All posts tagged: mental-health

This Woman’s Worth

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I am the daughter of a working-class housewife and a middle-class small business owner. I was born in the 70s and grew up to believe that hard work for fair pay was as much a woman’s right as it was a man’s. I worked hard at school and didn’t question progressing to university. My first job was, at age 11, delivering newspapers to half the village before school five days a week, for which I was paid £5. I progressed to waitressing at the village pub and revelled in spending my hard-earned cash at the Metro Centre twice a year. I think I was one of the last cohorts who enjoyed a free higher education and graduated with a small overdraft that I bounced in and out of as I stepped into a career. I didn’t go home after I was 18, so I always had a job, or two, to pay the bills. In fact, since I was a papergirl there has only been one year when I haven’t earned money. That was the …

A Quiet Mind, Who Can Find?

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One of the things I struggled with the most when we lived in New Zealand—and this is going to sound crazy—is life being so easy. I know, what a ridiculous thing to say. It’s true though. I don’t mean that we spent our days sipping cocktails, staring at beautiful views without a care in the world. Actually that last bit does come close to what I mean. You are so far away from the rest of the world on this beautiful, hardly populated island, safe and secure, that you don’t have to worry about the rest of the world. Yes, the bills are high, you still have to do maintenance on your house, teenagers are hard to live with wherever you are, but the things you have to care about are only in your world. Other people’s worlds rarely interrupt your day. Right now, I wonder how I thought that was such a bad thing as I feel like I am drowning in cares and woes. Our dog has developed some kind of cyclical diarrhoea …

Choosing the way to go

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There are many ways to leave life, starving myself to death is not the way I want to go and I decided that when I was 19. When I was 15, I began losing weight. It was easy. I was already really into sport, playing hockey and netball, running, cycling and anything else that was competitive. Gradually, and without a plan, I started cutting out food that had fat in it. I began saying I didn’t like chocolate and only eating sweets that were full of sugar but has the all important ‘Trace’ next to fat on the nutrition label. I whittled my breakfast down to one slice of toast which would be tossed aside as I ran for the bus. I spent my lunch money on sweets and magazines, and avoided the lunch hall by running around the sports field for half an hour. I am not sure how long it took, I think maybe a year but certainly by the time I was in my A’level years, I was in the habit of …