Happy Girl Winter: How to Overcome Seasonal Depressive Disorder
Parenting in a Pandemic: Lessons from a Teen Mom
When the Coronavirus pandemic hit, I wasn’t prepared for the truest reality of being a single mom. I’d never had to rely on myself so fully before, neither as a parent nor as a young woman. Suddenly, I couldn’t call on my family for physical support. My daughter couldn’t visit her grandparents because the risk of feeding COVID to their vulnerabilities was simply too great…
Lost in Translation: How Language Around Women’s Pain Creates The Pain Gap
How can such different language be used to describe identical pain? As a scientist by training, I turned to recent research for answers. The critical problem appeared to be simple and, unfortunately, unsurprising. While kidney stones can affect everyone, ovarian cysts only affect people with wombs…
Growing Pains: My Experience of an Ovarian Cyst and Being Ignored by Doctors
The sharp stabbing feeling had been a bursting ovarian cyst. My body had been telling me that something was wrong. When the doctor told me why I had been in pain, I felt relief wash over me. Not at the diagnosis itself (that part was quite concerning), but at the fact that I had been right. My pain was real and had actually meant something…
Make the Music Stop: What it Feels Like to Live with Borderline Personality Disorder
Borderline Personality Disorder is like a never-ending battle with your brain. I have constant feelings that are excruciating and full of hopelessness. But I feel completely empty, void of all feeling, at the same time. Where’s the balance? Please. Make the music stop…
Accepting Your Illness: How Understanding Your Eating Disorder Aids Healing
To begin recovering from your illness, you must be able to accept it. This acceptance can manifest in many ways. You can admit that you are sick (whether you believe it yourself or not). You can open up to others, allowing yourself to be comforted and supported. You can speak on how you feel, in the moment and during stressful trigger moments…
Chosen Sisters: How Friendship Helped Me Through Grief
There is often a cliché (but nonetheless true) statement regarding the bond within female friendships – it’s often called a sisterhood. A sisterhood is women who will support you through your darkest times…
More Than Meets The Eye: Stop Assuming that People Aren’t Chronically Ill Based on Appearances
At first glance, if you were to see me in the street, you might conclude that I'm a healthy and vibrant young woman – someone who is strong with copious amounts of energy. The reality, however, is a far cry from that…
Embracing Your Insecurities: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think
Oh, insecurities. Everyone has them. I like to think that some people are more skilled at hiding their insecurities. Some are more skilled at embracing them, which leads to the key word: CONFIDENCE. But it isn’t as easy as spelling it out, is it? If I’m being honest, I don’t know the first step to achieving full self-confidence. Mainly because I don’t achieve it often…
Cancer Happens. How Do I Deal?
My internal mantra was ‘suppress, don’t address’. Instead of allowing myself to address my worries, I shoved them deep down and told myself that I was doing the right thing. That was quite foolish of me, wasn’t it? There is no right thing to do when it comes to reacting to cancer. Even if there were, bottling up my emotions was certainly not it…
It’s Not Your Fault: Forgiving Myself for My Bipolar Disorder
It remains difficult to avoid demonising everything related to my condition. I am not going to lie to you all and say that being bipolar has its perks or ‘gives me character’. I will say, however, that it is not so simple to draw the line between myself and my condition. As a result, demonising my bipolar means demonising myself…
‘You Feel Like a Fraud, a Fake’: Fighting Imposter Syndrome
Imposter syndrome is loosely defined as doubting your abilities and feeling like a fraud. It disproportionately affects high-achieving people, who find it difficult to accept their accomplishments. Many question whether they're deserving. It involves feelings of self-doubt and personal incompetence that persist despite your education, experience, and accomplishments…
Not Feeling Normal: The Impact of Birth Control on My Mental Health
There is currently no precise percentage for the number of women who experience negative side effects from the pill, as everybody is different and it is difficult to measure. In the beginning, this fact put me at ease. When I didn’t feel any pain and wasn’t plagued by the feeling of sickness constantly, I took it as a win. Physically, I was fine. But I didn’t even consider the mental side of it…
My Experience of EMDR Therapy
I was willing to try anything to allow myself even a moment of respite, so I met an EMDR therapist. She explained the therapy to me as the idea of reprocessing your perception of time and emotion when experiencing a flashback. When encountering a trigger, something can happen called an amygdala hijack. The amygdala is the part of your brain that processes memory and emotional responses. When overwhelmed, it effectively goes into panic mode and it’s near impossible to process that, while triggered, you’re not in danger at that precise moment…
‘You Don’t Look Sick’: What is an Eating Disorder?
I didn’t look sick. At least, not to anyone who didn’t know me well. My weight hadn’t plummeted to dangerous lows; my skin wasn’t pale; my hair wasn’t falling out in chunks. I didn’t ‘look’ sick, so I convinced myself that I wasn’t…
Reflecting On My Epilepsy Diagnosis
My first seizure was terrifying. Seizures are changes in the brain’s electrical activity. These changes can cause dramatic, noticeable symptoms or may not cause any symptoms. Common feelings associated with seizures include physical and mental exhaustion, confusion, and memory loss…
It Isn’t Just the Plague Year: Working Through Imposter Syndrome During a Global Pandemic
2020 saw what seemed to be a lot of people falling to one side. The pandemic was getting to them. They were drowning. Failing. Others, though, were thriving. I watched as people that I knew began developing dream projects, starting businesses, diving into passion projects. I would like to believe it was a sudden surge of motivation that prompted me to share my writing, but in truth, it was severe anxiety of being left behind…
Health and Sex Education in the UK is Failing Young Women
Broadly remembered as “that class where I had to put a condom on a banana”, PSHE is not treated as a serious subject – perhaps in part due to its lack of exams and its casual set-up. It is usually taught by form tutors, who are out of their comfort zone and subject area…
The Pain Gap: Why is Women’s Pain Not Taken Seriously?
The relationship between women and pain is an interesting one. Studies show that, globally, women experience more pain over their lifetimes than men. It is the expectation that women will inherently experience pain. This expectation forms the basis of the phenomena of the pain gap. This bias that women are expected to experience pain their entire lives is now deeply embedded into modern medical discourse…
Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder and Me: How My Menstrual Cycle Impacts My Mental Health
What I began to recognise was that my mood and levels of anxiety, as well as my relationship with food, would fluctuate throughout the month. While we all have our good and bad days, the cyclical nature of my symptoms was unmistakable. After doing a little research, I came across PMDD (Premenstrual dysphoric disorder). The easiest way to explain PMDD is as an exaggerated and extreme version of PMS (premenstrual syndrome). The reality, though, is hard to describe…
Breaking Away from the Toxic Narratives of ‘Comfort Eating’ and ‘Lack of Self Control’: Navigating Binge Eating Disorders in A Fat Body
Being a fat person displaying the key signs and behaviours of early-onset binge eating means that you’re automatically dismissed as not having an eating disorder due to medicalised fatphobia. Binge Eating Disorders are commonly dismissed as ‘comfort eating’, or simply a lack of self-control if your body type is fat…