“Are you okay?” The words are being thrown around left, right, and centre today. The school children are wearing yellow. Businesses send out emails to their employees. Supermarket and retail employees sport their yellow wristbands. If only people took it seriously every day, instead of just one day a year…
Whether you call it R U OK Day, or Suicide Prevention Day, this is it. The 12th of September. This is the day where we want to message or call every single one of our friends and family and ask them, are you okay? How are you doing? How is life, and are you really … Read More
‘Just look on the bright side!’
‘It’s not as bad as you think it is!’
‘If you just focus on the positives, you’ll feel better.’
‘Your life is wonderful, you don’t need to be depressed!’
We’ve all heard them, and a lot of us have even said them. But you know what? These things don’t help (believe it or not)! I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again; people like us, we can’t just look on the bright side to feel better. If it were that simple, who would need antidepressants? Therapists would be out of a job, and we would all be ‘okay’! Here are a few reasons why you really shouldn’t tell someone with a mental illness (or even someone who is seriously struggling with something) to just ‘look on the bright side’:
Dearest Friend, It’s been a while since we spoke, but I have seen the change in you. I wish I could say it’s a good sort of change. But it isn’t. Darkness has so clearly taken a hold of you, and the change in your face, your expression, your eyes… oh my friend. I see you … Read More
A phrase that often goes through my head is “some days are better than others”, and I have often used this in my posts and stories, simply because it is so true. Some days are great! Other days are average. And some days, we feel like we are in a living hell.
We might be too tired to fight it; things seem too difficult to keep pressing on. But even if some days the only thing I do is survive, I will not give up. If I wrote out my entire life story, not once would you read that I gave up, and this is why:
Dearest Friend,
Some days really are better than others. For me at the moment, there are a lot of days that are better than the ones in the present. And there are some things you need to know.
I understand that you are one of many people who go through life having no idea what it is to feel depressed or to experience anxiety. And that’s okay too. But for those of us who do, it can be incredibly difficult to explain what’s going on in our minds, but it’s also difficult for you to understand us.
Yes, it’s okay to not feel okay. I mean, hey. It’s not alright that people have to go through this, that fact is just awful. But this is to you, my friend, who doesn’t know what it’s like, and I ask you to take a moment to read just four things that we struggling people really want to tell you…
There are some days, where you simply ‘have’ hope. It’s just there. And then other days, you really have to fight for it. A quote that I love and can really relate to is “Sometimes you have to fight a battle more than once to win it”. If depression, anxiety or other struggles are something … Read More
Some days, I can begin writing and it just flows. Other days, or weeks, I can try… and it just jams up. The thoughts are there, all bubbling up and trying to spill over, but it isn’t working. And I just. Can’t. Write. I find that writing is an escape for me. It’s odd, because … Read More
Hey lovely people. This is a bit of a story and a few of my thoughts, straight from the heart. My thoughts and feelings on recovery, and how I am going with feeling okay. Sometimes the craziness of life gets the better of us, and we get very quickly overwhelmed, especially if how we feel … Read More
Feelings. They creep up on us out of nowhere, confuse us, bring us joy, and even pain. But what do you do when they hit you like a tonne of bricks? When you’re overwhelmed by this perhaps foreign concept, these things called feelings? A lot of us struggle when we begin to have different feelings, … Read More
