a bag of fancy apples, I usually come out with those items plus a box of biscuits, a bag of Percy Pigs and a chocolate lolly for my niece.

In Waterstones I will go in with around five books on my list and I give myself permission to buy them because they last longer than a bag of Percy Pigs.  But more often than not I come out empty handed because I’ll look at the books and for some reason I might not like the cover, or I might not like the first five words on the front page; so I put the books back on the shelf because none of them have met my expectations and there’s no point buying a book if it doesn’t tick all the boxes that it needs to.

Image result for books on a shelf

Now this is where psychiatric life gets interesting.  When your mental illness starts to act beyond the realms of a GP’s capability a good GP will down tools and say…

“This ain’t my bag; I’m sending you to a psychiatrist!”

…and after you’ve waited between four to six months for your appointment this is where the fun starts!

Nineteen years ago the only psychiatrist I’d ever heard of was Freud – and let’s be honest he doesn’t have the greatest reputation, I mean I was at university reading Dracula and they were throwing the Oedipus Complex about like it was a football covered in cream.  In case you don’t know what the Oedipus Complex is, it’s something Freud came up with where a guy has a complex relationship with his mother and this is because he fancies her and it results in all sorts of chaos in his life and relationships (something to that effect).  It got dragged into every book I read while I was doing my degree and I now have to make a conscious effort not to give off any impression that the characters in my own stories fancy their parents because it’s a crazy idea and I will not be tainted with the same literary ridiculous brush that the likes of Bram Stoker and the Bronte sisters have been tainted with, no thank you!

Image result for freud
Would you trust this man with your brain?

Aside from Freud I didn’t know a great deal about what a psychiatrist was about.  I knew they were doctors and I knew they looked after brains but that was it.  When I got my appointment to meet my very first psychiatrist all I could think was that he was going to fix my brain and make me normal.

When you have a physical ailment and you go to the doctor or a specialist, they can look at the problem and they can see it because whatever it is is usually staring them in the face.  My bowel problem was a physical problem and whoever looked at my situation knew that there was a real problem and they tried to fix it.  When it comes to your brain all a psychiatrist has to go on are the words that come out of your mouth.

You can’t lie about constipation.  You can’t hide a lump that shouldn’t be there and if you’re in pain, or discomfort and you can barely move there’s no disguising that because it’s real; a doctor can see it.  But if it’s your brain that’s in pain, if it’s unhappy or it’s got a million things going on in there that it shouldn’t have, voices, despair, moving inanimate objects and a crazed idea about saving the world with the help of the singers on a playlist on your iPod; then those are the things you have to tell the person the system has placed in front of you and hope to God that they believe you and they want to fix you!

In 2002 I was a first timer in a psychiatrist’s office.  In the waiting room I sat and looked all the people who were there with their social workers and nurses.  Some had no teeth, some had yellow fingernails from too much smoking and some just stared into space.  I remember looking at all of them and thinking…

“Is this my life?  Is this who I am now?”

No photo description available.

No one tells you what to expect when you go to a psychiatry appointment.  A few months ago I had a CT scan and I got a leaflet in the post to tell me how it would work.  In the summer my mum had an Endoscopy and she got a booklet to tell her the exact steps her feet would take.  When I walked into the Rivington Unit at the Royal Bolton Hospital in 2002 and sat with all the psychiatric patients, no one told me how it would work, no one told me the steps my feet would take.  No one told me that it doesn’t matter if you have good days and bad days or if the only reason you managed to get dressed today is because you’ve just had three bad days and this one is a little lighter.  It doesn’t matter.  It doesn’t matter because it’s not about yesterday or last week or ten years ago.  It’s about…

how you present on the day

You have to be willing to work in that room.  You can’t be shy or secretive.  You can’t hold back and you have to be the strongest version of yourself even when you have no fight left in you, you have to find some because if you put forward a wavering claim of insanity and a psychiatrist doesn’t see it to be a convincing representation of how you truly feel, then you will walk out of that door with absolutely nothing.  No diagnosis, no meds, no referral to therapy…absolutely no help whatsoever.  And believe me, when you’ve jumped through the hoops to get to the top dog, you don’t want to leave with nothing, because you have to remember, these guys are pros.  They could probably pay off my entire mortgage in a couple of pay checks. They take no prisoners, they haven’t got time to be messing about so the least you can do is get your facts straight.

I got lucky.  My first psychiatrist was a human being.  I was in that room an hour.  I was nervous, my hands were sweaty and when I followed him into the room the first thing I said was…

“Where’s the couch?”

Image result for psychiatrists couch

When he gave me my diagnosis I cried.  Not because I was sad – I mean I was, obviously, Bipolar Disorder is not something to celebrate – but because I finally had answers for the behaviour I couldn’t explain.  I left with meds and a weight off my shoulders because just when I thought no one could help me, I’d found someone who could.

What’s the worst thing that a good psychiatrist can do?  The answer is simple…

…get a new job and leave.

You never know who’s going to take their place, it could be any old fool.  You know that saying people use when you’ve just split with someone and they’re trying to make you feel better…

“You have to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince.”

Well for me, it was a bit like that.  My first psychiatrist, let’s call him Dr Jackson, he was amazing, but he wanted to move on and who was I to hold him back? But he left a train wreck in his wake.  Anyone who took his post didn’t stay for long and in most cases that was a good thing.

I met so many frogs.  Really ugly, dirty, smelly frogs.  Frogs who made me cry, they made my mum cry…

“You’re putting words in her mouth”

“You’re too intelligent to be a psychiatric patient”

“You’re not Bipolar”

“I don’t think you need psychiatric medication, let’s take you off it”

Maybe this is why I had so many hospital admissions, because these buffoons were confusing the situation.  Being an outpatient and having so many different psychiatrists – and I’m talking double figures, not just a couple – I was passed from the consultant to their junior.  When you see a junior doctor doing their psychiatry training you really get to see how the cogs turn.  All the questions the consultant has casually asked you over the years that you interpreted as general conversation, turns out, it’s a trick. 

Everything they ask you is a tick box exercise and the juniors haven’t quite mastered the art of the general conversation tone.  They have a shopping list.  A list I like to call the Shrink’s Shopping List…

  • What medication do you take?
  • How much of it?
  • What benefits do you claim?
  • Who do you live with?
  • What is your current mood?
  • Do you want to hurt yourself?
  • When was the last time you wanted to hurt yourself?
  • Do you want to kill yourself?
  • When was the last time you wanted to kill yourself?

They literally tick the boxes on the paper in front of them.  I don’t know if they realised that the doorstep of a folder with my name on the front of it lying on their desk already had the answers to 90% of those questions.  But they don’t look at you; they just tick, and after that they tally up your responses and send you on your merry way. 

Image result for ticking the box

I hit my head against the goal post so many times.  I was in that room less than ten minutes and ten minutes when you have to wait months for your next appointment to get another nit wit who doesn’t know how to think outside of the tick box is excruciatingly painful, physically and emotionally.

In nineteen years of being in the system I have four psychiatrists who I owe my life to.  Just like the doctors have a tick box list, I have a tick box list of my own. 

Dr Jackson put me on the right track numerous times.  Dr Ogden did the same.  I once saw him shopping in Sainsburys and he had a twenty-minute conversation with me and my mum standing next to the fish counter.  When he wasn’t my doctor and he discovered I was on one of the wards he paid me a visit and sat down with me and asked what went wrong? He was a saint and if I ever get to see him again, I owe him a fish.

In 2011 I met Dr Murphy.  Now this guy is my favourite.  I owe this one my life five times over.  He is the one I quote in my presentations because he put me on the path to what the pros call…

“RECOVERY”

He put me in my place.  He gave me a nurse I didn’t want but it was the best thing he could have done.  He told me there is always something else to try when it comes to medication.  He did what he said he was going to do and he gave me…

“The life I wanted and the life I deserved”

If there is one person on this earth who I want to see me strut my stuff on a stage, it would be Dr Murphy.  Because of him, I put Bernard in his place and now I’m in the driver’s seat.

Strutting my stuff

In December I had my four monthly check up appointment with my current psychiatrist, we’ll call him Dr Smith (inventive, I know).  Last time I spoke to him I was in the middle of an episode and I wasn’t sleeping or eating.  While he was on leave I had no one so when I had my appointment with him months later I told him all about losing my job, redundancy, finding a new job, starting a new job and he said…

“…and you did all of that while you were ill?”

I said…

“Yes.”

He said…

“I am proud you’ve been able to do that.”

No psychiatrist has ever said they were proud of me and his words warmed my heart.  When you’re a psychiatric patient quite often you’re labelled as being at the bottom of the barrel, some professionals see you as a no hoper, there’s not much they can do with you and you have two options…

Crumble and die

Or

Prove them wrong.

I went for the second option.  Option one was never really an option.  I don’t admit defeat easily. 

On the first day of my new job I was shown around the offices.  Bearing in mind I haven’t been an inpatient for ten years it took me a second to realise the finance office used to be the reception of the locked ward I once spent two months of my life on and from the window while I wait for the girls in the office to count out my petty cash I can see the room I used to sleep in.  I can’t describe the feeling. 

Every time I look across at my old room I see a version of myself that was lost and had no idea what the future would look like.  I never imagined I would get a grip on Bernard.   When Dr Murphy would challenge my grandiose ideas I would challenge his questions and my family and friends would look at me and wonder if I was ever coming back.

In March last year, eighteen years after first meeting him, I saw Dr Jackson.  I sat in his office and told him there was alien being in my brain with superpowers and I was waiting for it to give me the instructions on how we were going to save the world (this is just before Corona wreaked havoc in the UK).  He found the problem and he set the wheels in motion to fix it and once I felt better I thought…

“…one day I will show him who I have become.”

On Wednesday I walked across the hospital to take a document to my senior administrator.  I knew he worked just down the corridor and every time I make this journey I walk past his office and I think to myself…

“…one day he’ll open the door and he will see me.”

The senior admin knows my past, she knows Dr Jackson has been my psychiatrist and in passing she mentioned my name and he passed on his best.  There is nothing nicer than being remembered but when you’re a psychiatric patient you never know if you’re remembered for the right reasons.  When I took the document over I phoned my mum for a chat on the short walk I said the words…

“I’d love to see Dr Jackson when I’m doing something like this.”

In the office I was looking at a spread sheet when the senior admin tapped my hand and nodded towards the door.  Fate works in mysterious ways and sometimes you really do get what you wish for. 

Every time I come out of an episode I am embarrassed. I am ashamed of my behaviour, my words, just Bernard in general and it can take months, years, forever, for that embarrassment to fade but when you’re stood in an office with the secretaries for all the Psychiatric Consultants in the hospital and you look up from that tapped hand and one of your most treasured psychiatrists is standing in the middle of the room and he waves and asks you if you’re okay?  There’s no other feeling like it. 

I was having a tough day on Wednesday and seeing Dr Jackson gave me a lift I didn’t think was possible.  It must be nice for a consultant to see a patient go from the bottom of the barrel to having a job in the very area where they’re still a patient, but let me tell you now, it is the best feeling when you realise all your hard work has paid off and you really have proven all the terrible consultants wrong and no matter how small your achievement is, it’s still an achievement. 

In that moment I felt like a success story, for me and for him.  It’s a sign that he did a good job with me and I did my best with the tools that all of my favourite psychiatrists have given me. 

May be an image of Katerini Edgington-Spathis

The shrink’s shopping list may be an abundance of difficult questions and there is no right or wrong answer, but sometimes it’s not what’s on the shopping list that matters…

…it’s how you do your shopping.

Dedicated to the four psychiatrists who saved me and still do to this day.

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Reading time: 14 min
Do I really need to expand?

Last night my friend sent me a message to ask how the next blog is coming along because he was looking forward to reading it…and then said…

“no pressure”

I’ve toyed with the idea of blogging for years and when I decided to bite the bullet and give it a go, I had no idea how well or how badly it could go down. 

Last weekend after writing all about life on a psychiatric ward I said thank you to my parents-in-law for all their support with this venture.  I am massively grateful to them for their acceptance and for never being embarrassed by the fact their daughter-in-law airs her dirty laundry on the internet for all to see.  I know many other people would be thinking if I was to share anything in public then they would rather it be make-up tips on YouTube.

I’ve always felt like a really boring person who hasn’t achieved much or seen much.  I have said this countless times about people thinking I was a peculiar child, an alternative teenager and just plain weird as an adult (and you can take Bernard out of this equation, he does not get credit for any part of this blog) but this isn’t the space for pity because I’m not feeling sorry for myself right now. 

I keep pointing out that I’m weird, but the question is…

“Why?”

What’s your definition of weird?  How do you measure it?  Who even decides what is acceptable behaviour in the world and what isn’t?  Well I can’t answer any of those questions, but I can tell you a little bit about me and maybe by the end of this piece, you can tell me what you think.

When I was a child I was given a packet of jelly babies but where most people would eat them, I didn’t; I played with them.  I mean come on, they have arms, legs and a face, they’re practically people so I treated them the same way I would my dolls. 

Jelly Babies | United Sweets of America

To me that’s common sense, it’s up to you what you make of it.  This is the whole point of this piece; its about opinion, its about how we interpret the behaviour of others and how we categorise it.  To me those jelly babies were no longer just a packet of sweets, they were people they were characters, but it was the people around me who decided if tucking them into a Sylvanian Families bed in their imaginary house was weird or not.

Growing up we had a dog, Stavros.  I remember taking him for walks with my mum and brother, there was a field at the back of our house that was a dumping ground for old bikes and broken wood and one particular day I found an abandoned Christmas tree.  On the spot, I adopted this tree and I named him “Presents”.  At the end of every walk I would hide this tree in a safe place so that on my return we would be reunited.  I have no idea how long I kept this going but it was a considerable amount of time and I do remember the day we took the dog for a walk and Presents was gone.  I searched high and low for that dead, flaky, old Christmas tree and I was devastated when I came to realise that Presents was no more.  Now I’m not 100% sure that what I’ve written here is the absolute truth but this is what I remember and as I write this I am cringing so badly I can feel my spine clicking.  I imagine my family were mortified to have a child and a sibling who had an attachment to a dead tree but at the end of the day I wasn’t hurting anyone.  The only person who was hurt by Presents’ disappearance was me. 

When should you take down your Christmas tree, lights and decorations? How  to store decorations and what you should do with your tree - Irish Mirror  Online
RIP Presents

I had an imaginary friend, Rupert.  I told people he was based on Rupert the Bear, but what my family never knew was the Rupert in my head wasn’t a bear at all.  He was a boy who was the same age as me, a boy who understood me and liked playing house with jelly babies. 

I convinced everyone around me that Rupert the bear was my imaginary friend because that way I would appear less weird because the bear was an existing character created by a real person and that made having an imaginary friend much more acceptable.  Doing it this way meant that I could keep my version of Rupert private; I wouldn’t get frowned upon because I was just a creative child who liked Rupert the Bear, but on the flip side I was doing myself an injustice.  By dulling down my imaginary friend to keep him safe made me feel…

“People will think I am the worst storyteller.  I can’t even make up my own imaginary friend…”

…but having that secrecy and privacy with my friend Rupert fuelled my imagination and when I look back on my creative life since that time, I really do believe that it gave me the ability to create the characters I’ve written into so many of my stories over the years.  Is that weird?  Or is it clever?

I think anyone who has known me for any amount of time would say that I have a complex mind (again, nothing to do with Bernard).  It’s easy to say I’m an “over thinker” but I think that puts a negative spin on it and over thinking is not necessarily a bad thing.  Neither is curiosity.

I think I’ve used this before but it’s a good example so just go with it…

When Americans hail a taxi in the street they shout…

“TAXI!”

…yet in conversation they call them cabs.  Why not just shout…

“CAB!”

When people kiss why do we close our eyes?  Surely we like the person we’re kissing so why don’t we open our eyes to look at them?

Why do we rely on magazines and the media to tell us what we should be wearing?  It’s all very well picking out oversized shoulder pad boyfriend jackets, folk inspired coats and fringing on bags but who gave who the power to say that’s what we should be wearing.  And if it is what we should be wearing, then why are there so many different styles of clothing for the non-fashionistas to wear?

Who convinced the world that One Direction were the best boyband to grace the X-Factor – because they didn’t even win.

Who came up with the idea that weddings need to have a theme and a colour scheme because I made a point that my half of my wedding was not going to follow that pattern.  I had knitted flowers and multi-coloured chair covers.  Everyone had a knitted buttonhole as they entered the room.  I sent my bridesmaids down the aisle first and all four of them had different dresses of their own choice because every single one of them is a completely different person with different personalities and to put them in the same dress would be asking them to change just for me.  One of my bridesmaids has tattoos and she asked me if I wanted her to cover them for the photos.   I said…

“No, because it would be like telling you to cover part of your soul.”

The Girls

I had a drag queen perform at my wedding; she was beautiful but over 50% of my guests left the room because they didn’t approve.  I thrust my friend into the limelight and asked her to do a reading, she said…

“What should I read?”

I said…

“Whatever you want, make something up…”

And she wrote the most beautiful speech I could have asked for.

For my witness to sign the certificate I didn’t ask any of my bridesmaids, I asked a male friend (by the book it’s always a female) who I’ve known for twenty years and I wanted him to be part of my day. 

Breaking the rules

All of this might seem weird, but is it?  That day I wanted everyone who had given up their time to see me get married to enjoy the day.  I wanted them to feel relaxed and look around them and think…

“Yep, this is definitely Kat, and Matt, but mostly Kat”

Who does it hurt not to play by the rules?

At primary school a teacher told us the story of Mary and Joseph and the birth of Jesus.  I remember being horrified that Mary was having a child by another man and I wanted to know why Joseph wasn’t really ticked off with his wife for cheating on him and then spinning this tall tale that she had been chosen to have a special baby with an invisible man.  I could see she was completely dumbfounded by my question and I do kind of feel sorry for her because what on earth do you say to an eight year old kid when no one knows the answer?  But you can’t tell these stories and expect everyone to just accept them; not when some of them are so incredibly spectacular.

Mary, Joseph and God

On holiday in Greece one year, I stood in the sea and willed it to part for me like it had for Moses; I would stare intensely at rocks searching for ten new commandments so I would be famous.  I wanted to be a nun because I liked the outfit and I would prance around the house in my dad’s dressing gown because it was black, I would wear a white pillow case over my head and I’d pretend I was married to God because from a really young age I never saw a future with a man because I was too strange. 

At secondary school when we had to start thinking about our future and our careers I remember going to the careers room; which was a tiny old thing buried in the basement of the school and I would always whisper because it felt like a library.  There was a book like a catalogue with a list of careers for us to choose from and I remember saying to the careers officer…

“I don’t need the book, I already know what I want to be; I want to be a psychiatrist.”

Ironic really isn’t it?  That about 6 years after this I found myself sitting in front of a psychiatrist instead of actually being one.

Prior to this I wanted to be a podiatrist so in year 10 I did a week of my work experience following around a podiatrist.  I saw an unbelievable amount of feet.  They were crooked, bony, crusty and a few of them whiffed a bit, but it didn’t matter, because I didn’t plan on looking after the feet of the average Joe, nah, my sights were set on the guys in the bands I loved.

Crispian Mills
Simon Fowler
James Mudriczki
Scott James

I self-medicated with their music.  I read whatever I wanted into the lyrics of their songs and I convinced myself that because they were standing on stage an awful lot, they would require help to look after their feet. 

I dreamt that they would take me on tour with them as their personal podiatrist and I didn’t for one single second think that this wasn’t possible. My friends laughed, my family smiled through gritted teeth at another one of my hair brained ideas but I just wanted to make a difference, why was that so hard to accept?

In 2002 I did my first Edinburgh Fringe Festival, man I love that place, I loved it so much I did two more of them.  During my first one I’d written a play and I walked around the city with a copy of it in my bag.  I watched play after play after play and I was totally transfixed with the atmosphere in the city and I somehow told myself that a director would find me and find my play and want to cast it, direct it and make it soar above all of the hundreds of plays that had taken months and years to perfect, but mine would be so well received because of its powerful message and it would win the prestigious Fringe 1st award. 

Gilded Balloon Box Office Assistant 2002

Well it’s obvious that didn’t happen because I was too shy to show it to anyone.  I was surrounded by talented people who were beautiful and gifted and I was just a box office assistant who got star struck when Alan Davies walked in with Paul Merton and bought tickets for a drag show whose best asset was the micro pig she brought on stage at the end; but truthfully?  That was the best job I’ve ever had. For the first time ever people didn’t think I was strange and if they did they didn’t mind.

As I’ve got older and next year I will be the dreaded 40, I can look at myself and I think…

“Yep, I can see why people think I’m weird.”

You can blame the bipolar but I was strange long before Bernard came along, I mean look at me; I’ve given my mental illness a name!  I refer to my stoma as her and she!  I give inanimate objects personalities and last year the most exciting thing about getting house insurance was getting a limited edition Meerkat toy that I won’t share with any of my nieces or nephews (sorry guys).

When a child names their favourite toy we think it’s cute.  My niece has names for all of her toys and I guarantee if they weren’t named we would find that strange; but, as far as I’m aware as we grow older we we’re never told at any point to stop doing that?  So if you don’t name the plants in your garden or the bike that you ride to work every day, then maybe it’s you who’s the weird one; have you ever thought about it that way?

Life should not be dictated by the clothes we wear and we should be allowed to ask questions regardless of it raising an eyebrow over every religious belief we’ve had since the dawn of time because everyone wants the world to make sense somehow – even if it means challenging something sacred. 

Kids should be allowed to have imaginary friends and not be judged, that imaginary friend is salvation, they’re company, they’re a loyal companion.  That fictionalised creation is a sign of creative intelligence and you’ll never know why they’ve been created because you will never hear them speak.

When I did my speaker training Richard McCann called me quirky.  I’d never been called that before. I guess it’s a more acceptable term for weird and I say in all of my presentations that I embrace my quirky side and I am not shy of being a bit strange these days because I have never tried to change, so I ask myself, why change the term?

Throughout my teens when I thought it was a bad thing to be different and weird was something no one should ever flaunt, I would wonder what was it about me that made me stand out from other kids?  Why didn’t I just eat the jelly babies?  Why didn’t I break the branches off the dead Christmas tree and throw them for the dog to fetch?

Perhaps it’s because…

  • I wanted to be a nun because I liked the outfit.
  • I practically plagiarized my imaginary friend to keep my imagination safe.
  • I wanted to be a podiatrist so I could perve on the feet of singers.
  • And I thought if the sea could part of Moses, then the sea could part for me.
Magical Moses

That’s just the beginning.  This is just a taster of who I used to be and who I still and I am not hurt if people think I’m a weirdo because does it really matter?  Does it not make me who I am and prove that I am not defined by Bernard because most of this happened before Bernard ever made an appearance.

I will hold my hand up right now and I will say I am thankful for my over thinking, overactive and over imaginative imagination because if there is one thing that’s for certain…

…that, is what makes me weird…

Dedicated to my parents-in-law, for being proud of me when they don’t have to.

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Reading time: 14 min

*All names have been changed where needed*

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Ever heard that saying…

“What doesn’t kill you, can only make you stronger.”

Sometimes I think the people who say this are the ones who have never had anything in their lives that has set out to potentially kill them.

Those words, are they supposed to be comforting? Are they intended to give us hope?  Hope that maybe the bad days are behind us and now we can look forward to a peaceful and tranquil life?  Or are they words we use when there’s nothing else to say and we just want to make someone feel better?   

I bet you think I’m talking about Covid, but in the words of Alanis Morrisette that would be…

Alanis Morissette updates Ironic for 2015 as she admits song's lack of  ironies | Daily Mail Online

Today I’m writing about something I don’t usually get the chance to talk about, even in 99% of my presentations I don’t get the chance to go into any detail about it so maybe it’s time.

What am I on about? 

Well, when you don’t look after your mental illness, when you haven’t learned that making small adjustments to your everyday living can lessen the chances of a fully-fledged Bipolar episode; then the result – for me – is a strongly advised stay in a psychiatric ward…six times over.

When I do my presentations I have a limited time to tell my story. There are certain things people want me to address so I pick out the bits that are relevant for that group.  I always touch on my hospital admissions but I never really get the chance to go in to any detail about them, my audience knows I’ve been in hospital and they know how many times but they don’t know anything else about it.

In 2019 I got the chance to go up to Dundee and speak to a group of students studying Psychology and training to be psychiatric nurses at Abertay University.  It was my dream gig!  It was one of the top five on my “speaking bucket list”.  This was my chance to tell them the truth and hope that part of my story would promote change in the field they were going into.  I wanted them to right the wrongs that had been done to so many people I know and change the system because they were in the perfect position to do this.  So when I was asked to speak for an hour to an hour and half and told to include absolutely everything…

  • Childhood
  • Adulthood
  • Bernard the Bipolar brain
  • Treatment
  • Hospital
  • Discrimination
  • The present
  • The future

I went full pelt into it and sugar coated nothing!  I talked for 1 hour and 17 minutes and the video of that presentation is used as part of the course material in the psychology lectures.  The section about hospital is used a separate part of the course material and students are told beforehand that what they are about to watch is raw and can be upsetting.

I never, in a million years, ever thought my story would have a disclaimer; now all seriousness aside for a minute, it is kind of cool; I felt like one of those warning alerts that flashes across the screen a documentary starts…

Caters News on Twitter: "*Warning: Distressing Content* - Horrific footage  from inside a #Cambodian #slaughterhouse shows dogs being crammed into  cages before they are #killed for meat. 😢… https://t.co/JZcDjPQNVo"

But I guess this is part of my point.  I don’t get the chance to talk about it so people end up thinking that my mental illness isn’t really that bad and because I am who I am and I’m “high functioning”, then I’m probably only a little bit Bipolar as opposed to being a lot bipolar. Or…

“Like Stacey on Eastenders but not as bad.”

I love that line because whoever says is has never seen me in a fully fledged Bipolar episode. It just makes the feel better to think this way.

When I tell people that I’ve been on a psychiatric ward they assume one of two things… it’s like Jack Nicholson in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest”

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest | George Eastman Museum

or Sandra Bullock in 28 Days. 

28 Days | Netflix

Well, it’s neither.  What I had wasn’t the worst, but it was far from the best.

This morning I was hoovering when I came up with the idea of writing this piece and I briefly wondered, is this what people want to read?  Should I even be writing this now that I work in a psychiatric rehab unit twenty seconds walk away from the place where I was a patient?  Should I post this on the internet for all to see?  What if someone I work with reads it? 

My answer to those questions? What I’m about to write is the truth.  It happened and there’s no changing that.  I created this blog as a space for people to read the bits I don’t get a chance to talk about in my presentations.  I wanted to show others that I have worked damn hard to become who I am, I wanted people realise that appearances can be deceptive and just because a person is high functioning, it doesn’t mean they’ve always been that way.

The dark parts of my story are not to everyone’s taste and if you’d rather not read about them that’s absolutely fine, I am not offended.  If you don’t want to know what goes on behind the locked door of an acute psychiatric ward, then you’d better close your browser now because just like the blog I did about poo, this is not for the faint hearted.  This is the truth; so fasten your seatbelts because I’m about to rip the plaster right off that wound!

I’m not going to write about the lead up to any of my admissions, in fact I’m not even going to write about them chronologically because it doesn’t matter what order they occurred; after that first admission, they all look exactly the same.

*Disclaimer – I am only referring to the hospital where I was an inpatient and therefore I cannot speak for any other or service*

When you walk through the door of a psychiatric ward it is like walking into a prison, the only difference is; you’ve done nothing wrong. 

Why is it like a prison?  Because the door is locked.  You can’t get in without being buzzed in and you most certainly can’t get out. 

When the door locks behind you everything you once knew about yourself disappears.  You are no longer a mother, brother, sister or friend.  Whatever job you did on the outside world is irrelevant because regardless of you being a teacher or a lawyer or a shop assistant, it doesn’t matter, between the walls of that ward you are no longer a person, you are one thing and one thing only…an inpatient. 

Contrary to popular belief hospital is not a holiday camp.  It’s not fun and it’s not relaxing.  When I was admitted because my Bipolar high was out of control I would ask the nursing staff what was I supposed to do now?  They said…

“…rest.”

But how do you rest when you don’t feel like you need to? 

On the acute ward I was on I was stripped of everything that was a comfort to me.  I had no mobile phone so any contact with my friends and family was done in the allotted visiting times of 1-2pm, 4-5pm and 6-7:30pm when my mum came to see and brought my phone. 

I was a pro at clock watching, I would sit and watch that seconds hand go round and round until it hit the number I needed because visiting hours were like drugs! It was a hit that numbed the pain of seclusion just for a few minutes.

Everything I knew about home was gone.  In the morning I had to let my hair dry naturally because I wasn’t allowed my hairdryer.  I would ask the staff to borrow the ward hairdryer but it depended on whether they liked me enough to loan it to me.  I am not joking, there were countless times when I would ask to use I and they would say “its broken” but twenty minutes later I would hear someone else two rooms away drying their hair with the alleged “broken” dryer. 

I had no need for my keys anymore because the ward was my home. Even something as simple as a duvet is one of the most painful things to be without.  When its December and you’re sleeping under a window with a crack in it and one of the nurses thinks the five blankets you’re trying to hide under is one blanket too many, it hurts like hell to have someone take two of them away. 

If you like a hot beverage like tea or coffee and you’re used to getting up to make one whenever you feel the need then trust me, the reality of not having a kettle at your beck and call is torture because you have to wait for the drinks trolly to come out at the allotted times and if you miss it?  Well you’ll just have to wait until the next one and that could be two hours away.

When I was admitted nothing was ever explained.  Imagine when you go on holiday and you check in to your hotel and they give you a map and they say…

Checking in at a Hotel | Engoo

“This is the dining room, breakfast is at this time, the 24 hour bar is here.  You’re full board so lunch is served by the pool at this time and the restaurant is open at this time for your evening meal.  We also have room service available.  Enjoy your stay.”

No-one ever told me what time breakfast was, sometimes they’d ring a bell to wake you up, or an angry support worker would bang on every door or sometimes a patient who never slept would charge up and down the corridors shouting…

“BREAKFAST! BREAKFAST!”

God I hated her!  Her middle name should have been Foghorn!

I was never told why the door was locked.  I thought because I was a voluntary patient I would be able to come and go as I pleased but I couldn’t and I’d ask the staff why they were treating me like prisoner.  I hadn’t been sectioned so why were they treating me like I was.  You know what?  I never got an answer, because I was viewed the same as everyone else, it didn’t matter that I hadn’t been sectioned, the door was locked to stop the mentally ill from leaving and I was mentally ill.

Technically the responsibility to explain how the ward works is down to the staff, as you’d expect.  But in reality it’s the patients who tell the new patients about the do’s and don’ts of psychiatric ward life.

Believe it or not every single person on the ward is different.  We might all have been pigeonholed as the same but in all six admissions I met an array of characters.  It’s incredible how you become a tight knit group, there is no difference between you and you make the strongest of bonds with people who you would probably never meet on the outside world.

I met so many amazing people but there are a select few who so many year later I still remember.  I remember them because despite their illnesses and their life choices, they reminded me that people are still people.

I made friends with Nancy* who was a heroin addicted prostitute, she’d been raped and all four of her children had been taken away.  On the outside world it would be so easy to say that someone like Nancy didn’t deserve to have children and that a prostitute can’t be raped because selling themselves is their occupation.  On the inside of a psychiatric ward you come to realise that not everything is as clear cut as we think it is. 

We would watch Coronation Street together, we’d drink tea and we swapped life stories.  I remember she once said…

“When we get out of here we should go for a night out.”

I remember thinking there was no way that would ever happen because her idea of a night out and my idea of a night out were probably very different. 

At the time Coronation Street had an impending rape storyline and as it played out on the screen I looked at Nancy and I asked her if she was okay?  She covered her face and cried.  The staff knew what she’d been through and they knew what we were watching but no one took the initiative to turn it off when they had for other patients.  I remember putting my palm out for her and she held on to it until scene had finished.

Woman Hand Or Palm Showing Up Something Stock Photo - Image of mature,  gesture: 113303200

Nancy was an inpatient for two weeks, she never showered, she never combed her hair and she had hardly any teeth, the teeth she had left were black and rotted but every single morning when I walked into the lounge she would stand and she would hug me and ask me if I’d slept.

Justin* was on a methadone programme trying to get a grip on his Schizophrenia.  The voices in his head were always worse in the morning and as soon as he woke up he would walk up and down the corridor banging his head with his hand trying to get them to stop.

He was six years older than me and he would ask me what it was like to have a job because he’d only ever been on benefits and when his voices calmed down he showed me how to roll a cigarette because I’d never smoked one.

One morning I woke with crippling anxiety.  I was completely detached from reality, I hadn’t slept in days or eaten a meal and I was confused about where I was.  I managed to get dressed and I went into the lounge. I sat at one of the tables in the adjoined kitchen and cried looking out at the people in the room.  I recognised them but I couldn’t work out why or who they were.  All I could feel was my racing heart, the bile in my mouth and my shaking hands.

Justin walked past the table and said…

“Morning Kat.”

And when I didn’t reply he did a double take.  He knew something was wrong and without any hesitation he gave me a hug.  All I could do was cry and I kept saying…

“I don’t know where I am.  I don’t know where I am…”

He waved at one of the other patients and they shot off to get a nurse, even though I’d already been ignored by countless other members of staff just minutes before.  It should have been their job to help but instead a nurse stood over me like the grim reaper and just said…

“What’s wrong with you?”

“I can’t do anything if you don’t tell me what you’re crying about.”

Anyone who has anxiety of any kind will tell you when you’re in that moment and everything around you is so overpowering, the last thing you can do is tell someone how you’re feeling and why you’re feeling it.

He stood over me for less than thirty seconds before he said…

“Go to your room and stop crying in the kitchen.”

When he walked away it was Justin who sat with me.  He rolled his entire days’ worth of cigarettes and told me about his girlfriend.  He told me one day, when he was off the drugs they were going to buy a house because one day he would have a job, just like me.

He spent the rest of the day checking on me.  He was no professional, he had no qualifications and he had more than enough of his own stuff to be getting on with, but he still knew how to communicate with another human being who needed support.

There are patients who help others and there are patients who wreak havoc when they don’t their own way.

Irma Batters Florida, Could Retain Hurricane Strength Through Monday | Live  Science

Jane* was one of those.  On the surface you could tell she’d lived a tortured life both of her own making and no fault of her own.  It was 2011 and she had a Walkman.  She was allowed one hours leave from the ward a day and one day it was raining so she saved 20 minutes of it for later in the day when it was less wet.  She decided she wanted to take this 20 minutes when visiting hours were finished and for whatever reason the nursing staff saw necessary, she was denied exit from the ward.

Jane was livid and I can understand why, because when you have nothing and the one thing you do have is taken away the only thing you can do is respond like a hurricane so everyone knows just how ticked off you really are.

I kid you not, Jane put her headphones over her ears and switched on that Walkman and for six whole hours she walked up and down the ward shouting, screaming, dancing and making herself known.  Was it funny? No, it was flippin awful!  Did she make a point? Absolutely.  Did it do her any good?  Not at all.

The history of the Walkman: 35 years of iconic music players - The Verge

I remember Doreen was in her 70s, consumed by depression.  She didn’t wash, change her clothes or go to the toilet so she constantly soiled herself.  She was given adult nappies but her illness prevented her from understanding how to wear them.

One Saturday afternoon and there was a group of us watching American Idol in the lounge with a care worker who picked the comfiest armchair and a foot stool with the best view of the TV while the rest us sat around the sides.

Enter Doreen, fully clothed including the coat she hadn’t taken off in four days.  She was covered in poo, it was in her nails, on her hands, up her sleeves and on her trousers.  All she wanted was to ask the care worker how to put the nappy on.

“Please can you show me…”

Well this went down like a lead balloon.  The care worker looked at Doreen holding a nappy in her poo covered hands and yelled…

“DON’T BE STUPID! GET AWAY! DON’T BE SO THICK YOU STUPID WOMAN. GO AWAY! YOU’RE DISGUSTING!”

The care worker dragged her away and 20 seconds later she sat back in her armchair watching American Idol.

It was myself and another patient who tried to help Doreen figure out how to put the nappy on.  We tried to make a complaint but you learn very quickly when you’re an inpatient on an acute psychiatric ward that your word counts for nothing.

In hospital there are those who probably don’t need to be there and those who have been in so many times they might as well stay there.  There are people who are the crutch for others and then are the people who just slip through the net.

Article 38 of Hong Kong's National Security Law: Yes, they want to get you  | The China Collection

So many people on the ward self-harmed.  I saw people do it.  I saw a man slice his wrists in a corridor and then stagger through it dazed and bleeding because he didn’t know what to do.  He was told he was silly. When I self-harmed I was told I was intelligent enough to know better, but mental illness doesn’t choose people according to their intelligence.  Trapped in a moment of internal devastation, mental illness doesn’t tell you the consequences of your actions, it simply tells you what it needs you to do. 

Wayne* came on the ward a week before I was about to be discharged.  He was the same age as me and even though we’d both lead completely different lives he had one of the kindest hearts I’d ever encountered in any of my six admissions.  His depression was debilitating and always caused him to spiral into destruction, but one thing about Wayne was when he was admitted into hospital he knew it was the last chance saloon and all his focus went into getting better.

He had a girlfriend and she was the only thing he ever talked about.  The thought of her kept him going and gave him a sense of purpose, a reason to get better.  He was hopelessly in love her and all he wanted to do was see her.  The only problem was, she didn’t want to see him. 

I had 24 hours leave coming up and that morning the two of us drank tea together and he said…

“Kat, she’s coming.  My girlfriend, she’s coming to see me today.”

He was so happy and when I left for my leave with my overnight bag, he smiled and he waved and I said…

“You can tell me all about it tomorrow.”

The following day I went back to the ward and I couldn’t find him.  When I asked the other patients who were now my friends, where he was someone said.

“His girlfriend came to see him and she dumped him.”

Wayne was devastated.  The staff knew what had happened.  They were aware of the situation, they’d seen him sob when she left and yet when he wanted to go to the shop they never asked him what he was going to buy.  No one asked him if he wanted to have a chat first, so Wayne bought a bottle of anti-freeze, he drank the bottle and ended up in intensive care.  By the time I got back to the ward, he was dead.

I like to think he became an angel and found a lady angel who would love him just as much as he loved her.

What I remember most about the patients in hospital are their acts of human kindness.  Their tender hugs even though they hadn’t washed, their toothless smiles and their innocence in a world that is far from forgiving.   

Now don’t get me wrong, as an inpatient I myself am no angel.  I can be difficult, head strong and non-compliant. I hold my hand over my heart and I can honestly say that I have been that person the staff roll their eyes at.  I have been problematic, stroppy and rude. 

At the time I thought it was justified.  I believed it was the right way to behave because there was something I wanted and I needed to have it and whatever I was, it was the most important thing in the world and the staff should get it for me right there and right then…even if the thing I wanted was just a calendar so I could see what day of the week it is.

Hospital has an effect on you.  It is traumatic and it’s isolating because when you go back to your normal life how do you explain to people where you’ve been when they’re too afraid to ask because you should just forget about it and move on.

Sumo Wrestler Cartoon Japan Japanese Wrestling Postcard | Zazzle.com in  2021 | Cartoons japan, Japanese cartoon characters, Japanese wrestling
SUMO – Shut Up & Move On

How do you tell people you can’t look at the lights in their houses because they look like UFO’s and when you were in hospital you thought there were cameras hidden in the bulbs and the aliens were watching you.

How do you tell people you can’t eat food like corned beef hash because it smells like the food in hospital and it brings back the same nauseating feeling you had when you thought you were being poisoned by the staff but you had to force feed yourself because otherwise you’ll be sectioned for being non-compliant.

How do you stand in front of a crowd of people and tell your story and still think to yourself…

“…you have no idea how bad this actually was…”

…because you still don’t have enough time to tell them everything that really happened.

Abertay University, 23rd October 2019

The reality of it all is, there aren’t enough minutes to tell the whole truth of six psychiatric admissions and what I’ve written is still only a snippet. There will never be a presentation long enough with an audience willing enough to listen because the truth is never ending.  Not only that, but despite being the root cause of every single admission, Bernard will never allow me to spill the tea on all everything I went through, why?  Because some of it is just too painful and sometimes the painful bits need to be taken away so that you can move on.

After all….

What doesn’t kill you, can only make you stronger…

Dedicated to the inpatients who kept my head above the water when I was drowning…2003-2011

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Reading time: 21 min
The doorway to a different world

For years I believed you could only truly be a writer if your work was published.  Whether you spend ten minutes on a poem or dedicate ten years to writing that one novel everyone is supposed to have within them – the work only pays off if the end result is on a shelf in Waterstones.

The minute I learned how to use the alphabet I knew I wanted to be a writer.  All the way through primary school I was writing stories taken from the characters I was reading about in the books I loved.  I was the funky kid in The Babysitters Club, I was just like Jo in Little Women, I was Kat instead of Katie in What Katie Did and I wanted to be Darrell in the Mallory Towers books because boarding school looked so much more exciting than the school I was at.

High school was a mine field of actions and emotions and it was at this point that I realised just how different I was from the other kids. My life at home was different, I didn’t understand myself, I didn’t understand the world and I read a hell of a lot of Point Horror books.  I was inspired by the writers who could incorporate the lives of kids at college with romance and at the same time make stalking and the supernatural cool.

At the age of eleven I stopped writing about fluffy clouds and rainbows and making everything in the world appear pretty and I brought out the big guns and I wrote my first novel, The College Fears.  Was it as bad as it sounds? Oh yes, it was terrible, but I dedicated my life to that story and I wholeheartedly believed that I was going to be discovered and thrown into the writing limelight and I would be the next big thing before I turned thirteen!

The College Fears

The College Fears was the culmination of a group of kids embarking on a brand-new journey at university, discovering new friendships and being completely independent, no family, no ties to their past, just the freedom to be who they wanted to be.

In 1993 I was beginning to realise that my mind was a messed-up circuit board where nothing was connected the way it should be.  I struggled with body image and the perception of who I wanted to be compared to who I really was.  I couldn’t make sense of anything so I threw all that I had into that one story.  I gave my characters the biggest egos, the worst luck in love, I made them beautiful on the outside but hideous within.  I made them tactile, I gave them eating disorders, I made them appear a whole lot older than they actually were.  They were everything I wasn’t but everything I wanted to be.

When I finished my first novel I was proud.  I felt I had achieved something big.  Who else had spent every night, every weekend thrashing out words and sentences?  I would send myself to sleep at night by creating conversations between my characters.  When I did this I wasn’t in my own head anymore, I was somewhere else, with other people; I was every single character I had created and I was the bees knees! In the real world I was anything but cool but in my head I was a successful writer, wise beyond her years with an advanced and complicated rare talent.

In 1994 I started to write my second novel.  I called it Life.  It was about a girl who went to university and she was addicted to suicide.  She’d tried to kill herself thirteen times in five years.  That poor girl, I gave her hell in that story.  I gave her misery and self-loathing, I gave her scars and an internal battle that she could never make sense of and never shake off.  But I also made her beautiful.  I made her appealing to boys, I made her intelligent and successful.  I made her popular and I gave her a singing voice any X-Factor contestant would crawl across hot coals to have come out of their oesophagus.  But hell, that poor girl was tortured, she was miserable.

Life

When I look back at my early writing I can tell you straight off why my stories were written the way they were.  I was miserable and tortured and struggling but every word I wrote was a release from all of that.  On a blank piece of paper I could be whoever I wanted to be, I could do whatever the hell I liked and no one could stop me.  That’s the power of the written word, you can dress it up and dress it down and it doesn’t matter what the end product looks like because you can call it art!

As the years went by I swam in writing circles with real writers who were published and successful and they saw the world from angles that I never even knew were possible.  I loved those people, I still love those people with all of my heart and even though I didn’t fully fit in; I was accepted as a human being and when I was with those people, listening to them read, watching them sign their work I would sit in awe and think,

“That, is what I want. That is who I want to be.”

They taught me everything I needed to know at that time, how to be a critic, how to deliver your best work, how to get a backbone because the writing world was just as tough as the real one. 

I once wrote a screenplay about a man whose entire family hated the fact that he was a writer. I was sixteen and obsessed with the book Trainspotting and by the end of watching the film I already believed Danny Boyle was going to direct my masterpiece with Robert Carlyle cast as the lead role.  I pictured myself at the BAFTAs, the Oscars, I’d pick out a dress from Hello magazine and when I went to bed at night, I’d fall asleep to the sound of my acceptance speech for Best Screenplay.

Wordsworth

Growing up I kept a diary.  It was the usual angsty teenage…

“I hate the world but I love this boy in my English class…”

…kind of stuff and my brother would joke about breaking into the locked tin I kept it in and reading all my deepest darkest secrets but really, my real secrets, my true diary was in the stories I wrote.

I confessed my undying love for the kid in Year 10 English by aging him and making him rescue a girl with no true friends in her life.  I took out my anger on the bullies that wouldn’t give me a break by creating a twenty-something year old character called Doug Fairchild and I made every other word a hideous swear word. I made him a violent moron with a conscience that didn’t make an appearance until the last page of the book.  I killed off pointless adult figures because in fiction it was so easy to do.  I gave girls eating disorders because it was easier to carry off than doing it myself.  I made my characters stars!  I made them humble singers, guitar geniuses, famous, adventurous and admirable and I full on believed that every story, every character, every single page I covered with my barely legible handwriting was going to be printed!  It was going to be real!  As far as I was concerned, every written word that fell from my pen to the page, made me a true writer in every sense of the word.

But it’s like public speaking.  In the eyes of the world unless you’re charging a fee to be heard, you’re not really a speaker.  Unless your work is printed, you’re not really a writer.

Last year in lockdown I had time on my hands and a room in my house that was a disaster zone.  I was spending hours editing a novel that I wrote twenty years ago and my mind was consumed by the ridiculous amount of notebooks that were littered with ideas, plots and synopsis. 

(Bear in mind this was smack bang in the middle of a massively prolonged and never-ending Bipolar episode so I had a lot of energy and an incredibly obsessive imagination)

At the time I couldn’t read books.  I tried everything from Jilly Cooper to Bret Easton Ellis and everything in between but the only thing I wanted to read was my own work.  My overactive Bernard the Bipolar brain convinced me the best thing to do with my furloughed time was to build myself a library.  

The disaster zone

It took me three whole days.  I lifted, I carried, I sorted and I got a chance to look at 38 years of an unstoppable imagination that I never gave enough credit. 

My library

I looked at the two novels I wrote back in the 90’s and the reams of short stories and countless other novels I had forgotten I’d ever written because they were the backing singers to something bigger.  I picked up the tattered notebooks I used to carry with me before mobile phones had memos.  I relived the memories of where those initial ideas came from and for the first time, instead of giving myself a hard time over what should have been and my lack of effort to get my work published, I actually shrugged my shoulders and I thought,

“This not about being published.  This is how I stayed alive.”

Before phones had memos

Standing on the shelves in my “office” are notebooks and folders that contain my own version of therapy.  I have hundreds of stories and pieces that contained my sadness and exposed my madness.  I have countless pages that are just daft scenarios I created simply to exercise my imagination.  They were childish expressions of a life I wanted but one I knew I would never live. 

So does it really matter that I’m not on a shelf in Waterstones?  Does it matter that the only eyes that will ever see my work are my own?  It might be a shame with some things but trust me, most of that stuff should probably never have left the pen in the first place.  I am not always consistent, I may not be very good.  I’m probably lazy and sometimes I have far too many ideas I want to write and these days I hardly ever finish the stories I start. 

I once had a vision of a life full of artsy friends and intelligent conversation and cultured weekends but really?  Let’s be honest now, I’m a kid from Bolton who got a raw deal and the only escape I had was to dream of a life where I wasn’t me and the most gratifying part of it was that I could make the lives of others miserable without hurting anyone real.

I am not what I thought I would become.  I haven’t grown into the writer I longed to be but now, when I look at my shelves I don’t see failure; I actually see someone who achieved something because I have more than just a couple of books, I have many books; I have my very own library.

The collection

Being a writer is not about being in print.  Being a writer is about having an imagination, its about putting the alphabet together, it’s about sentences, setting a scene, creating characters and becoming so immersed in something that it takes away the pain of what’s really going on in the world and making it that little bit easier to live with. 

When people tell me…

“I didn’t know what to get you, so I just got you a notebook.”

How is that not the most perfect present?  For Christmas Matt bought me a Paperchase voucher.  The other day he asked me what I’d bought and I said…

“A shit tonne of pens.”

…because being a writer is about enjoyment, it’s about opening a new notebook and trying not to cross out any words so your first page looks perfect.  It’s about clicking your new rollerball pen and setting it to work or flicking off that weird gluey ball at the tip of a fresh gel pen and watching the ink slide across the paper.  Writing is about working all day and riding the bus home reading what you wrote the night before.  It’s about sitting on the floor by the fire when is flippin freezing outside and writing about somewhere hot.  It’s about shoving a bunch of characters in a coffee shop with no social distancing rules, no masks and no Covid app asking you to track and trace where you’ve been; they can just drink coffee and if you’re really creative they can have a party without the rule of six!

I have never pretended to be something I am not.  My fiction is dreadful. I know it is!  With my hand on my heart I declare it now that I am no J.K Rowling and I wouldn’t want to be.  I am not Shakespeare, heck, I couldn’t handle the public attention.  I don’t know the difference between a novel and a novella, I barely know the difference between a noun and a verb and the worst part of it all?  Doing a degree in English literature has completely ruined my love for literature!  Now I can’t open a book without trying to see where the Oedipus Complex fits in to a Mills and Boon or if the concept of the Menage a Trois fits in with a teen fiction book I picked up in a charity shop. 

In the last two years I have educated myself on my writing.  My writing isn’t about publication…

(Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to turn Penguin away if they come knocking at my door…)

…it’s about survival, it’s about escapism, it always has been.  I’ve learnt that I can do whatever the hell I want with words because it doesn’t matter, they’re mine and I take ownership of everything that doesn’t make sense because at the time of writing it, I knew exactly what I meant. 

Sometimes the best advice has come from a character of my own creation and maybe this is the only way I can learn to take my own advice? 

Being Bipolar sucks.  Sometimes having a stoma is really annoying, but the worst thing that could ever happen to me is my imagination being taken away.  How would I keep myself entertained?  What would I spend my money on?  WHSmith’s would go out of business if it wasn’t for me buying Pukka pads and gel pens.  My friends and family would have to think of something else to buy me, God help them with that one.  What would I do with the shelves in my office? I’d have to read books again.  What would I do on holiday? Part of my whole holiday experience is tramping round the shops looking for cool notebooks with lines in them.

I’ve taught myself that a finished story doesn’t have to be finished.  You can resurrect your characters and give them a makeover. You can backtrack, move forward, there doesn’t have to be a realistic timeline because its all fiction, time doesn’t exist.

Resurrected characters

I don’t care that I’m not in print.  My terrible fiction gives me air, it’s my release, it’s a distraction from a world that everyone wants to get away from.  It’s not real life and that’s the beauty of being a writer, that ability to transport yourself from one place to another without leaving your house.

That’s writing…

…that’s the writer in me.

Dedicated to Milly. I wasn’t sure I could pull a blog off without you, but now that it’s written, this is for you. Be a good girl xx

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Reading time: 13 min

For years I’ve toyed with the idea of writing a blog but I never followed it through because there I always came up with a reason not to write about myself.  I haven’t done the travelling I wanted to do, I haven’t accomplished financial greatness and I haven’t had the romantic heartache that most girls were having from about the age of 11.  I have never tried drugs, I haven’t even smoked a cigarette, so yeah, why would anyone who has done all of those things and more want to sit and read anything about me?

Well writing a blog is a funny thing.  It’s only when you sit and start to write that you realise life isn’t always about the things I’ve just mentioned.  Its not all sex, drugs, travelling and cigarettes; you don’t have to be a CEO or have a Doctorate or speak and understand fifty languages to show people you’ve lived a life…

(NB – as I write this its 8:10pm and I’m making a note for myself to re-read that last sentence because I had a conversation with Mum earlier where I described the opposite so tomorrow I need to remind myself of this moment)

…sometimes life looks different for us, that’s why we’re…

“individuals”

In 1989 I was seven.  I only remember one thing about being seven and it wasn’t my birthday, it’s nothing to do with my friends or my toys or whatever me and brother got up to when we were playing in the street with the other kids.  No, the one thing I remember about being seven has to be the biggest discovery that no other seven-year-old can possibly have discovered.  It was a discovery that was both entertaining and an escape.  It played out like a gentle hum in the back ground of my younger years, it mapped out my teens, it created an unbreakable connection to one very special man and in 2016 a life long dream happened in a way I never imagined possible. 

What was the discovery?

Coronation Street

I’m sorry if it’s not what you expected and by all means log off the blog and I won’t be offended but if you are curious to know what the hell I’m on about then take a seat and I’ll tell you a story…

One night I switched on the TV (this is back when I was seven by the way) and the police walk into a house and tell a woman her husband has been stabbed and he’s died and obviously the woman is devastated but the most gobsmackingly astonishing moment of the scene is when the camera pans behind her and the son of the dead guy is listening on the stairs.  Shock horror.

Well I was gripped.  I didn’t know what this was.  Who were these people?  Who was the boy?  Why had the guy been stabbed?

The following day I went to see my grandparents and I was excitedly retelling this story to my grandad who informed me this little gem of televised discovery was Coronation Street.  I remember him filling me in on the characters and the storylines and he called it Corrie.  That in itself was just pure genius. 

When I was a kid I was lucky enough to have a TV in my bedroom.  Back in the 80’s and 90’s if you had a TV in your room you were royalty.  Well I didn’t feel like royalty but I got to watch Corrie whenever it was on and the next day I’d sit by my grandad’s chair and we’d talk about it and I’d sip the incredibly sweet tea from his mug that was as big as my head (I think he put about six sugars in there when I was really young) and I’d feel alive and it was a moment we shared all the way up to when he died in 2005.

My grandad was a saint, that’s how I felt.  He was the most beautiful man I have ever met in my entire life and I mean no offence to any other man in my life but even the characters I created in the stories I wrote and still write, were never a patch on the man my grandad was.

I left home at 18 to go to university and this time I had no TV with me.  Every day at 6pm my grandad would ring my mobile and he would read to me the notes he’d taken from the last episode of Coronation Street.  When I moved to Edinburgh to work the Fringe Festival we would work our phone call around my crazy shifts.  When I was in hospital with a crippling bout of Bernard the Bipolar my grandad would find all the change he had in his house and give it to me so I could call him on the pay phone on the ward and he would read every episode of Corrie to me so that wherever I was in the country or even out of my mind, I never missed a single thing that happened on Coronation Street.

December 2016, I’d been married for about a month, we’d been living in our house for just over a year, I was a Volunteer Employment Ambassador for Bipolar UK and I’d been doing my public speaking thing for almost two years but there was nothing much to shout about.

I have no idea where I was when I got the call but I was definitely in a car when Sandra from Bipolar UK called me and asked if I could go to ITV at Media City with her on Friday and meet with some writers who were doing a storyline with a new character who has Bipolar.  I asked her which soap – casually, obviously – she says…. Yeah you guessed it…

Coronation Street

Well as you can imagine, I lost all sense of decorum and any volume control on my voice completely went off the scale but, seriously! Don’t throw Corrie into the ballpark and expect me not to throw it right back out! Please.  But then she says…

“Now you can’t tell anyone about this Kat.  It has to be completely confidential we may even have to sign something to make sure we don’t talk about it.”

“Yeah, yeah, absolutely, that’s no problem.  I won’t say a word.”

Well there were at least two other people in the car that day so that was that promise out of the window!  But in the lead up to that day I swear I didn’t tell anyone else that I was going to ITV to speak some writers about Bipolar.  I swear…

You know how kids get on Christmas Eve when Santa is going to creepily break into their home, eat the contents of their parents fridge and then leave them a stack load of presents before he goes off to an infinite number of other houses and does the exact same thing?  Picture that level of excitement… because that was me the night before I went to the ITV studios.  I was a just like a kid on Christmas Eve.

Admittedly some aspects of that day are a little blurred.  I had to look like a professional, I was supposed to advise these writers (the verbal geniuses of my most favourite soap in the world) on how to conduct a realistic representation of my illness. 

Anyone who knows me well knows my ultimate dream growing up was to be a writer, I wanted to write for Coronation Street.  By this point, at the age of 34 I knew I was never going to achieve that and this is the opportunity so much.  Bernard has prevented me from doing so much with my life, if things had been different maybe I could have fulfilled that dream, we’ll never know; but this was the next best thing.

That first visit we were given lunch.  It was a buffet.  Heck.  I hate buffets.  Give me a plate full of food and I’ll eat it but for God’s sake don’t ask me to queue up in a strange environment behind all these creative professionals and expect me to somehow not stick out like a sore thumb.

Buffets are like first dates.  Why do people go out for meals on a first date?  You’re nervous so you can’t eat or you’re so self-conscious you feel like you shouldn’t eat, or maybe if you do you’ll drip sauce down your new top or you’ll get lettuce stuck in your teeth.  Buffets are the same.  If you put too much on your plate you’re greedy but you have to put something on there because otherwise you’ll be weird and ungrateful.  I went for minimal sustenance.

So we go into this room and it is exactly like you’ve seen on TV.  Massive room filled with tables in a large square and they’re covered with white cloths, so I also can’t spill anything off my plate because then I’m messy as well as everything else.  The room fills up with people, they smile and nod and they eat their lunch and once the room is to full capacity there’s a man sitting next to me and he introduces Sandra and me and explains we’re from Bipolar UK.  Sandra talks about the charity and I have no idea what she’s saying because all I’m doing is looking around the room at the people wearing funky glasses, quirky tops with stripes and they’re the exact replica of what I wanted to be when I was growing up.  At some point they opened up their MacBook Pros, switched on their iPads and in my head I’m thinking…

“I still write in a Moleskin and think it’s cool.”

I look down at my plate baring a king prawn next to a slice of cucumber expertly curled and a cherry tomato that keeps running away from the fork shaking in my hand and I know full well, there’s no way that food is meeting my mouth in this room.

That room was my dream.  In that room I told myself that even though I hadn’t achieved what I wanted to, I was part of something so big I could never describe to anyone how it big it really felt.

I imagine to the writers in that room, it was just another storyline.  Just another bunch of characters they had to find dialogue for.  The thing is, when you’re putting a label like Bipolar on a character you have to get it right.  If you get it wrong and you upset the audience you’ll lose that audience and the whole show falls apart.  That’s why they ask real people to go in and tell them what the illness is really like. 

I’m a co-facilitator for the Manchester Bipolar UK support group and every month (pre-Covid) I always stress that everyone’s Bipolar is different.  You’ll never get two people the same so getting a character to represent an illness and also be an individual is tricky. 

I got to tell them my facts.  I got to show them the way to introduce the character so that they didn’t anger every Bipolar person in the country.  They laughed when I talked, they thought I was funny.  Someone in the room casually said…

“I think you should be sitting here”

…and I thought…

“Yes, I probably should.”

How do you go back to your office job on Monday having been in that room?  How you copy and paste and click send into countless emails after you’ve been with a bunch of writers who you should be sat next to not in front of?

Reality sucks…

Wednesday 5th March 2017

Let’s cut to the chase.  Sandra and I were invited to go back to the ITV studios, only this time it’s a little different.  This time we’re meeting with the researcher, two producers and the actress playing the Bipolar character; Connie Hyde.

(Little bit of filling the grey bits in for those who don’t know, Connie was playing Gina who is Sally Metcalfe’s sister)

Believe it or not this was less intimidating than the square table situation.  While we were waiting to be greeted in the lobby Eileen walks past and then Rita from The Cabin waves bye to the receptionist and then Ken gets in to a really flashy car and all of this just blows my mind because I have never been any good with celebrities. Star struck just doesn’t cover it.

Dominic the researcher took us up to the canteen for lunch, this time I got wise and said I was too excited to eat (I said I was less intimidated, I didn’t say I was composed), he did manage to make me a cup of tea and I wondered if I could take the ITV mug home with me (I didn’t).  Sandra was talking away and I looked around and in one corner Eva was laughing with Peter Barlow, a few tables down Gail was eating a sandwich and then in walked Audrey and I just thought…

“How the hell am I going to look normal?”

People always tell me…

“You know celebrities are human, they poo and wee just like the rest of us.”

Yeah, I know that.  But right at that moment, when Rita walked past me she looked exactly the same as she does on screen, just perfect and I tried to tell myself that she is just like me only I kept thinking, her poos are probably golden!  I’d been watching her on my television for 27 years, I’d seen practically every husband, every bad choice, every humorous comment she’d made within that time, the woman was royalty! So how was I going to conduct myself in a professional and sensible fashion when I was smiling like an animated Meerkat on speed!

I have no idea how we got to the next part of the building.  I remember shaking hands, I remember smiling and being shy but trying not to be because I’m trying to portray this punk-ass public speaker type image to show people I’ve achieved something even though I’m the one in the room with the diagnosis.  Sandra’s the messenger, she’s the one who tells people the facts but she doesn’t have the real insight into the illness, that’s my job.  I’m the one who has to tell the story and try and show these people all angles of my condition because remember, no-one is the same and while I can’t represent everyone who has the disorder, I am in that room to represent myself, at least.

The room overlooked the whole of Media City. Everything was calm, it was all still and strangely, so was my heart.  It’s a funny thing being me.  I freak out and then something in me just changes.  Like going on stage before I do a talk.  In the lead up to it I question myself a million times,

“Why are you doing this?”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Why are you doing this?”

And then, right before I step on the stage I think to myself…

“…because there’s a reason for it…”

Everyone has dreams, writing was always mine, but I was not a writer I wanted to be and I’ve always felt that Bernard took that away from me.  Yet here I was using the one thing that takes no prisoners and destroys everything in its path; the thing that has almost ended my life on so many occasions and I’m about to use it to influence a television program and a whole team behind it into creating a realistic representation of Bipolar Disorder.  The very thing I would kick to the curb in a heartbeat.

That was the reason behind my sense of calm.  My job wasn’t to write but I was still there to tell a story.

When Connie Hyde walked into the room she had a folder in her arms.  She shook my hand as she sat down in front of me and she opened up the folder.  Sandra went through the technicalities of the illness… and then the floor was mine.  

I’d be lying if I said I can remember what Connie asked me but I remember she started to write.  I gave her my story.  I told her how Bernard came about, I told her about all the weird things I’ve experienced, the obsessions with drag queens and swans, the compulsion to save the world, the six admissions to locked psychiatric wards, losing friends, losing myself, losing hope.

I remember looking directly at Connie, into her kind eyes and at her pen as she wrote down my words.  I remember glancing to my left and one of the producers was crying when I told them that the system gave up on me and my life was deemed pointless.  Then she laughed when I told them all that I’d achieved everything they said I never could, I even touched my face with my left hand so they could see my wedding band to prove it.

That room was incredible.  The feeling was indescribable.  Who would believe this?  It was so far off the scale that even though I was there I wasn’t sure if it was really happening.

When we filed out of the room I handed Connie my business card.  It was my first business card, the one before the website, before the blog, before anything really.  Sandra panicked and wanted any contact to go through the charity but it wasn’t about drumming up business or staying in contact, it was about proof.  I wanted her to have something to remember me.  I thought maybe if she was struggling to get into character or she needed a reminder of the face behind one version of the illness, then she could look at my face on my business card and remember who told her their story.  I wanted her to remember that even though her role was a work of fiction, it was real for someone.

I think the most difficult thing about this process was not being able to tell anyone.  God that was hard!  It’s like someone sitting on a wasp and then telling them not to move.  It’s practically impossible. 

When Gina walked onto the cobbles and the monthly meeting of the Bipolar group came round I knew one of the topics of discussion would be the latest Coronation Street storyline.  By this point I could tell everyone and everything that I’d been part of the process and I’m not going to lie, I told that story with a smile as wide as slice of watermelon!

But it’s a sad moment when you’re revealing your best kept secret and you realise 90% of the room question why it was you who had been picked to go.  The simple fact is I’m an ambassador in the north west and that’s it.  It’s the charity’s red tape, it’s just geography, it’s nothing personal and it’s not about picking favourites; I was just local.

The best thing about being part of the…I guess you can say…storyline or maybe the plot, was sitting in my living room watching it play out and the actions on the screen mirrored the things I’d talked about.  I was proud of the writers because they showed they’d listened to what I had to say and I’d been taken seriously in a world where that’s sometimes difficult.

There’s one thing that I loved about watching Gina on my TV, it was like watching me.  I don’t know if it was intentional or if I’ve seen something that wasn’t really there but so many people asked me if Gina’s obsession with dogs on plates was a representation of my love for swans? If it was, I’ll take it!

I’m not going to lie; I was gutted when Corrie didn’t take Gina’s story to the heights that it could have gone.  They could have shown the soap world how to really do a Bipolar storyline because there was so much they could have done with it.  Maybe they forgot about it amongst all the other storylines?  Maybe they changed their minds or maybe they were doing what I try to do, prove to the world that you can live well with a mental illness.  Who knows? 

I wrote an article for Bipolar UK’s magazine Pendulum about my involvement with the show and I sent it to Connie.  Over the last couple of years we’ve had a couple of messages here and there and that’s been nice, every message she tells me I helped her and inspired her but I can’t take the credit for her work.  The day we met she looked as though she wanted to get her character right.  She wanted to portray Bipolar Disorder realistically because it’s so easy to get it wrong and I know she’s reading this because I asked for permission name drop her; so I want everyone to know that she did a damn good job playing Gina and should she ever return to the cobbles, I’ll be glued to my telly like a mask that sticks to your face when you breathe in. 

When I started public speaking being an inspiration never entered my mind, I just wanted to tell my story in the hope that people would listen.  It’s incredible how many doors its opened, it’s given me so many opportunities that I still find unimaginable.

I haven’t travelled the world but I’ve had some damn good holidays.  I’m not rich but I can pay my mortgage. I’ve never had my heart broken and I count myself lucky in that department.  I may never have tried drugs or smoked a cigarette but come on, have you seen what those things do to people? 

When I started writing the blog I didn’t know if I had anything people could relate to.  I didn’t think I had anything that people would want to read about, I felt like I had nothing and I’d achieved nothing.  But what is an achievement?

Is it buying a fast car and having a posh job?  Is it being able to buy expensive jewellery because you’ve earned the money to do it?  Is that what is says in the dictionary?  Are those the things it lists?

You can label it whichever way you want to but in reality the definition of achievement can’t always be found in the dictionary.  Sometimes we have to define achievement according to how we live our lives as an individual.  No two Bipolar people are the same and that goes for human beings in general.  We spend so much time comparing ourselves to others and talking ourselves out of things that we don’t realise we could be missing out on something wonderful if we were just brave enough to take that chance and see what’s out there.

These days I think outside of the box.  I gave up trying to be something I’m not a long time ago and I’m happier now than I ever was because I set my own goals and, if I reach them I tick them off a list because maybe achievement is about never giving up. 

Maybe achievement is about trying to live life the way we want to and seeing what comes our way.  Maybe its about trying not to be afraid.  Maybe its about throwing caution to the wind and embracing a cloud to get to the sun that eventually breaks through.

Maybe achievement is simple.  Maybe it’s about taking a risk and accidentally falling into your childhood dream and even though it looks different to the way you wanted it to, you can still make an old man proud…

Dedicated to Albert Patrick Mullineux

And thank you to Connie Hyde

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Reading time: 21 min

We all poo.  Whether we like to admit it or not we have to get rid of the meals we’ve eaten, because let’s face it; what goes in, must come out.

I know as I write this there will be people thinking…

“She shouldn’t have written this…”

“No one wants to know about anyone else’s bowel movements…”

“There are some things that you just don’t talk about!”

But isn’t that the whole point of this blog?  Isn’t that whole point of me doing the things I do and saying the things I say?

I never asked for Bipolar and I never asked for a stoma but this is what I have and there’s nothing I can do to change it; so to echo my own mantra, all I’m doing here is making the best of a bad situation in the hope that some good might come out of it. 

Pre- Stoma 2007

Today this isn’t about mental illness, today this is about poo; I’m sorry, but like I said we all do it and maybe it’s something we shouldn’t be shy about.  No one bats an eyelid when people talk about growing a baby and childbirth…

“It’s the most natural thing a woman can do.”

“The human body is so amazing to be able to create a brand-new human being.”

I agree. It’s true.  However, people fail to realise that a human’s ability to poo is also the most natural thing the body can do and it dictates how that person lives.  The most incredible thing about the body is its ability to process food and excrete it.  I can’t say it enough…

we all do it.

Its a common misconception that the rich and famous don’t go to the toilet because they are too beautiful but lets set the record straight right now…

Chris Hemsworth does it…

So does Harry Styles…

Zac Efron does it…and if you think Megan Fox doesn’t poo, you’re mistaken…

…because so does Jessica Alba…

And as for Arianna Grande…she’s not that tiny for no reason, she has to poo just like the rest of them.

This is not for the faint hearted, if you can’t talk bodily functions then the door is where you left it, turn right around and walk back through it because I am not going to apologise for anything I write on this one.

So let’s cut to the chase, why do I crap in a bag and how did it get to this point?

Constipation, that’s all it was.  I couldn’t poo. As a kid I’d go for days without going to the toilet.  I’d get back ache, stomach-ache, eating was a nightmare because everything was backed up with a week’s worth of chewed up meals.  Sometimes I’d get so blocked I’d throw up and sitting on plastic chairs at school was horrendous. 

When I was thirteen I hadn’t been to the toilet for around two weeks.  The pain was so bad my mum took me to the doctors who said there was something wrong with my Appendix but because they hadn’t burst there was no need to go to hospital.  A few days later the pain stepped it up a notch so Mum took me to A&E.  The doctor there was about to admit me until he realised there was nothing wrong with my Appendix, I just needed to go to the toilet.

Skip forward to 2010 when Bernard the Bipolar brain was rocking my world and my psychiatrist prescribed Quetiapine.  He ran through the side effects with me and I remember constipation was one of them, I waved away his comments and said…

“Oh I get that anyway, I’m used to it.”

But this is where the journey really started because he wasn’t wrong, my existing problem got a whole lot worse.  Bernard went back in his box and closed the lid but the nightmare of Connie constipation was playing out like a horror film with all the anticipation of fear but no scary resolution. 

The GP said…

“Eat more fruit and vegetables…”

But it didn’t work.  They said…

“There’s no cure for constipation.  It has to be managed with laxatives.”

And boy did I try them all…

Colon cleanse

Lactulose

Senna

Senna max strength

Dulcolax

Fybogel

Movicol

Bisacodyl

Picolax

Peanut enema

Laxido

Exlax

Colax

Fruits & Fibres Chewable cubes

Califig – I could drink up to a bottle of that a day

Suppositories

Then I tried all the seeds and supplements you can imagine but nothing helped.  It just got worse; pain, bloating, trapped wind and all I could do to ease the pain was have two hot water bottles, one at my back and one pressed between the desk and me trying to ease the pain of an air bubble that couldn’t pass through because there a mountain of fibrous fruit and veg standing in its way.

I was referred to a specialist, had a colonoscopy (that was fun), but the alleged cure he gave me didn’t help.  I went back to him a year later because the GP just said increase the laxido.  I was taking eight sachets a day when the limit was four and it still wasn’t helping.  He said…

“I’ve done everything I can… so I’m sending to a specialist unit at Wythenshawe hospital.  You’ll probably need a bag.”

This is probably someone’s worst nightmare.  Poo comes out of your bum, it’s not supposed to come out anywhere else but I wasn’t fazed by this; within about 20 seconds I already knew this was the only solution to get rid of Connie constipation.

Then shit got real.  After 32 years of people telling me to eat more fruit and veg and take more laxatives on top of more laxatives, suddenly I was actually being taken seriously. 

I walked in to the Gastroenterology department like a deer in the headlights.  How was this going to be any different to the GP telling me to eat more apples? How could I convince these people that I was at the end of the road and I couldn’t take any more?  I was taking 10 senna tablets on top of 6 sachets of Laxido and at least 12 Buscopan doses a day to try and cancel out the trapped wind. 

I never cried about my situation, I never shed a tear because if Connie was anything like Bernard and it wasn’t going away, then all I could do was deal with it.  

So I sat in the waiting room and I looked at the people around me and I thought to myself…

“This is what the last chance saloon looks like.”

I didn’t care who saw me, doctor, trainee, top dog surgeon or a banana farmer because I had no expectations, at this point all I’d had was a stack load of false hope and disappointment so when a twenty-something year old guy stepped into the waiting room with a folder in his hand, said my name wrong and smiled, I smiled back because even though he looked about twelve, he looked kind.

Dr Heywood

In the consultation room he opened up the folder baring the referral letter from the specialist and he looked at me and said…

“I used to work with Dr Loganathan.  He’s sent you to the right place.”

After that I can’t really remember what he asked me and I have no idea what I told him, but twenty minutes in he left the room and came back two minutes later with the top dog surgeon, Miss Telford.  I could tell instantly that she was not a woman who messed around; she knew what she wanted and she knew what to do in order to get it. 

She sat on a chair in front of me that had the height of a foot stool and she looked at me over her reading glasses, then she looked at the notes Dr Heywood had written and then back into my terrified eyes and said…

“We can definitely help you.”

I can’t explain it, that feeling of something so beyond relief whatever you want to say or however you try to say it, no one will understand because you’ll never be able to recreate that one single moment where you start to see there is light in the darkness.

That moment, hearing her words was like hearing the voices of a thousand angels singing and they were saying…

“Now you can cry.”

Treatment for any kind of health condition mental or physical is never straightforward and it’s never a short journey.  I had to have the most bizarre tests and investigations that I’d never heard of and to this day I wonder to myself…

“Who the hell came up with that one?”

Now if you can’t handle this next bit, look away because this is not for the squeamish.  I mean it, look away now because it is not pretty. 

I had to have balloons inflated into my bum to see how strong the muscles were, it turns out my muscles no longer worked.  I had to swallow 100 teeny tiny plastic pieces and then have an X-ray to see how fast they travelled. I had to stay in hospital for a day where I ate a meal of Smash and beans and had to blow into a tube like a drunk driver every half an hour to see how long it took to digest the meal over an 8 hour period.  It never digested.   I had to drink two cups of Barium Swallow in thirty minutes, it’s vile; it tastes like chalk with mixed with water, and sit in an elevated chair in front of a camera while people yelled at me and told me to clench my bum cheeks but then realised I couldn’t because I had no rectal muscles, a prolapse and a growth where I’d complained about a pain but it was never taken seriously.

When the nice young doctor asked if I would take part in some research he was doing I agreed because he’d been so nice and so helpful and I thought it was a…

“…you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours…”

…kind of situation.  But if I’d known it was going to be two very young and admittedly handsome doctors stuffing balloons up my jacksy that wouldn’t stay up there, I probably would have said no.  A lesson learned.

I have to say, at this point everything was laughable; it was the most bizarre situation I had ever been in and I had to work all the tests around my working week and the only saving grace was to be able to offload all of these ridiculous tales to my desk buddy Jayne, you may not realise it but you made the situation so much better.  Had I sat next to someone with a poo phobia, I know it would have been a very different story.

At this point it’s April 2016 and I’m supposed to walk down the aisle in seven months time.  Miss Telford tells me all of the crazy tests point to the only solution being an Ileostomy, so in technical terms they bring out a tiny blob of your small intestines which becomes the Stoma, it bypasses your colon and you poo from your tummy.

I wanted it done.  I wanted it quick so that I could have some kind of normal life.  I’d have cancelled my wedding.  I didn’t care, I was in that much pain I was willing to give up the dress and the day and disappoint every single person on the invite list so that I could get my squidgy blob and I’ll admit right here, right now, in front of everyone who came to my wedding that I was devastated when Miss Telford said…

“Get married first, then we’ll do it.”

Unless you know what it’s like to need an operation for something you’ve lost your grip on, you’ve no idea what it’s like to have  to wait twelve months for it.  All I could think was…

“What if I’m walking down the aisle and I have to turn back because I need a poo?”

“What if I don’t make it?”

“What if I make a mess of my dress?”

“How the hell do you poo in a wedding dress?”

But time stops for no one.  Life still goes on around us even though we might not want it to. Even though I really just wanted to stay at home and lie in bed where I was only a few steps away from the toilet, because at this point if I needed the loo there was no warning, there was no suggestion of it happening, it was a case of…

“Hi honey I’m hooooommmme”

And I had about five seconds to find the nearest toilet and hope I got to it in time.

People used to say that they never knew I was ill, they could never tell that I needed an operation or that I was in pain; when they saw the hot water bottles they just thought I was unusually cold.  I’m a good actress, I can pull the wool over most eyes but now I’d like to apologise.  I’d like to apologise to all the girls at STA who had to share the three cubicle toilet with me.  When you thought you heard a trombone to your left or a tuba to your right, it was me.

To anyone who walked past the franking machine and thought someone had chopped a body up and hidden it in the cupboard where we kept the bubble wrap, that was no dead body, that was me.

I’d like to apologise to my parents in law who have always been unbelievably kind but when I stayed at your house for the first time in 2013 and my bowel decided to work unexpectedly, I blamed the smell on Matt but it wasn’t Matt; it was me.

To everyone at BAND before the move from the YMCA, when I ducked out of your training sessions without time for an apology, it was me using all that toilet roll.

To the guy who pulled his jumper over his nose on the Trans Pennine Express to Edinburgh, I lied when I said…

“I think the guy before me ate something dodgy.”

It wasn’t a guy… it was me and I didn’t eat anything dodgy.

I apologise with my hand on my heart to the two old ladies at the North West Regional Speaking Competition for the Association of Speaking Clubs, you would have thought the fancy hotel would have more than two toilets for us to use and I really did think that you wouldn’t smell my eight day old poop over the half a bottle of Anais Anais you’d doused yourself in that morning.

I’m sorry to everyone who ever encountered my bowel movements. To the houses I went to, the shops I mooched in, the cafe’s I ate in, whatever you saw, whatever you smelt … it was me. It was all me.

It’s the 11th May 2017.  It’s surgery day.  It’s bye bye old life, hello new one! It’s farewell to sitting next to the toilet at work, it’s a shrug of the carefree shoulders to planning out the daily dose of laxatives depending on how close the nearest loo is. 

You have no idea what this operation meant to me.  People thought I was crazy; how could I be happy about this?  How could I want this?  Was there really no other option?   

Truth be told, I didn’t care what anyone else thought, it was no one else’s business.  I’d had 12 months to get my head around the idea of having a stoma, a squidgy blob poking out of my tummy.  A little red thing that looked like a weird willy. 

I had to cope with this somehow because there was no chance of a reversal and this was going to be with me for the rest of my life so I gave it a name.  I had this weird idea that if I gave it a character and a personality I could be friends with it, I could love it like I love any of my friends and it would make it easier to look at and to live with.

“Wilomena”

The first time I looked at her after the op she moved, like a little worm with a big head and I thought…

“Oh dear lord, why the hell is it moving?”

It’s the weirdest thing to get your head around.  You no longer poo out of your bum.  You don’t pump out of it either.  Literally nothing comes out of there because it all comes out of your stoma.  It pumps, it poops and it moves like your rectal muscles should.  It’s the same game but you don’t have to rush to the toilet because your toilet is attached to you.  And when I walk through the street and I feel my bag and it’s got last night’s meal in it I can smile with joy and I think to myself…

“Here I am, just shitting in the street.”

I love Wilomena; she has given me my life back and now there is laughter where there was once sadness.  I am endlessly amused by the unfortunate burps and raspberries she makes and I am thankful to my desk buddy James for finding it funny and embracing it when other people were horrified.  Thankyou for feeding her tea when she pushed my mug across the desk (oh yeah, sorry that was me).

Thank you to Nathan Langton for inviting me on your podcast back in August.  I spend my life talking about mental health and living with a mental illness but no one ever wants to talk about poo.  You have no idea how much the 45 minutes of poo related airtime meant to me.  The freedom, the laughter and being able to go into intricate detail about a stoma to someone who has never heard of one was liberating.

Sh!T Talk and Banter

I don’t look ill anymore, I have freedom, I don’t take laxatives and I’ve taken about 6 Buscopan tablets in the last three years. 

But sometimes life doesn’t always go to plan.  It likes to throw you those curveballs at every opportunity, so here’s a letter to Wilomena to finish things off…

Dearest Wilomena,

I’m sorry I sneezed. I’m sorry this made my stomach muscles flop and collapse but it really wasn’t my intention to cause either of us any harm.

I’m sorry we only had 16 months of matrimonial happiness.  I’m sorry that you get tired. I’m sorry that something in there is wrong and it’s changing the shape of your face.  I’m sorry you look like a really ugly tennis ball and I’m sorry you get the blame for all the pain; I know it’s not your fault.

I know we had a CT scan yesterday and that was an experience of its own but whatever the results are, if we have to part ways and another stoma takes your place just know that I have loved you.  If we have a hernia and Miss Telford can fix it so that we can stay together, you should know I will always love you. 

And if nothing can be done, if we remain in pain and you’re still as ugly as sin, don’t worry my dearest Willy, we will get through it together; the way we always do.

Lots of Love

Katerini

Post stoma – 2017
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Reading time: 17 min

We all say things we don’t mean.  We say things that we think are funny but no one else does.  We might be that unfortunate soul who doesn’t realise that the person we’ve said something to isn’t laughing because they’re crying on the inside. 

It sounds like every time I write one of these I’m complaining about life.  I’m giving airtime to the troubles I should have put to bed a long time ago.  Maybe that’s true, perhaps I am dwelling on the past and I’m being a pessimist about the future and maybe I’m reading too much into the present.  Whatever your thoughts are, if you stick around then I appreciate your patience and I am thankful to you for giving up your time to read another one of my “whinges.”

I was in my last job for 11 years.  I walked into that office thinking this was my first full time permanent job, I was a commuter and back in 2009 the sardine can train was worth it because I was on my way to being the adult I never thought I would be.

It’s no secret and I’ve said it often enough in the last 5 years that back in 2002 a social worker told me my mental illness was too serious for me to finish my degree.  They said I would never work, not part time or full time and I would never have a romantic relationship because a girl with Bipolar was not good marriage material.  Well I don’t like being told what I can and can’t do and everyone should know by now that even though I took those words to heart and I initially abided by the suggestion of a solitary life, I didn’t do it for long.

I’d never been in an office environment where I wasn’t a temp or I wasn’t covering someone or the temporary hands on deck person that was tossed to the side when the Christmas period was over.  I wanted to make this work, I wanted to be the best version of myself and shine!

That’s what I wanted.  What I did was a very different story.  I walked into the office and I shrivelled up like a flippin prune.  I was a fish out of water.  I went all shy, I retreated into my own little world and I have no idea what people thought of me at that time but I knew it wasn’t the image I’d wanted to project. 

I was doing a 12 hour day, leaving the house at 7am and rolling in at 7pm.  I was tired, I was worn out and I wasn’t even getting any job satisfaction because when you think people don’t like you, what kind of satisfaction can you take home with you?

I know everyone who works gets tired, it’s just the nature of working life, it’s not designed to be easy.  But not everyone was trying to conceal a mental illness that takes up more energy than you can imagine.  Not everyone was on 20mg of Olanzapine and various other psychiatric drugs, heavily sedated and trying to prove a point that a normal life could be achieved if you just worked at it.

I went to bed at 9pm.  I rose at 6am.  I said no to virtually every Christmas meal, every spontaneous night out and if anyone left the team for pastures new I said good bye to them in the office because what was the point in sticking around in Manchester when all I would be thinking is

“What time will it be when I get home?”

As the years went by in that job, I like to think that people liked me.  I like to think they saw my quirky side, that I could be a bit silly but I was also sincere, even when I made up a lie in order to avoid another social gathering. 

In all honesty Bipolar disorder is not a walk in the park.  When it comes to medication it’s not like taking paracetamol.  It’s not a cure.  It makes the symptoms take a backseat, they are masked, they give your brain a rest and they make everyday living so much easier.  Every single one of my Bipolar friends will tell you that medication is just one aspect of living a positive life with a mental illness, another aspect of it is management.  What I didn’t realise for so many years was that just because you take your meds it doesn’t mean you can live like the rest of the world, just as someone with Diabetes will inject their insulin, it doesn’t mean they can go to the shop and eat 5 snickers bars and can of full sugar coke.

People don’t realise that mental illness is a massive ball ache to manage.  With Bipolar Disorder I have to have a regular and strict routine.  Sleep is 100% a key factor in staying well.  If you’re Bipolar and you don’t sleep, you can kiss goodbye to the normality of your thinking patterns.  I get creative, I think if I can’t sleep I obviously don’t need it.  I get racing thoughts, my eyes play tricks on me and my whole world that I’ve worked by backside off to achieve falls down around me like a sack of mouldy potatoes with no where else to go.   

When you’ve been in hospital 6 times, twice facing being sectioned if you don’t comply, when you’ve seen some of the things I’ve seen people do behind the locked door of a psychiatric ward then trust me, the second you realise the life of a normal person who can party like a rock star isn’t possible because you need to take the beast of Bipolar in hand; then you’ll realise the kindest thing you can do for yourself is to question if you really want to repeat the cycle of self-destruction just because the rest of the world thinks you’re boring and you should just enjoy yourself because life is just too short….Well yes, life is too short, it’s even shorter when you’re living part of it on a Bolton psychiatric ward losing weeks and months of time trying to discover what reality actually looks like because believe me, when you find your way back into the real world you will never get back the time you have lost.

Try having a physical condition on top of a mental one.  Try having a bowel that doesn’t work and the doctors just keep saying drink plenty, eat more fibre and increase your dose of senna.  Try needing an operation for an Ileostomy and having to wait 12 months for it and while you’re waiting you have to sit by the door in the office so you can get to the toilet in time.  Try having to use two hot water bottles at work because you’re in too much pain and intense heat is the only thing that helps.

I love my stoma, I really do and I never need to worry about where the nearest toilet is because it’s now attached to me. But 1 year later tell me how you feel when you sneeze and you feel something inside you drop.  Tell me how you feel when the stoma nurse tells you your stomach muscles have collapsed and that’s just what happens when you have keyhole surgery.  Tell me what your reaction is when your stoma changes shape and becomes the size of tennis ball.  What do you do about the pain?  What do you do when you have to push hard on your stoma because there’s a bulge around it and you know it’s a partial parastomal hernia but the stoma nurse says it’s nothing because your tummy always sticks out when you’ve had abdominal surgery.  When the GP says you need to lose weight what do you do?

What do you do?

Well if you’re me you just get on with it.  You suck it up because there’s no other alternative.

I tell myself I’ve been through worse.  Bipolar is way harder than anything Wilomena can throw at me.  So what if it hurts 90% of the time? Who cares if it feels like someone has their hand inside my gut and is twisting my intestines like they’re doing a tug of war? 

Sometimes the world fails us, the NHS has had so much praise over the last few months and hats off to them they’re making the best out of a bad situation, but sometimes the NHS fails us and all we’re left with is to make the best out of our own bad situation because the reality of it is, if I crumble, if I flounder and if I fall, there is no mortgage fairy and time does not stop ticking just because my mind takes a ride on the Ferris wheel of Bipolar chaos.  Life does stop to consider its options when Wilomena decides she’s having a bad day and there’s nothing you can do for the pain except lie flat and that really isn’t an option when you’re sat at a desk all day.

I’ve been through worse…

…what do I do?

I make adjustments.  I turn up the volume and I do my best at life.

When I lost my job in the summer I didn’t fight to keep it.  It was time to move on anyway so I pulled my finger out and I signed up to every job site there was going and I applied for anything I thought I could do. 

I applied for jobs that I were too far away, underpaid, overpaid, a pipe dream, too few hours, too many hours.  Caught up in a Covid world of uncertainty I never imagined I’d fall on my feet.  I got a job that I really do love.  It’s less hours, there’s no commute and I’m in love with the people.  But you know what?  Nothing has changed.  I still have Bipolar and a massively problematic stoma.  I’m still tired and I still get pain. 

So if I have to start getting ready for bed at 8pm I’m sorry.  I’m sorry this makes me boring, I’m sorry you think that because it’s the weekend you think I should

“Live a little”

But regardless of what day of the week it is, nothing has changed.

Try taking 3 mood stabilisers all of them at a high dose.  Try to manage your tiredness and all the other side effects that, believe it or not you can live with because hospital is a much worse place to be.   Try analysing your every thought every second of the day to ensure you’re on the right planet.  Try praying that every stoma twinge is not going to turn into an infection because you haven’t got the time for it and you don’t want to go into hospital when its rife with Covid. 

So if you think I’m boring, if I’m not the person you want me to be and my lifestyle doesn’t match up to what you think it should; then I’m sorry.  I have never used being Bipolar or having a stoma as a reason not to do something and yes they are the reason I live my life the way that I do, but going to bed early, not drinking, not having late nights and all the over thinking; you have to understand, it’s not holding me back from life, the routine isn’t a punishment or a sacrifice; it’s just…

…damage control…

…it’s just me looking after myself so that I can go to Josh Groban concerts.  I go easy so that should Covid ever take a break I can invite a friend over for a curry and a chocolate cake we probably shouldn’t eat.  

All of this is so that I can meet my friends for coffee after work.  I do this so that I can go to work every day.  If I work I can pay for a holiday where I can take stupid selfies, eat ice cream and do doggy paddle in the infinity pool like a pro because I was never any good at breast stroke.  I can have my moment of Hollywood fame where I act out the priceless moment of getting out of the pool like a supermodel but it turns into a scene from Jaws where I look like I’m being dragged back in by a frenzied shark. But my favourite part is lying on a sun lounger with my ostomy bag basking in the scorching sun and everyone else is staring like its an alien and I’m just like…

“Yeah, I crap in a bag, what of it?”

My daily routine is dull as dishwater so that I can stand up in front of a crowded room and say…

“…this is how I do it and as dramatic as it might sound, this is how I’m alive.”

I am who I am because I take control.  Sometimes I loosen reigns, sometimes I try to fit too much into the few hours that we get during the day and sometimes I don’t do enough. 

…but everything I do, every technicality of the routine I call damage control is so that I can be the best version of myself. 

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Reading time: 11 min

How do I sum up something in the briefest of ways without taking up too much of your time but also having the space to give you a big enough impression of what my younger years were like?

I hate to dwell on my younger years.  I don’t like to give my childhood too much “air time” because it’s not something I can change.  What is it they say on Love Island?

“It is what it is.”

I don’t want my childhood to define me, but the trouble with growing up is, whether we like it or not, it’s shapes us.  It moulds us into the adults that we become.  We go from impressionable children to grown up humans who have choices…do we become the worst version of ourselves?  Or do we become the best?

I grew up in a sociologically approved nuclear family; two children, and two parents.  We appeared to the outside world to be the perfect family.  My parents were hard working , my Mum was an Assistant Head Teacher at a secondary school in a unit for hearing impaired children. My Dad started out as a mechanic and I knew from a very young age how hard he worked because his hands and fingernails were always black with oil and grease that no amount of scrubbing could ever clear.

My Dad was rarely in the family home and my younger brother and I were always told that he was “driving”.  This meant that he was out doing long haul driving trips from one end of the country to the other in forklift trucks and he would be gone for days…but I never missed him.  Whenever he was off on one of his “driving” trips it was a relief because it was respite because he ran our house like a military camp. 

The first thing I ever did wrong was be born a girl.  In Greek families the first born is expected to be born a boy, I never got to understand the reasons why but whatever they were I had already disappointed him before I even had the chance to learn how to talk.

I grew up with so many rules and regulations that I didn’t realise until I was around 14 or 15 that my friends and my peers didn’t have the same rules in their families.  When my dad came home from work we had to be at the bottom of the stairs ready to greet him with our best Greek before he was able to put his key in the door…

“Kalispera Baba…”

We had one of three responses…

  1. “Spera!”
  2. “Disappear!”
  3. “Bedroom inspection 10 minutes.”

Number 3 was the worst.  1 and 2 meant we could retreat back to our bedrooms, out of sight out of mind and out of trouble.  Three was problematic.  Bedroom inspection meant we had to blitz our quarters to his satisfaction and specifications and not one of those things was easily obtainable.

The bed had to be poker straight, no lumps in the sheet and the duvet had to be tucked in at all the corners. The bin had to be empty because if it wasn’t he would empty the contents on our beds.  He’d run his fingers along every surface looking for dust and if he found it he would wipe it on our clothes.  He would check our school bags for drugs and cigarettes and threaten us with strip searches. He would favour one bedroom over the other and whoever was deemed failure in that moment had look at the other person’s success and learn from them because they were better. But neither me or my brother were ever better in that moment, we were just lucky.

We were never physically abused but the verbal torment was difficult to live with.  I was a constant disappointment, I was ugly, I walked funny; my brother was naturally clever and bright.  He was popular at school and slotted into society like a well-oiled machine.  I may have been jealous of my brother growing up but I never resented him.  He was my ally.  He was the one who after the humiliation would knock on my bedroom door and say,

“Do you want to borrow my Roxette tape?”

Everything in the Spathis family household came down to three things, money, appearances and control.  To the outside world we had to look like the perfect family and we were lucky to be in it because we had food on the table, clothes on our back and a month long holiday every summer to Greece.  Did I want any of that? Not really.  I just wanted to be loved.  I wanted my Dad to love me.  Looking back I put too much effort in to trying to please and impress someone who couldn’t be pleased or impressed.

My dad made a constant point that money was an important part of life, it was the most important part of life.  When I got my first part time job at the age of 16 I had to offer my Dad my £17.50 as a gesture and a contribution to the household because I was earning now.  He didn’t take it but the lesson I had to learn was that I owed him.

Everything in life comes at a cost and I was quick to learn that enjoyment sometimes costs a little bit too much. My mum and I love the band James.  Their song “Sit Down” is an anthem of my younger years and every time it comes on the radio I can still hear my mum singing along in the car as she drove us to school. 

When James announced their tour in 1999 the band were at the top of their game and tickets were like gold dust but with the pay from my Saturday job I could afford to go so my Mum and I forked out for two tickets. 

Miraculously we had decent seats but it wouldn’t have mattered, just being in the same room as Tim Booth back then was an honour and a moment to remember forever.

The following morning my mum made a fry up.  Bacon, sausages, scrambled eggs and toast.  I’ve never been a big breakfast eater and meal times were always stressful at home but I’d been witness to one of the best concerts in my own little history so I had a big smile on my face as I cut into my bacon rasher.

My dad asked how much the tickets were, back then concerts were reasonably priced we’d paid around £30 for each ticket.  He asked how much the carpark had cost, I remember it was £5.  I’d bought a t-shirt, how much was that? I think it was £15.  I remember the mood changing at the breakfast table.  He picked at everything, he was angry we’d spent so much money on something so trivial.  He left the table in a temper and I stared down at my plate with a bit of bacon and cold scrambled egg remaining.  I lost my appetite because I felt guilty.  I’d wasted money and I had nothing to show for it that was of any use to anyone else, I had been selfish.

I scraped the last bit of my breakfast into the bin.  Just as the last bit of my half-eaten bacon rasher was falling into the dustbin abyss my Dad walked back into the room…now I was wasting food.

“GET THE FOOD OUT OF THE BIN!”

I fished out as much of the scrambled mush and the wet bacon rasher that I could salvage.  I don’t remember his exact words, but I had to eat the food that had been in the bin.  His words are not relevant because I know how he felt as he stared down at me crying into my dirty breakfast.  Disappointment, hatred, disgust.

All the way up until that point I had tolerated him because I had to.  But this, this was the final straw.  The feelings of disappointment, hatred and disgust were mutual.  I wanted out of the Spathis household. 

As a child I had begged my mum to send me to boarding school so I could escape.  I wanted to be like Pat and Isabel in The Twins at St Clares or like Darrell Rivers in Mallory Towers but the difference was I would never complain the way they did in the books.  Boarding school sounded perfect but my only option was to work my backside off and go to university.  Leave and just go.  Get the hell out and live life the way I never could if I stayed at home.

It’s funny really, reflecting on all of this; because as I said, he really wasn’t around that much.  My Dad was a Grade A adulterer.  God knows how but he had women falling at his feet left right and centre.  I’m guessing he probably made some of them feel like he could save them, I’m not sure what from but I’m certain in most cases he destroyed them.

I caught him once.  He had a guy working for him who went to prison, my Dad promised this unfortunate soul that we would watch over his family while he rotted in a cell wearing a prison issued tracksuit.  It was only when I saw my Dad with my 13-year-old eyes as he put his arms around the waist of his co-workers wife that something in me said “nah, that’s not right.”  I’d seen Saved by the Bell, I’d watched Zack and Kelly get it on and it looked a lot like what was going on in front of me and it was wrong! So wrong. 

I talked to my Mum about what I’d witnessed and it was downhill from there. When my dad knew what I’d seen he called me a liar. I was making up stories, I was poison, evil and it was another three years before he admitted that what I’d seen was the truth.

My parents split up twice, once when I was really young and the second time I was 16.  When they got back together the first time I remember my Grandma asking me if I was glad my Dad was coming home, I said yes, but I meant no.  She didn’t know what it was like at home but I wanted her to be happy.

The second split was only supposed to be a temporary thing.  He threw us out of the family home, me, my brother and my mum.  He went on holiday with the woman he’d lied about three years before and told us we had three weeks to find somewhere else to live and move out.  If we didn’t he said we’d just have to deal with it when he brought someone back after a night out. 

It was three months before we found a beaten-up cottage that had more problems than you can imagine.  What was intended to be temporary turned into 17 years.

Call it what you will, unfair, cruel, downright unbelievable, but even when the walls were literally falling down around us, at least the three of us were finally safe.  We were safe from his hatred and his immediate cruelty but he still controlled us, my Mum in particular, for a further 18-19 years until she was in a strong enough place to divorce him; and now he is nothing.

If I ever say anything to people about my life growing up, some ask…

“Why didn’t your Mum do anything?”

I used to ask myself the same thing.  In the moments where it counted, when we were waiting to be told we could eat, when he told me I was a waste of a person, when he picked at how I dressed, when I got B’ s instead of A’s, when I just existed and he didn’t like it, why didn’t she tell him to stop?

Because she couldn’t.  Because it wasn’t possible. Because she had it worse out of all of us and I didn’t know that until now.

My mum sometimes says she hopes I can forgive her.  But there’s nothing to forgive.  In the end she rescued us and she took us to a safer place where we could be who we wanted to be.  My brother could experiment with his hair and order a takeaway every Friday night with his friends.  I could invite my friends over and we’d sit and listen to music and talk about the boys we liked at 6th from.  I could write stories and I could buy whatever I wanted with my £17.50 and not have to hide it.  We could live without the fear of being judged or ridiculed and what’s more is, she continues to rescue us every single day; financially, physically and emotionally. 

My Mum is my best friend, she’s my oracle; she knows me better than I know myself.  She’s the strongest woman I have ever known and I forget about the things she’s been through because she always looks ahead. Even when she doesn’t feel like it she works hard at life to make it better for everyone else. I would never have achieved any of the things I have if it wasn’t for Mum. 

She feeds us, pays for the broken toilet, takes in parcels and is a sponge for the trials and tribulations of adult and working life.  She is the first person to take a stand when the mental health system bails on me and everyone around us and I know when she reads this she’ll be thinking, “Kat, I really wish you hadn’t done this” and my answer to that is, “suck it up Glenny, because it’s the truth.”

Every story has a hero.  My mum is mine…

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Reading time: 12 min

School days, they’re just the best days of your life aren’t they? I mean who doesn’t love getting up at stupid o clock, donning on a uniform that even though it makes you look the same as everyone else in the entire school you still get judged because your tie is too long or too short or you’ve got the fat end showing instead of the thin end because that’s more fashionable and that’s what the cool kids do. 

Who doesn’t love walking through those gates knowing you’re facing a day full of lessons you either hate or just don’t understand?  Your teachers terrify you, have you done your homework?  Is it good enough?  Have you got the right books with you?  Have you remembered your PE kit?  You better hope so because if you haven’t you know you’re gonna be wearing that mismatched kit from the lost and found that 100% guaranteed has not seen a washing machine in its lifetime!

Who doesn’t love walking into your form room where 50% of your classmates hate you and the other 50% just don’t get you? 

Who doesn’t love waking up with dread knowing the next 5-6 hours are going to be spent dodging paper objects being thrown at your head? Paper objects that soon turn into pens, protractors and rulers because you’re not providing a good enough reaction? 

Who doesn’t love being called…
“Big nose”
“Pinocchio”
“Swot”
“Geek”
“Specky four eyes”
“Pizza face”
“Hippy”
“Thicko”
“Minger”
“Frigid”
“F***ing weirdo”
“Slow coach”

…Those are to name just a few of the endearing and heartfelt (I’m sure) comments my ears were privy to hearing on a relentless daily basis.

Who doesn’t love all of that?

Yeah, your school days are the best aren’t they?  I mean, I look back on mine all the time and think “I’d love to go back and go through it all again?

School was awful! From 1993 to 1998 I was all of the things I’ve just listed.  I was all of those things because the bullies made me believe that they were true. 

I couldn’t help some of it, I mean realistically there’s not much I could have done about the size of my nose, I tried to cover it with my hand so people weren’t exposed to the obvious horror that it caused but it made breathing difficult and in woodwork it wasn’t exactly practical when I was trying to saw through a plank of wood.  There wasn’t a great deal I could do about my skin either, I was a teenager, I had acne and no matter what the doctor prescribed I still had acne, so I apologise that it made my face look like a pepperoni pizza! 

I’m sorry I was such a slow coach but I was not a sporty kid and PE was most definitely not my bag so if I came last in the 100 metre hurdle race at sports day, take it up with my legs because clearly my legs and my brain were not on the same team. 

From age 12 I needed glasses, I’m sorry, I didn’t realise me needing to see the blackboard was so offensive to so many people; I’m sorry they made me look like a geek.  I’m sorry for being in the bottom class in Maths and I’m sorry I was in the top set for English but I missed the memo on how this would mould me in to being a thicko and a swot all at the same time!

I’m sorry that because I didn’t want to wear Kappa jackets and Spray Way coats and my trainers were Puma and not Nike this made me a hippy and as for being a minger, well, it is not my fault that no one fancied me; lads of class 93 – 98 that’s on you, I am not taking the fall for that one. You may have called me frigid but maybe it was a blessing in disguise that no one wanted to jump my 11-16 year old bones because when I look back at the photos none of you were exactly Crispian Mills material.

But there is one thing I will not apologise for… I will not apologise for being a “F***ing weirdo” because why should I? I didn’t think I was a weirdo, I thought I was just me. 

I know I asked too many questions about how the world started and did people really exist?  How did we know if we were really alive and how could we prove it because pinching yourself was just a matter of opinion.  I wanted to know how different religions formed and why didn’t everyone just believe in the same thing because at the end of the day we all live in the same world (that’s if the world really existed). 

I know I may have had an inability to see the things that were contributing to the allocation of this label, but from the age of 11 my subconscious must have made a decision that no matter how “weird” I appeared to be to the outside world or how difficult my school days were, my determination to be who I was would not waiver.  

I had a friend who refused to shave her legs when every other girl in school was shaving their’s, because of this she gained the title of “Gorilla Girl.”  She was bullied constantly and every person on the corridor would shout this obscenity at her but she never reacted.  I once asked her if it bothered her and she said…

“They’re just jealous”


But once she said…


“It’s getting boring now.”

So I asked her why didn’t she just shave her legs and then it would all stop?  My friend turned to me and she said…

Why don’t you get a Kappa jacket and wear better trainers”

She had a point because I was not prepared to change anything about myself for the benefit of anyone else, so why should she?

When it comes to bullies there’s always one thing that I’ve never been able to understand and that’s…

“Why?”

Why do they do it? What could they possibly gain from making somebody else’s life miserable?  Why is it funny to make someone cry?  How is it okay to hurt them? Who makes the decision to throw a wooden ruler or a plastic protractor at someone’s face and as for hitting someone over the head with a 300 page science book, how is that sidesplittingly hilarious?  I didn’t find it funny when it was done to me and I certainly didn’t think it was okay when I saw it happen to someone else.

When you eventually pluck up the courage to talk to someone about the bullies you get the standard response.  They are…

  • Unhappy in their own lives
  • Bored
  • They’re being bullied by the bullies themselves
  • If its boys then they must fancy you
  • If its girls then they’re jealous

To me not one of those explanations are ever true.  Using these excuses gives reason for completely unacceptable behaviour.  If any of the bullies who made my school days a living hell were unhappy that is not my fault and does not excuse the misery they inflicted on me or anyone else.

Making excuses for bullies puts blame on the victim. 

“Don’t rise to it.”
“Just ignore them.”
“When you leave school none of this will matter.”

But it does matter because it stays with you.  I left school 22 years ago and I have never forgotten the names I was called; I’ve never forgotten the feeling of a wooden ruler being thrown at my head. 

When I was 14 I reluctantly went to a school disco because my group of friends convinced me that it was a good opportunity to tell a boy that I liked him.  He laughed hysterically and must have been so utterly horrified at the prospect of someone like me thinking he was worth looking at that the next day he threw a stone at my face and grazed my jaw.

Bullies come in all shapes and sizes, they’re clever as well as stupid, they’re hard done by and they’re privileged.  Bullies can be our best friend, they can be our bosses and they can be our family.  There is no cap on the age range of a bully, there’s no valid reason for their behaviour and there’s no excuse for their actions. 

As a victim I blamed myself for the treatment I received.  People tell me I could have changed and then my teenage years might not have been so hard but changing isn’t as easy as people think it is. 

If I changed my appearance for someone else then I would never have been able to accept myself.  I would never have been comfortable with who I was because every time I looked at myself I would have wondered who was staring back at me.

Yes I asked far too many questions for anyone to be able to answer and while I wondered if I really existed in the world, I knew when I looked in the mirror that I was just a girl who liked reading books and listening to Indie music and that wasn’t really a bad thing to be.

Twenty-two years later Facebook is a field of social envy.  People make friend requests all over the show because they want to show others what they’ve got, their money, their houses, their kids.  They want to show others how much they’ve achieved and how they’re probably still the same person they always were back in the old days.  Maybe I’m no different.  As I write this piece I would be lying if I said I didn’t wonder how far it will go, who will see it and think…

“…damn, we gave her a rough ride…”

I have nothing flashy to show in the years that have passed and I make a point of refusing friend requests from the people who made my life miserable.  I didn’t want to be friends with them in the 90’s so why would I want to be friends with the now? 

The last twenty-two years have given me mountain after mountain to climb, I have loved, I have lost and at times I have been a complete stranger to myself.  There were times when I wondered if I would make it, if I even wanted to make it at all but in a way I guess I’m one of the lucky ones.  Facebook is a minefield of gossip and rumours and its only through the friend requests that I have accepted that I’ve heard about the people who didn’t make it.  Some of the people who made my life miserable are either dead or in prison and I wonder if the ones who are still around are sorry.  I’ve always tried to be a better person and I can’t help but think it’s a shame that those individuals couldn’t do the same for themselves.

The saying goes…

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.”

In all honesty whoever made that up has never been bullied.  It’s easy to say but it doesn’t take away the pain of someone’s hatred.

I don’t have the answers to tackling bullies and if anyone asked me how to deal with one I’m not sure I would be able to give them the right kind of advice because I’m not sure I even dealt with mine in the right way.

So to all the bullies out there, past and present, get a grip! Look at who you are and ask yourself if it’s worth it? How will torturing someone enrich your life? Is making the girl/boy with the braces cry something to be proud of? Are you truly happy when you throw something at someone’s face? And if that person doesn’t make it, if you’re responsible for that person feeling unable to carry on because they don’t meet your ridiculous expectations, can you live with yourself?

I am not denying that for the majority of my life I have struggled with the concept of who I am and who I will become.  I have always found it difficult to be happy with myself when the rest of the world looks so different to my own.  I wonder on a daily basis if I am good enough.  Have I done enough for my job?  For my friends?  Am I good enough for my family? Am I good enough for me?

I was bullied at school and at home I never met the expectations that my Dad laid out like a contract…

“If you look pretty and achieve the highest grades I will love you, but even then it will never be enough.”

In just the last few days I’ve learnt that you will always meet people who don’t like you and in return you might not like them but we’re all human and sometimes we just don’t gel.  Even adults say mean things, they might not throw rulers or stones at your face but those sniping comments will still hurt, but always remember…

Sticks and stones have the potential to break our bones but when it comes to names it’s what you do with them that makes the difference…

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Reading time: 11 min

In 1998 I was at 6th form college trying my best at my A Levels and wondering if I was in over my head with the subjects I’d picked…

  1. English Literature and Language, I thought it was the best of both worlds, but I hated the books we had to read.
  2. Communication Studies, to this day I have no understanding of what that subject was about.  I remember watching clips of The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and having to tell my tutor how many different camera angles there were in one shot. I also remember words being thrown around like syntax (first time I heard that I thought my tutor was asking for Tampax) and societal dynamics.
  3. Sociology…. I was an idiot for picking this and an idiot for sticking with it.  I should have dropped that subject like a hot potato in the first 3 seconds of entering the classroom.  What was I thinking?

Anyway, regardless of the subjects any of us chose that was not the most important part of being a 6th former.  Nor was the fact that we had all chosen to go on to the next stage of our educational lives.  Sixth form was seen as either a steppingstone to going to university or it was buying time.  It gave everyone two years to gain a better idea of what they wanted in life and more importantly what they didn’t want.

It was also a massive fashion parade! Bear in mind we’d all spent five years in a school uniform having had only the odd “own clothes day” sprinkled here and there.  Own clothes days always put the fear of god into me because those were the days when the bullies had free reign of humiliating the less fortunate in the fashion world. 

I remember in year 8 my Mum bought me a red and blue woollen jumper with a heart on it and I loved it.  Not only had she taken the time to buy me a present but she’d picked something that I liked and wore with pride. 

Did the mean kids like it?  Hell no! 

Was I glad to put my uniform on the next day? Yes

Was I sad because people made me ashamed of my jumper? Too right I was sad.

In year 10 I was completely and madly in love with Crispian Mills, the lead singer and guitarist from the indie band Kula Shaker.  I was going to marry him, he was going to rescue me from all of my familial torture and he was my ticket to self and social acceptance. 

Crispian was famous for wearing the most outlandish and extravagant trousers and the fact that he didn’t care what people thought was incomprehensible to me and I idolised his confidence.  When I watched him performing he always wore these crazy wide flares and they were never a plain colour, they were always bright, embroidered or striped!  I wanted to have his confidence.  I wanted to not give a flying banana what anyone thought about me and my clothes because I was something, I was something good and I was someone special.

When own ‘clothes day’ came around in 1997 I bought a pair of pink and purple striped trousers from C&A and I had Crispian Mills’s face printed on to a white t-shirt and I walked through those school doors like a flaming hot Rockstar.  I was cool, I was confident and I was showing everyone that I didn’t care because Crispian Mills was an inspiration and I had gained my brave girl pants from watching his carefree persona. 

Did my confidence last?  No

Did I wear those pants again? Never

Did I wear the t-shirt again? Of course I did.  I gave up on the will to be adventurous, I didn’t give up my on my heart.

In 1998, the summer before I started 6th form I remember half dreading half celebrating the notion of being able to wear what I wanted.  I was now the one who was in control of what I wore and how I carried myself.  I had my first ever Saturday job so I had the money to buy the clothes I wanted and feel good doing it because surely, by now we’d sifted through the dregs of educational morons and the chavs and bullies were no longer in the vicinity?

That may have been the case but it became pretty obvious that you don’t have to be a bully to disapprove of what someone is wearing and you don’t have to say it to someone’s face in order to hurt them.  Chinese whispers can spread like wildfire in a very short space of time and I learnt pretty quickly that I was most definitely not buying the right clothes from the right places.  Marks and Spencer’s was not the place for a sixteen year old girl to buy fashionable tops from and BHS is an instant no no for all things trouser.  It was hopeless.  My excitement over 6th form being the place for a new start and a new beginning for my personal fashion was the opposite of what I’d hoped for.  

On one particular day and I was sat in the refectory with my friends talking about boys (we were always talking about boys) and the door opened; three girls walked in.  It was like a scene from the film Mean Girls only Mean Girls hadn’t even been born at this point. 

It was “the plastics” walking in fully made up, wearing the clothes that were a combination of the Spice Girls, All Saints and B*Witched.  They just floated into the room with their perfect hair and perfect nails and flawless skin and every single head in the room turned and I just thought…

“If this is what I’m up against, I give up.”

I gave up because the girl in the middle of the Charlie’s Angels-esque trio had snogged a boy I had the biggest crush on and I couldn’t compete with perfection.  I looked down at my BHS jeans and the jumper I’d kept from year 8 because it miraculously still fit and I thought to myself ‘Crispian Mills will come for you, any second now he’ll walk into the refectory in front of all of these people and he’ll barge past the perfect plastics and he’ll take your hand and he’ll say…’

“You look beautiful and you’re perfect as you are.  Now let’s get out of here because we’ve got a tour to do and the bus is waiting outside.”

A girl can dream.

In 2000 I bagged my place at university.  From the day I got the confirmation I started shopping.  This was definitely a new beginning.  I was going somewhere where no one knew who I was or where I came from and I was determined to make the most of the opportunity to wear whatever I wanted.  I didn’t care where I shopped or what people would think because this was my time to shine, I was at university and were no chavs and no bullies and no perfect plastics.  I would be surrounded by funky people wearing flares and fun jumpers…

…so how it ended up being worse than school and worse than 6th from combined I have no idea! 

My housemates tried to change my views on my clothes…. 

  1. Less jeans, more skirts.
  2. Fewer t-shirts, more blouses with low cut buttons. 
  3. No trainers, kitten heels instead. 

Was this me? No

Did I do what they said? Hell no! 

Did it depress me that my friends wanted to change me because I didn’t look the way they wanted me to?  Of course it did.

It hurts when people don’t like the way you look.  It’s the first thing we’re judged on but when it comes to clothes it’s the one thing we can easily change. 

I could have changed everything about me, I could have made life so much easier for myself but I didn’t.  Even when I came back to uni after a weekend at home and I found every single item in my entire wardrobe had been taken and replaced by an array of clothes belonging to my housemates, I still did nothing to change my appearance.  Some might say they did this as an act of love in an effort to make me look more aesthetically pleasing; but the truth is, they broke my heart.  This was the one thing that cemented the fact that I was just not good enough, simply because of how I dressed.

In 2009 I got a job at full time job in an office. 

Did I feel like I fitted in there, clothes-wise? Nah. 

I wore jeans every day, I wore jumpers and stupid t-shirts and trainers and I bought boots from Boundary Mill and if anyone made a suggestion or a comment, positive or negative I let it go over my head because at this point I just didn’t care.  Maybe it was the fact that there was nothing I could be bothered doing in order to change myself and if I didn’t feel right in what I was wearing then that was on me.

In the office I was everyone’s friend, there wasn’t one single person I didn’t speak to but when it came to nights out, I steered well clear.  In the 11 years that I was there I can count on one hand how many out of office celebrations I went on, this wasn’t actually a clothes related thing, this was a personality thing, my personality.

It was the same story every time, leave the office and I turn to an invisible pumpkin.  I wasn’t fun, I wasn’t interesting, I was the last person people wanted to talk to and don’t get me wrong this wasn’t just with work people, this was life in general; hen do’s, birthdays, leaving parties, just being in a group of people where there’s a celebratory atmosphere something in me just gets lost.  It’s never a conscious thing and it’s never anyone else’s fault but I’m always aware of it.  When I’m sitting in a bar surrounded by people who can drink and dance and party like real rock stars because they are they are wearing the right clothes, their confidence is a reminder of everything that I am not. 

It’s 2020 now and it’s been a really rubbish year!  My god, can it get any worse? Probably.  The best part of 2020 was being made redundant.  I’m sorry it really was, I wanted to leave my job for about three years and I just never made the move to see it through. I was lazy and it was convenient but I made some really good friends there and I have a lot of great memories from being at that desk but even before the redundancies were made official I knew there was no way I wanted to save my job.  Instead I pulled my finger out and I got down to it and I found myself new job in a place that after just 10 minutes of being there it had already captured my heart.

When I asked my manager what the dress code was I prayed for an old lady type blouse and a below the knee skirt with “practical” shoes.  I don’t know why, I’m a ward clerk in a hospital and that’s all I’d ever seen so when she said there was no uniform I was genuinely disappointed. 

Did I know what the hell to wear?  No I did not! 

Not a flippin clue.  So I bought smart pants, dresses, tops and jumpers with pretend shirt collars poking out; but on my first day I got an inkling that something here was different.  I wore smart pants and a jumper.  On my second day I tested out a dress with my Dr Marten boots and you know what?  People commented, people said nice things.  So I tried a different dress, a different top, different boots, I dressed things up, I dressed them down and now, every day when I walk through the door with a different scarf or a different dress with a different cardigan someone says that they like my outfit.

I don’t know what the deal is here, maybe at this stage I really don’t care or maybe this was the clean slate I’ve always wanted.  Maybe at this point in my life, having been through the things I have, having done the things I’ve done; perhaps I really have found my brave girl pants…

…or maybe it’s just that I’m finally comfortable being in my own skin and I have nothing to prove to anyone through the way I dress.  Maybe that’s why I’ve never changed the contents of my wardrobe to satisfy others.

As we go through life we change, our likes and dislikes evolve, we move from one place to another, school, college, university; we change jobs and we wear the clothes that we think are appropriate.  We dress up and we dress down for every occasion, whether it’s an interview or a Christmas party we wear what feels right… 

…but one thing remains constant and that’s the fact that we are all just human beings, we’re all different and you can’t dress that up or down because you shouldn’t have to.  The only thing we can do with who we are is be comfortable with it, maybe even happy…

…and that’s half the battle.

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Reading time: 11 min

“In the past, what has helped?”

That, is my new community psychiatric nurse (CPN) talking.  I assume she’s trying to be helpful, trying to gage what the best course of action to take is. 

She’s been lumbered with a new service user who most likely has a red flag or a black mark that pops up as soon as she types my name into the system… I wonder what I says … I’m awkward?  Difficult?  A know it all.  High functioning?  All of those things are true.  I know myself. At least I thought I did. 

I usually see my signs and I handle them accordingly.  I kick them up the bum and tell them to “do one!” because I haven’t got the time for a Bipolar episode.  I have things to do but, you know what? Even experts sometimes make mistakes.  Nostradamus predicted the end of the world was in the 1990’s.  He was wrong.  We’re still here, albeit barely.

I appreciate that she’s asking this question, but her tone of voice tells me she’s bored already.  She knows absolutely nothing about me, she’s made no effort to gain any insight into my character, maybe she thinks by asking this question I’ll tell her how to do her job, make it simple.

I can hear on the other end of the phone she’s got a list of questions to ask me and with each answer she ticks off the question but doesn’t register what I say because then she’d have to do something.

Q. Are you eating?

Q. Do you have any Covid-19 symptoms?

Q. Do you know the Covid-19 regulations? A. I would hope so, we’ve been in lockdown for over a month!

Q. Is it just yourself living in the property?

Clearly she thinks I’m using the title of Mrs. as a decorative addition to my ridiculously complicated name.  I mean come on!  Even I know my marital status will most definitely be on the first page of my notes, she’s not even read that! And she keeps calling me Katrina!  That is not my name! 

So here’s the thing Karen, here’s the answer to your question; here is what has helped in the past…

Talk to me like a person!  Call me by the right name.  If you’re unsure I can teach you how to say it because it really isn’t rocket science.  It’s quite simple, Roy Walker said all the time “just say what you see”

“Kat…er…ini”

Take an interest in me because I am more than more than my diagnosis.  Ask me if I have a job and don’t be surprised when I tell you ‘yes’.  Ask me how long I’ve been married and don’t be shocked when I tell you we own our own house. 

Don’t assume when I tell you I’m a public speaker that I simply stand with a piece of paper and read a list of facts about how awful Bipolar is and how I let it beat me.  I am more than that!

I am the colleague at work who gives up lunchbreaks to discuss the emotional turmoil of others.  I am the friend who forgets to tell other friends exciting news because I know it’s not of interest unless they know I gain nothing financially for the work I do.

I am the 37-year-old woman who hates saying woman because I still feel like a girl, 

I am obsessed with music.  I have it playing 24/7 because it makes my world bearable because sometimes silence is deafening.

I am the writer who can’t call myself a writer because nothing is really in print but every word I write, no matter who reads it or doesn’t read it, bares a part of my soul I can never share.

I like to shop!  I love to shop.  I only wish I had more money in order to do it.

I have a passion for travel.  I love a holiday.  Who wants to stay in the same four walls when the outside world is changing every second?

I can’t tell you what helps.  That is your job to find out.  How can you help if you know nothing?

I am a person before I am Bipolar.  Are you a person before being a nurse?

Take a look at the bigger picture…

…I’ve just painted it.

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Reading time: 3 min

Last night my blog went live.  When my website went live I was excited.  I was nervous but it was a calm kind of nervous.  I had this hope and longing that I would get work out of it.  I hoped that a flock of hungry admirers would reach out and hire me for their conferences, school mental health days and universities would hunt me down and ask me to speak to hundreds of students about the realities of living a life with a mental illness and a physical issue combined.

Before the blog went live I didn’t ask anyone if it was okay to do this, just as I didn’t ask anyone if it was okay for me to speak out about my mental health.  Maybe there’s a difference between telling your story in a professional capacity as opposed to airing the dirty laundry of your past for all to see across the entire world. 

I’m pretty much an open book, I stopped hiding behind the wall of normality years ago, this was made easy because the wall was never there in the first place.  I’m happy to answer questions when people want to know what it’s like to poop from your tummy into a bag, when people ask me about being Bipolar its usually because they think they might have it and they want to gage whether they should be knocking on a psychiatrist’s door or if they can sit back and express a sigh of relief because their situation isn’t as bad as they thought.

I tell people I was a self-harmer, I confess I’ve planned to end my life more than once but there’s one thing I don’t talk about.  And that’s my cognitive impairment.  I don’t talk about it because its so hard to explain and I guess its kind of unbelievable because to look at me you’d never know of the difficulties I encounter, some of them you’d never believe were even possible.

People want to know why I don’t drive, believe me its not by choice!  In simple terms I say I’m not allowed to.  People automatically poo poo this as a valid reason because somewhere in the universe they know someone with the same diagnosis who frequently drives some form of vehicle on wheels.  Trust me, they’re the lucky ones! They drive because they can process the world around them in a nano second, they can react to a situation automatically, they just know what to do and that’s not because of practice, it’s because their brain works the way it needs to in order to safely navigate the roads.  Sometimes it takes me thirty seconds to work out how to tie my scarf around my neck.

I can’t drive a car because I can’t piece together the world around me… What’s going on to my left?  How do I deal with what’s happening on my right and what the hell do I do if a fire engine is up my jacksy and needs to get past me pronto?! People would die if I was let loose on the roads, I would die if I was let loose on the roads.  I’m not trying to be funny, I’m trying to explain that in my everyday life there are vacant spaces that I can’t fill in.

When I say I have a cognitive impairment I’m not sure what people are expecting to see.  They sometimes laugh and say, “don’t put yourself down,” but I’m not.  They tell me I’m intelligent and maybe I was once but these days I don’t feel it.  These days everything I do feels like a test.  A test to see if I can pull off the façade of looking intelligent because who wants to actually look as stupid as I feel?

When people ask me what my cognitive impairment is I usually start off by saying I have a terrible memory.  They laugh because they too have a terrible memory, everyone forgets things so everyone must have a cognitive impairment so silly me for thinking I was special.

It’s not just about being a little bit forgetful, like forgetting to put the washing machine on or forgetting to grab the eggs at the supermarket or not bringing your friends present to their birthday party.  It’s not about those things because we all do things like that, that’s human nature and I know that; but for me its different.  I can’t process information, I can’t digest it, I can’t make sense of it and because of all of those things I can’t retain the information I need to make the most of my working and professional life.  I wish it was simple, I wish I was being dramatic and self-absorbed but it’s much more than that.

A few years ago I was in a shop and I had to sign a receipt, I had the pen in my hand and I’m looking at the box I need to put my signature in, I wasn’t married so it was maiden name that I’d been writing since I was eleven, but in that moment I didn’t know what to tell my hand to write.  I knew my name but I didn’t know how to write it, not spell it, I knew that but I couldn’t tell the pen the shapes of the letters.  I managed it eventually but I walked away wondering what had just happened?

About 2 years ago I left work to head to the train station.  Manchester Oxford Road has a set of stairs that are steep and exhausting, especially after a day in the office when you’ve spent eight hours trying to reflect the illusion that you know what you’re doing.  I reached the station, I headed for the stairs, I climbed three and then my right foot stopped, my left foot didn’t know what to do either so I tripped and fell splat across the stairs.  When I picked myself up my feet were still confused so we took a moment on the stairs to gather together what the next move was.

I stood on those stairs being brushed past, nudged, tutted at and no doubt there was a lot of eye rolling going on by other commuters rushing for their trains, but all I could think was “why the hell can’t I climb the stairs?!  Why don’t I know how to do this?!”  Now every time I climb or descend a set of stairs I have to remind myself that I can do it, I have to remind myself how to do it.

When I cross roads I have to remind myself to look both ways, I have to remind myself how to look both ways.  Sometimes I look at the laces on my Converse and I’ve forgotten which way the laces go.  For a writer I’m a terrible speller, I get my to, too, two mixed up and my their, there, they’re all wrong.  I never used to.  I miss words out of my sentences.  When I brush my teeth I forget where to put my tongue so I don’t lick the minty toothpaste and make myself gag.  Sometimes when I’m reading I don’t know what the words say and I stare at the page trying to figure out why the hell I can’t read, I’ve written countless novels and short stories and I have a degree in English Literature and Linguistics so apparently I’m not completely stupid, so why can’t I read?

When I talk and my mind goes black its not because I’ve lost my thread it’s because I don’t know how to speak.  It’s not forgetfulness, it’s a vacant hole of nothingness and as I sit there looking into space trying to figure out how to get something in my head to communicate with my vocal chords and then transmit the message to my mouth so I look like a normal person I wonder, how has this happened?  What the hell is this?

It doesn’t stop there, sometimes I don’t know how to hold my knife and fork, I don’t know how to set the time on the alarm clock I’ve had for 13 years.  I don’t know how to button up my cardigan or operate the Sky remote for the TV even though I’ve been shown a thousand times.

I don’t know my way around the town I’ve lived in for thirty-eight years, I forgot how to catch a bus after lockdown.  I volunteer at food bank and I’m terrified I’ll pack the bags wrong even though its ridiculously simple.

When I do a speech it never comes out the way I want it to.  I was trained by the best man in the business but because my brain functions so differently from what his teaching requires I’ve had to adapt my own delivery so I don’t stare into the abyss when I forget how to talk.  Imagine that, I chose to be a public speaker knowing I had a cognitive impairment, knowing there would be a distinct possibility that I would look like a prize moron in front of hundreds of people.

How do I know I have a cognitive impairment?  A psychiatrist diagnosed it.  He wasn’t sure if it was medication related or if it was a rare side effect of having Bipolar Disorder and he left his post before we could delve any further.  So how do I cope? How do I deal with the things that challenge me?  Honestly?  I wing it.  I wing everything and I let my self-doubt catch up with me later.  I can’t predict what my brain is going to throw at me so I take the rough with the smooth and think myself lucky if my day isn’t a total disaster.

So why am I writing this?  I’m not asking for praise, I don’t want validation for doing this, the simple fact is, there is not enough written on this subject and I have no answers or advice for anyone who experiences something similar, but just like Bernard and Wilomena I don’t let this beat me.  I deal with it and I get on with my life.  I work, I write, I speak, I catch buses and I climb stairs.  Life is far from easy, it’s frustrating, it’s painful and relentlessly tiresome but what else is there to do other than carry on?

My cognitive impairment is annoying and frankly with the other two issues I think it’s a bit of a liberty to give me a third but don’t feel sorry for me, because I don’t.  If I felt sorry for myself I would never have achieved the things I have.  I would never have had the opportunities I’ve been given and I would never have been brave enough to show life that I can do this no matter what it throws at me.

It’s like I always say,

“I make the best of a bad situation

and I take control of it.

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Reading time: 9 min

The year 2002:

  • It was the year Halle Berry became the 1st black actress to win an accademy award for best actress.
  • Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake split up.
  • and Michael Jackson dangled his baby over a balcony.

I was twenty.  I was in my last year at university, ready to take on the world.  Ready to show everyone that I was someone special.  I was ready to make a difference.

I guess you could say on the surface I was just like any other student, I was hardworking, I had a lot of friends, I liked to go out and have a dance to music no one knew the words to and I had big ideas and big dreams I desperately wanted to achieve.

On the surface you  might say I was normal; but there was one difference between me and the rest of my friends.  My mind was clouded by something that had haunted me since the beginning of high school.  Suicide.

I wrote my first novel aged 11.  It was called The College Fears and it was about a girl who was at university who was starving herself because she was unhappy, but for no apparent reason.

I wrote my second novel aged 13.  It was called The Waste of a Person and it was about a girl at university who was obsessed with suicide.  She’d tried to kill herself 13 times in 5 years but for no real reason other than she didn’t want to be part of this world.

Writing about self harm and suicide was never a sadistic ploy at being different or miserable, it was my attempt to make sense of my own unhappiness, because I never told anyone just how unhappy I really was.

Because I was quiet I was labelled: shy, meek, timid.  And when I wouldn’t do the things other children were doing, such as dressing in the latest fashion, swooning over the nations favourites boybands or hanging around the swings at the park with a bottle of White Lightening, people said I lacked confidence and I had low self esteem.  But the truth is, growing up, I wasn’t really allowed to be me.  If I had I might not have had low self esteem.

This world has a set of regimented rules for us to follow, rules that mean we fit in nicely with the rest of society so that we don’t stand out.  We are taught not to challenge the norm and anything outside of what is seen as acceptable, is made an example of and ridiculed.

Growing up I was ridiculed from the way I walked to the clothes I wore to my passion for writing.  But it wasn’t just idle teasing from my peers, I was ridiculed and loathed by someone you would think would love me unconditionally.  My Dad.

My Mum, my brother and me lived in a house that was like  a military camp.  We were told to disappear from a room he wanted to be in.  We had school bag checks for drugs and cigarettes, bedroom inspections, degree level maths lessons on a Saturday afternoon.  We had to be granted permission to eat a meal and we were given a bedtime that was extended by half an hour each birthday.  When I was fifteen it was lights out at 8pm.  In summer it was still light outside and all of my friends were still at the swings I’d never been to.

We were picked on, laughed at, played off against each other but the worst thing, was we grew up as children thinking this was normal.

On the outside we appeared to be the perfect nuclear family. Two hardworking loving parents with two extremely well behaved children.  But, I grew up with such a degree of self loathing that for years I couldn’t even look in the mirror without hating what I saw.

Nothing I did ever matched up to his expectations and everything I did was a disappointment.  At 13 I was called a waste of a person because of the way I ate a grape.  I wore clothes that were baggy and unfashionable and ugly, thinking that by doing this I could hide and no one would notice me but it turned out, by doing this, I just drew even more attention to myself.

Going through school I was bullied for being a swot.  But really I was working so hard to pass my exams so that I could escape to university and get away from the military camp.  And I did, I got to university anyway.

What I realise now is, you can change your surroundings but you can’t change people, because wherever you are in the world, people are the same.  And so was I.  I still didn’t fit in and in the end, I didn’t want to be here.

Because who would want to be part of a world that doesn’t accept the people in it?

During our lives we all want to be liked and accepted but in the process we forget to like and accept ourselves.

I have Bipolar disorder, and for anyone who doesn’t know, Bipolar Disorder is a debilitating mental illness and I have struggled with it for fifteen years.  I’ve had six hospital admissions within that time, four of them because I made plans to end my life.

People said I had everything to live for and I should have a think about all the good things in my life and then I would feel better because other people have it worse.  But it doesn’t matter how good your life is or how happy you’re supposed to be because mental illness can be stronger than everything we have inside of us and around us.

Mental illness, whatever form it might be, whether its Bipolar, or Depression, Schizophrenia, OCD, Personality Disorder, they are all the same and they try to destroy us from the inside and we live in a world where talking about our mental health and our feelings and emotions is frowned upon.  But it’s days like today that make it easier for us to admit that life isn’t always perfect, because no one is perfect – not even the rich and famous and across the world mental illness affects everyone.

Owen Wilson

Drew Barrymore

Halle Berry

Eminem

Princess Diana

David Walliams

These are all people who have tried to end their lives.  We might not always know it but even the most powerful of people suffer from dark days.

Take Robin Williams for example, we all know his work, Mork and Mindy, Mrs Doubtfire, Good Will Hunting.  Robin Williams was known for his funny and eccentric personality.  He was an impressionist who I always saw laughing but in 2014 when he ended his life I was…horrified if I’m honest.  It was Robin Williams. How could this happen?

In May this year American singer Chris Cornell took his own life at the age of 52 and two short months later one of the lead singers of American band Linkin Park Chester Bennington, ended his life too.

Chester Bennington’s death floored me.  I have been a massive Linkin Park fan since the age of 18.  Their first album Hybrid Theory was the first album my brother and I agreed on.  It was my first experiment in the world of rap and hard rock, you’d never think I was a mosher would you?  But his death also raised questions.  I thought, if he couldn’t be saved, if no one cared enough to realise he needed help, if a celebrity with all the money and the means that the rest of us can only ever dream of couldn’t make it, then what chance do the rest of us have?

I don’t have the answers, but I believe in the power of our voices and the importance of understanding a problem in order to solve it.  Its so easy to get angry with the person who leaves us.  Chester had six children, Chris Cornell had three, so did Robin Williams.  How could any of them leave their children? Believe me I’ve asked that question myself, we spend so much time feeling angry and asking why, that we forget to think about the person we have lost. 

I believe suicide is not a decision made lightly.  Its a choice someone makes when they believe they have no choice.  When they truly believe that their families and the world would be better if they weren’t in it.

Well today I want to help put an end to that.  The starting point in tackling mental illness is to end the silence.

Today’s event is about having positive conversations and raising awareness of the issues surrounding mental illness.  By using our voices we can all play a part in the battle to reduce stigma.

So what can we do?

  • Find someone to talk to.  This can be a friend or a relative or someone completely objective.
  • Approach a charity who offer services to help you.  I can recommend a good one – BAND
  • Identify the source of your unhappiness.  Is it money, people, circumstances, work, health?  There are solutions to everything we think is against us.

I still get periods of self-loathing and depression but I tackle them head on now because I don’t deserve to feel it.

Public speaking gives me a platform to show others that being different from the rest is actually a good thing.  Back in school and at university, in fact, everywhere in between, I’ve always been different, but now, I don’t feel bad about it, I embrace it.

People think I’m weird because I like Drag Queens.  Well I really like them so I had one perform at my wedding.

I have an obsession with swans and Cher.  What can I say I like her music.  So I walked down the aisle to it.

I name the ornaments around my house, if its got a face it gets a name.

I embrace my quirks and now I’m comfortable with who I am because I surround myself with people who are comfortable with me.

Years ago I would dream of living in a tiny village in the Scottish Highlands where I would ride a bike with a basket on the front.  I’d be a writer and I’d own a book and stationary shop.  I might be married, I might have children and there would be no room for unhappiness.

Today the reality is simple. I don’t live in the Scottish Highlands or a village.  I live in the suburbs of Bolton in a terraced house.

I’m married to someone who couldn’t be more opposite to me but regardless of how different we are I’m lucky to have found my soul mate.  He accepts everything I am and everything I do and he has no idea how happy that makes  me.

There will always be unhappiness in all of our lives at some point, but I want to raise awareness of the difficulties some of us have on a daily basis with our mental health.

Mental illness is not a weakness and I think its important to know there is always a choice before it comes to having no choice. 

Even if we can’t see it there is always someone who can show us the way because, life doesn’t have to end if we have a mental illness, life starts the second we take control of it.

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Reading time: 9 min

World Mental Health Day 10/10/19

My entire life I’ve always known one thing for certain, I am different from the rest.  Growing up people thought I was a bit strange – leaning more towards the weird side than the normal side where the majority of my friends were.

In primary school I was a storyteller before I fully learned the use of the alphabet.  I would make up stories for other kids to play out but I was never asked to play with them.

My first crush was Sylvester Stallone, my friends were more drawn to Deiter Brummer.  I was a huge fan of old musicals and I loved watching Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Audrey Hepburn sing and dance their way across my TV screen.

My favourite film was The Nun’s Story in which Audrey Hepburn plays a young woman who gives her life to serve God as a nun.  I wasn’t particularly religious but I had respect for others who devoted their lives to a good cause and strived for a better world.  I would look at Audrey Hepburn in her nun’s habit and I wanted to be just like her. I fell in love with the simplistic lifestyle of growing tomatoes in the convent, sweeping leaves and in a world where fashion defines us I wanted to wear the nun’s habit because then everyone was the same.  No-one was better than the next.

To get myself prepared for my future as a nun I would parade around my bedroom wearing my dad’s dressing gown because it was black and I’d drape a white pillow case over my head. At school I would walk around the playground with my hands tucked into my sleeves imitating what I’d seen in the film and I’d ask my grandma if I could try on her wedding ring so I could pretend I was married to God.

Believe it or not at school I did have friends but there was always a clear difference between us.  From a very young age my career aspirations were different from those of my friends.  Most kids stereotypically wanted to be things like lawyers, doctors and teachers.  I wanted to be a Gurner. And I believed to be a good gurner I needed practice. So I’d practice anywhere I could, in mirrors, away from mirrors, out and about shopping in town, down at the supermarket, play time at school.  But it was a dinner lady at school who laughed at me and said,

“You can’t be a gurner you silly girl! You’ve got too many teeth!”

Talk about shattered dreams!

As we got older our career goals changed.  In year 10 I wanted to be a Podiatrist and I spent a week shadowing three different people who all had a passion for feet, but not in a creepy way.  They wanted to help people, they would keep the elderly’s toenails trimmed and tend the aching bunions of Bolton’s Ballerinas. 

Obviously helping people was at the top of my agenda but the feet I had in mind weren’t the feet of regular people, oh no.  I wanted to look after the feet of musicians, people in bands.  People in the bands I loved to listen to.  I wanted to cut Crispian Mills’ toenails, scrape the dead skin off Simon Fowler’s heels, moisturise James Mudriczki’s bunions and line up each member of The Montrose Avenue and take care of their ingrowing toenails.  Not that any of these people had those problems but that was the dream.

To me this was normal and it was absolutely achievable but coupled with the fact that all of those bands were the ultimate no no for a teenage girl in the 1990’s and I wore completely the wrong style of clothes I was bullied for about two years by a group of boys in high school who took a dislike to me and my ambition.

My friends would suggest listening to Peter Andre and Take That and at least pretend to like them.  They advised me to change my hairstyle, wear mascara so I’d look just like everyone else and STOP wearing t-shirts with pictures of Meat Loaf printed on them.

I could have changed. They said it would be easy, but I didn’t have the ability to be normal, I didn’t have it in me to conform.  I may have had friends and people who loved me but growing up it was always pointed out to me that because I was different I was a disappointment.

Growing up I felt worthless, pointless and a plague on my family.  I was suicidal on more than one occasion.  Imagining everybody’s life without me in it was a lot more appealing than me trying to fit in to what they wanted me to be.

My dad would point and laugh at the way I walked and the way I dressed.  Everything I’ve ever done was a disappointment to him, I wasn’t clever, I wasn’t pretty or athletic and I didn’t speak Greek.  I spent my childhood and most of my adult life wondering who I was as a person.  I’d say I didn’t know who I was or what I was supposed to be, what was my actual purpose in life?

My entire life I’ve felt like an outcast, a project for people to mould into what they wanted me to be because it wasn’t acceptable to just be me.  Because of this I had that constant feeling of never being good enough for anyone. 

When I was 20 my university friends took all of my clothes out of my wardrobe, locked them away and replaced them with theirs so that I would look more up to date.  I found the spare key and took my clothes back.

When I was 29 my friend said I would never find a boyfriend unless I changed my sense of fashion.  I ignored him.

Every time someone tried to change me I would retreat back to the things I’ve always loved, indie music, jeans and jumpers and a straightforward hair do!

I used to cry over not being able to fit in to any group and never being accepted until I finally realised I’ve actually always known who I am!  I’ve never had a problem with the things I enjoy or the things that make up my personality. 

I know now that if anyone has a problem with my individuality then that’s their problem because it’s not a bad thing to be different but it’s not acceptable to judge a person because they don’t match up to societies expectations.

Seventeen years ago this lady – her name is Ann – gave me a job and somewhere to live.  I worked the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the Edinburgh Ice Rink 3 years running.  She accepted every bit about me, quirkiness, mental illness and just plain weirdness.  Because of Ann I had my first experience of what it was like to just be me.  Through Ann I met my first group of friends who accepted me from the word go.  They fell in love with me the same way I fell in love them, we were strangers in a city that oozed a unique quality and we were all finding our feet in some way or another.

Seventeen years have passed and it has never mattered to then what’s playing on my IPod or what jumper I’m wearing or how long my hair is.  The fact that I have Bipolar and a Stoma doesn’t alter who I am to them, it’s what I do with it that counts, who I reach out to when I should.

2018 taught me that suicide happens all the time.  It happens to our parents, our aunties, uncles, friends and the people we pass on the street that we might never think to ask if they’re okay.

In the early hours of New Year’s Day 2018 my friend Renae lost her husband and their four children lost their amazing dad when he took his own life.

Frith was a doctor, a surgeon.  He was in the business of helping people and when he took his life no one knew why and no one saw it coming.  It just goes to show that suicide really can happen to anyone because mental illness doesn’t discriminate.  

Renae will probably spend every day trying to piece it all together while she takes care of their four children reminding them every day of the man they knew as Dadda. 

Over the last 18 months or so one thing has always been constant; Renae is not ashamed of how Frith died and she is the one person who has shown me that having a conversation over and over and raising awareness of suicide is so important so that people know they are not alone when they are struggling.

I talk to Renae most days and I guess both of us are trying to make sense of it all but it also led me to look back on the people in my life I’ve either lost or almost lost to the same thing.

When I was a child my family in Greece was large in numbers, my grandma had multiple brothers and sisters and I know you’re not supposed to have favourites but as a kid I gave my heart to my Auntie Sophia.

While my brother and I failed to measure up the expectations of the relatives Auntie Sophia was different; she was funny and kind and loving and whenever she was around it felt as if all expectations of us had melted away.  We didn’t have to do anything to earn her love, it didn’t matter that we spoke next to nothing in Greek.  We were allowed to be a bit cheeky, a bit mischievous, she was different to the rest of the family, she was a breath of fresh air.

I can’t remember when I noticed she was gone, I can’t remember if I ever asked why? But I was much older by the time I knew she’d taken her own life.

Over the years I’ve learned more about my family history and I’ve come to know more about the people in it who I have almost lost to suicide.  I’ve seen friends lose loved ones, friends lose friends and every time another person takes themselves away from us it makes me reflect on my own situation.

The last 14 months have been difficult.  I walk the walk of a public speaker trying to show people that you can take control of your life and mental illness but behind the walls of my eyes I still struggle with being that same disappointment I always felt I was.

In times of darkness I sometimes still struggle with suicidal thoughts and I don’t have the answers to tackling the big issues but I have my own version of suicide prevention and this is how I am still standing here today.

I listen to the same music on repeat for hours, days, weeks, months, however long it takes to feel better.

The usual suspects are:

  • Josh Groban
  • Chris Daughtry
  • Cher
  • Meat Loaf
  • Linkin Park
  • Luke Bryan
  • Puressence
  • Kula Shaker

And I’ll look for meaning behind the lyrics of the songs to inspire me to carry on through the tough times and believe it or not it actually works.  And it makes me wonder if the people behind the lyrics have felt the same way I do and then I don’t feel so alone.

I write stories, inventing characters and plots that represent a better world to live in.  A world where solutions are easily accessible.

I look at pictures of swans on the internet and I wonder how simple their lives must be and how much simpler my life could be.

My family.  Whether they know it or not my Mum and my husband are the light at the end of my tunnel.

Milly – my cat – as sad as it may sound, at 19 she knows me better than I know myself.

BAND – my voluntary work gives me hope whenever I lose sight of it.  This group of people have done more for me than they will ever know.

The Simeon Centre – I’ve never been one for therapy or counselling.  I’ve tried and tested it in the past but in April this year this organisation helped me to start to make sense of a part of my life I never thought I would ever be at peace with and I can finally move forward.  It’s because of them that I can embrace being different and be proud of it.

Life isn’t easy for any of us.  Sometimes it’s like being served a bad sandwich in a restaurant we’re supposed to love.  We don’t always like what we have but there are ways we can deal with the things we go through that help us to learn and grow as individuals.

Above anything else, at least for me, acceptance is the key to becoming the best version of ourselves that we can be. At the end of the day life shouldn’t have to end because of the things we go through; life starts the second we find it within ourselves to be able to take control of it.

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Reading time: 11 min

I’ve been a volunteer with BAND for about three years now and I have to say World Mental Health Day is one of the highlights of my year. This is the 3rd year I’ve been given time on this stage and every year Rita come’s up with a challenge for me to find a new way of telling my story.

This year’s challenge is a little different to what I usually do. I was asked to write a letter to my younger self knowing what I know about my life right now. 

In order for this to work I will require audience participation…. Look at your faces, so that’s what fear looks like. No I’m kidding, I’m not picking on anyone but what I need you ALL to do is to pretend to be me. I know, I know, who would want to be me??? But just humour me, just pretend for the next 18 or so minutes that you’re all called Katerini.

Okay? Let’s get cracking then…

Dear Katerini, people tell you that you should always be a team player, that we should always work together towards the same goal, whatever that might be. They’ll tell you there is no “I” in team, this is true, and this phrase will be thrown about like a volley ball all the way through school. Especially when it comes to sports day…

Sports day, you are going to hate it. Not only will you hate it but you’ll be rubbish at it. For your first sports day in high school you’ll volunteer to run the 100 metre hurdles because its the right thing to do for the benefit of the school, but you’re not a runner and you can’t jump either. You will knock every single hurdle over and you’ll come last and everyone, and I mean everyone, will laugh at you. But just listen; you don’t have to take part in something you don’t like because others say you should, you don’t like sports and there’s nothing wrong with that, there’s also nothing wrong with not always being a team player, you’re different and you cant change that.

Kat, in life you’ll have to fight for everything. You’ll fight to be seen and heard, you’ll fight to get people to believe in you and I’m sorry but you’ve also got a fight on your hands when it comes to believing in yourself.

Along the way there will be things that are going to annoy you. For a start your name is ALWAYS going to be a problem. No one will ever pronounce it correctly, you’ll get Katrina, Katerina and Katherine and be prepared for Kate instead of Kat. And as for your last name, you’ve got no chance!

Roy Walker used to say:

Just say what you see!”

Because it really is that simple. But don’t worry, just because people can’t pronounce your name doesn’t mean you’re forgettable, you can still make an impact. 

For example, you will be the best Brownie the girl guides could ask for. You have this need to help others and make a difference in a massive way and at the age of 10 being a Brownie will heighten that need by showing you that across the world some people don’t have food and water like you do. Some people are starving and cold and you will make a silent vow to find some way of helping them. You will start with writing to the Queen.

When you’re not trying to save the world you’ll make people laugh doing impressions of characters from Coronation Street, you’ll aspire to be a comedienne but you’re never sure if you’re funny enough.

People will trust you and you will be their go to girl for love and friendship advice even though you’re only 12 and know nothing about either subject except, you have a crush on Sylvester Stallone and you really really want to be best friends with the entire cast of Saved by the Bell. But please, don’t try and be a grown up. 

In the last year of primary school you will feel as if you know everything about everything, but when you get to high school you’ll realise you know absolutely nothing. When you leave home for university you’ll think you know it all, but remember you’re still only 18, you’re still a teenager. 

There’s no rush to add years on to your life and you need to remember this because at the age of 30 you’re gonna freak out big time because you’re a spinster living with your mum and nothing is about to change any time soon. In fact the greatest gift you could possibly receive would be the ability to turn back the clock, be a teenager again and do everything differently. But if you don’t try and grow up too fast and savour being 11, cherish being 18 and just enjoy being young, you won’t need to go back in time and change things. There are some things you just can’t change.

I hate to break it to you Kat but, you’ll never be popular. You’re a geek and a swot, you have no sense of fashion whatsoever and you’ll be bullied because of it. I’d like to tell you to just wear what everyone else is wearing because it would make life easier, but why should you? Later in life you’re exactly the same; you’re still a geek and you’re still dancing to a tune only you know the moves to so why change the way you dress just to satisfy other people? My advice, you don’t need to, so don’t.

Katerini the greatest gift the universe has for you is the alphabet. As soon as you learn how to use it you will become a writer. You’ll write your thoughts and dreams and feelings and you will create new worlds for new people to live in and your imagination will get lost in the stories that consume your mind because pretending to be in a different world is better than being in the real one.

When you’re 13 a grape is going to ruin you. I know you have this ritual of biting the top off and picking out the pips and then eating the rest, don’t worry, I get it, no one likes pips. But this time it’s different. You’re being watched as you do it. You don’t even want the damn grapes but you have to eat them because they’ve been paid for….

Who would have ever thought that eating a grape in this way would make you a waste of a person….

Those are the words that come from Dad’s mouth. What a waste of a person. And don’t for a second think that he doesn’t mean it because he does. You will never get over this and every time you eat a grape it will hurt. Sure, sometimes he’ll show affection and he might even say he loves you but he doesn’t mean it because you’ll never be what he wants you to be, you will never be good enough. But if there’s one thing you should do about this I’d say don’t go through life believing you are a waste of a person. Instead, remember there is only one of him and no matter what anyone says you can have a happier life without him in it. You can do this because you have your mum, you have your brother and you have the best grandparents going.

Grandad will share his love of film and he’ll make sure you never miss a single episode of Coronation Street and Emmerdale by sitting with a notebook on his knee and writing down everything that happens so he can read it to you over the phone the next day. And Grandma will share with you her passion for literature and when you’re in your 20’s you will hoard a collection of vintage Mills&Boon novels that she would be proud of.

These are the things that matter, these are the things that count.

Katerini throughout life you’re going to have to deal with a million difficult things but the biggest thing you will have to tackle is your brain, your mental health and your individually tailored version of your very own mental illness and no matter what it does to your perception or what anyone else says its not fashionable and its not the in thing to have and its definitely not a super power! The reality is it will try to kill you, on more than one occasion. 

When you’re 22 people will wonder if you will reach 23 because you’ll be admitted to a psychiatric ward and its touch and go if you will make it out. Here’s how it works on a Bolton K ward. The hospital bosses may have changed the names but to a patient a K ward is still a K ward. No one tells you what to do, no one tells you how it all works, where can you get a cuppa? What happens at meal times? No one explains anything. You’re locked on the ward like you’ve committed a crime and you can’t leave unless a psychiatrist grants permission and be warned, the majority of the staff don’t care and they won’t be afraid to show it, but at least try not to take it too personally, to them its just a job.

In hospital every patients condition is worse than the next and 90% of people will argue that they shouldn’t be there; and that goes for you too. You will feel confused, scared, misplaced, but the same thing will happen 6 times and in 2011 when you ask the best psychiatrist you’ve ever had if you really need to be in hospital you need to believe him because he’ll say:

Right now Katerini, this is the only safe place for you.”

Sounds harsh, but its true. And when he tells you to start learning about your illness and take some control, listen to him! Because if you do that the sooner you’ll realise that mental illness can happen to anyone and its not because you’re a waste of a person. 

Mental illness or no mental illness, you’re still gonna be different. You just can’t help it, its just you, but you know what? You will come to realise that different doesn’t have to be bad.

For example, your taste in music will always be the opposite of your friends. While they hang posters of Peter Andre and his 6 pack on their bedroom wall, you will go to bed wearing a diamond ring from a Christmas cracker and dream of marrying Crispian Mills and Simon Fowler because you will love indie music and loathe pop (although secretly you will have a soft spot for the Backstreet Boys but you’ll tell no one until you’re in your 30’s). 

You’ll hate famous labels and you will shop at C&A to prove a point that no one understands, not even you. However, at the age of 35 as you’re leaving the house for work you’ll notice you’re wearing a coat from GAP, a pair of Converse on your feet and a Cath Kidston Bag! You are literally covered in labels, only now, you don’t care.

In year 11 you’ll have to put together a record of achievement and you’ll feel as if you’ve achieved nothing in the 16 years you’ve been alive because people like Leanne Rimes had a number 1 album at 13, Natalie Portman won Best Actress for the film Leon when she was 14 and all three boys from Hanson were under the age of 18 when their first single “Mmm Bop” became one of the most annoyingly addictive anthems of the 90’s.

The truth is Kat, you’ll never win an award for best actress, because you can’t act and you’ll never have a number 1 album because you can’t sing. Your name isn’t Leanne Rimes or Natalie Portman and the sooner you accept that you’re Katerini it will make things a lot easier.

I won’t lie to you, life will always be hard. You’ll have to prove yourself to everyone, all the time and you’ll wonder if you’ll ever achieve anything worth talking about. But guess what…. you will, because you’ll become a speaker and you’ll win first prize in a competition for talking about drag queens for 8 whole minutes! Then you’ll tell hundreds of people all about yourself and even though you’ll never believe it’s a story worth telling, one day you will because you survived it! You survived the school bullies, the dictator parent, the judgemental friends and the constant day to day dealings with mental illness… you survived it all.

Katerini believe me when I say that one day you will be a strong and somewhat confident person, not because of the things you’ve been through but because of how you dealt with them. Only you can live your life Kat, we may not be able to stop any of the negative things from happening but mark my words, by the time you’re 36 you won’t believe the things you’ve achieved.

You’ll fall in love…. with Drag Queens, Josh Groban and Swans…

You’ll buy a house…

You’ll even get married…but not to Josh Groban…

Most important thing of all, you’ll be happy.

At the end of the day, the key to your happiness Kat, is self-acceptance. The day you stop hating yourself is the day the darkness lifts and the weight on your shoulders becomes that little bit lighter. 

Remember that you are not defined by the things you go through, you make your own definition and only you can do that. 

We may go through life being led to believe that we should work together as a team, but when it comes to ourselves only we can make the most of our lives. Sometimes doing things to please others just doesn’t work. 

There is no “I” in team… but there is definitely a “me”.

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You can’t finish your degree; you have a mental illness.”

You don’t need a job; you’re entitled to benefits.”

You have a mental illness so you will find having a relationship virtually impossible.”

2003: My first experience of life on a psychiatric ward and the first time I ever encountered a social worker. After six weeks in captivity it was time to be released back into the world. I wanted to finish my degree, I was two months away from handing in my dissertation and one step closer that all important cap and gown. I didn’t know my mental illness would dictate my future or that my Bipolar Disorder went hand in hand with a social worker who was telling me the exact opposite.

I was consumed by disappointment. Was this it? Single, jobless, my mum forced into being my “carer” because a social worker said this was all a mentally ill person could expect from life. I’m not usually one for being told “no”. Tell me “no” and I will try my hardest to prove you wrong – it looked like I had to prove the social worker wrong too. 

It was never an easy journey and it took over ten years but I did achieve the things I was told I never would. I finished my degree, I got a job and I even got married! I’d like to take the credit for having the ability to do all of this alone, but that would be wrong. In 2011 I was begrudgingly introduced to a Community Psychiatric Nurse (CPN). I didn’t want a CPN and I made that very clear when I met her but I was wrong to assume she would treat me the way numerous other people had.

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