A place to share my thoughts, struggles, experiences, reflections and, most importantly, my hope.
Having experienced anxiety and depression for over a decade, navigating life with mental illness is something that I have become very familiar with. But recently, after quite a thorough process, I received a new diagnosis: Borderline Personality Disorder, or BPD for short. Around a year ago I didn’t know much about BPD, and it’s still…
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If I wanted to, there are probably a lot of letters that I could put after my name, though only one of them would bear any educational significance. Clare D, BA, BPD, SSA, PCOS, HSP. You may or may not know what all of these stand for, and some are more significant to me than others.
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Last week it was my birthday. I often find birthdays weird and a little difficult. I think it’s a mixture of the expectation, the tendency to reflect on the last year and look at the year ahead to the next, and the subtle pressure to be happy the whole time. I spent a lot of…
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I am pretty bad at self care. Just to be clear, when I say self care I don’t mean taking a spa day, having some ‘me time’ and buying myself some treats. I mean the kind of self care that is taken for granted. I mean making a bed so that I’m not sleeping an…
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Last January I took part in Move for Mind, and I would thoroughly recommend it. Mind is such a great charity and the fundraising challenge is a really great way of building up movement and motivation in way that is manageable and helpful for each person. You even get a free t-shirt when you sign…
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Over a long time and in bursts of thoughts and sentences this blog has begun to form, as I worked out how best to talk about something that feels so rarely discussed. Self harm is a mostly hidden but very present struggle for so many people today. For those who have self harmed, or have…
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When simple words don’t seem to serve justice to the depth of darkness that depression brings, perhaps a metaphor will better suffice, will give a better picture of how it really feels. Like a storm, a hurricane, like being lost out at sea, surrounded by a flood of apathy and despondency, or caught in a…
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Diary Entry – Tuesday 8th August: We were walking by the river in Ho Chi Minh City. It was a hot and humid day, but down by the water I didn’t feel so exhausted. The morning had been hard for me. We had been walking the busy streets of District 3, stopping at intervals to…
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Depression has cast a shadow on my life for over five years now. It hit its worst when I was sixteen. I thought that it would never change, that I would never get better. But then I did. And yet it stayed lurking nearby, and I could feel it coming back again last Christmas, sneaking…
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The Lilies of the Field 