Speeches Archives - Bi-polar with a stoma Blog

Warm hearts…

Blog_Bi-polar — Sun, 21 Jan 2024 14:48:58 +0000

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 myside warming herself on a heated blanket. I know, party like a rockstarright? Well, today I partied like a different kind of rock star. Ten years ago, someone once said… “Never say no to any kind of publicspeaking opportunity.” I listened to that advice, and I have never said no to any kind of speakingopportunity. Two years ago, the hospital chaplain walked onto the ward where Iwork. It was a week after I lost my friend to suicide and we could nothave been more different. Ade is a Reverand and Minister of anEvangelical church in Manchester and I have always struggled with the conceptof religion. I am not a believer in God but I have always been a firmbeliever in fate. I believe everything happens for a reason; it’s notalways good and it’s not always fair but I also believe that people meet for areason. Ade took me under his wing. He looked after my wellbeing at a timewhen I wasn’t sure what my wellbeing was supposed to look like. Fastforward two and a half years and last week Ade asked me to tell my story to ahundred people at the annual conference at his church. He said… “It’s short notice, you can thinkabout it, you can say no…” I said… “I’ll do it. Thank you. Ifyou think I can do this, I will do it.” He said… “It’s an African church and 90% of thepeople will be black and we wear white.” Well, the only thing I have that’s white is my wedding dress and a scarf afriend bought me that never made it out of the cellophane because it’s toopretty. I figured my wedding dress might not be appropriate so my prettyscarf made it out of the cellophane to cover my hair. Now I am not experienced when it comes to church attendance. I canprobably count on one hand how many times I’ve been to a Greek church and anyother kind of church was probably for someone else’s wedding. You canprobably imagine I was a little fish flapping away outside of the bowlcontaining the water I needed to be in. I had no idea what to expect. Two of my favourite people came with mein the form of mum and Matt and as I write this I have to tell you, I havenever been more grateful to them for being there than I was today, not simplybecause I had people there, but trust me, when I walked through the doors ofthat church I was instantly emotional. I kid you not, the welcome wereceived gave a whole new meaning to the word… “…wholesome.” We were embraced, we were greeted with smiles and warmth and it wasbeautiful! No one looked at us strangely. We were the only three people whoweren’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 theleft. I felt so sorry for Matt, this was probably not his mostcomfortable moment and he was now separated from everything that wasfamiliar. But you know what? Matt’s a trooper. He gets a lotof stick in life and I am guilty for some of that, but I have never been asproud and grateful to my husband as I was today. There was music, there was dancing; there was joy. I wish I could sayI lost myself in the atmosphere but my ridiculous inability to “let go” stoppedme from doing that and if I could go back, I would dance around that floor andcelebrate life with the rest of them. I am always cold. I wear between two and three pairs of socks allyears round. I have the heater on underneath my desk all day at work andwhoever turns it off, they turn it off at their own risk. A coldKat is not a happy Kat. I have three hot water bottles in bed with me andI 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 roomwas small, or that we were all sat very close together? Or maybe it wasthe people that made the room warm? I sometimes say certain things warm my heart, like someone making a kindgesture for another person, or kind words, so maybe that’s what it was, maybeit was the hearts of the people and their kindness and compassion that made theroom warm. People I have never met before who had no idea who I was, came to us andasked us if we were having a good time. They encouraged us to dance, gaveus water and food and I sat in my seat, trying really hard not to cry becausethe whole thing just felt out of this world. As I watched each speaker I was in total awe of their energy and I couldn’thelp 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 beengrateful for any opportunity to tell my story but sometimes I’ve left the roomfeeling like it was a really bad job interview. I always put a lot ofwork in to my PowerPoints and I have always denied being a perfectionist andclaimed… “…I just like things being done right.” But I admit it here, right now I admit that I am the biggest perfectionistgoing. I felt really strongly about getting today’s talk right. I wanted toget it right for Ade and I wanted to get it right for the people who werewatching. With their warm embrace around my heart I wanted to give themsomething that they might think about, because being in that room, just sittingamongst the ladies, is something I will always remember. When it came to my moment, as I walked up to the front of the stage...

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“A Student with an Idea and a Speaker…”

Blog_Bi-polar — Sat, 03 Apr 2021 19:44:09 +0000

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. 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...

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A Waste of a Person

Blog_Bi-polar — Sat, 29 Aug 2020 14:43:52 +0000

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...

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Bad Sandwiches

Blog_Bi-polar — Sat, 29 Aug 2020 13:49:37 +0000

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...

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Dear Katerini – there is no I in team…

Blog_Bi-polar — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 10:22:10 +0000

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.

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