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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This Mental Health Awareness Week, I wanted to share some of my recent experiences of navigating both the ordinary and the significantly less ordinary situations in which I have found myself in day to day life. 2022 was a very hard year for me. Mental health crisis aside, I spent two and a half months…
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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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‘How are you?’ I hear, The question with which most conversations begin. ‘I’m tired’ I say, A whole thesaurus of words ready for when I’m feeling more creative. Exhuasted, run down, burnt out ‘Knackered’ as we say up north Spent, drained, shattered, weary. Weary is the one that seems to encompass it all. Weary of…
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Whilst we can’t meet together as churches right now, that hasn’t stopped us coming together virtually. At The Globe Church one of the main ways we do this is through weekly Bible studies. And during lockdown we’ve been looking at something the Apostle Paul talks about in his letter to the church in Galatia: the…
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The Lilies of the Field 