Kissed By a Dementor

Dear Friend, I’m sorry I didn’t write sooner, and perhaps you’re wondering why I’m writing now after all this time or why I’m writing at all. Recently on one of my coffee dates with Jiminy Cricket, I brought up the subject of how I’ve officially passed the one year mark since graduating high school. This recent achievement had me wondering whether people who were so instrumental in my high school life would be interested in knowing where I am now, what I’m doing and how I am. I'm writing today acknowledging how far I've come, and after speaking to Jiminy Cricket, I realised writing a letter is the perfect way for not only me to look back on the past year, but for those of you interested. I want to show you that without your support I would not be here today. I'm finally getting to a headspace where I can truly value your role in my life. Whether you met me in year seven or somewhere along the way, if you’re reading this it means that despite my...

I’d like to share an essay that I wrote at the start of the year for Youth Studies, which focuses on how the stigma surrounding mental illness has influenced and continues to influence my personal experience with mental illness.   The stigma surrounding mental illness is one of the major social constructs impacting on the societal understanding of mental illness and affects the way in which individuals with mental illness are perceived and treated (Conrad & Barker). Goffman (1963) classes stigma as “a ‘mark’ that signals to others that an individual possesses an attribute reducing him or her from ‘whole and usual’ to ‘tainted and discounted’” (Pescosolido, 2013). The stigma associated with mental illness in current society, whilst illustrates the social fault lines of a society that produces such prejudice and discrimination, it also is negatively impacting those with mental illnesses. With the prevalence of mental illness in society today, especially promi...

Think back to your childhood; do you remember ever wanting to fly?  Looking back now what do you see? Do you find yourself wondering why your younger self didn't seem to be preoccupied with the fear of falling? Well looking back now I see a lot of things, I find myself asking how is that children can be scared of something so trivial such as monsters under the bed, but when they're wanting to fly the thought of falling never appears to cross their minds? I don't recall ever wanting to fly, I think I was too frightened by the idea of falling that flying seemed impossible. So I never gave much thought to flying, instead, I focused my attention on this fear of falling.  Fear in itself is a tricky thing it can be the key motivator in pushing us to where we want to be and sometimes beyond but it is also what prevents us from reaching that beyond. There's this quote about how it doesn't matter if you're scared it doesn't mean you're...

Recently the idea of hospitalisation was posed to me by my GP as a very real possibility. He started to explain that all these things we're doing, the medication, seeing a psychiatrist and working with my psychologist; they're only short term; prolonging the inevitable. I showed him what I had recently written trying to explain how I'm feeling: "My head feels like it's about to blow. It's reached full capacity. I'm mentally and physically exhausted. I'm ready for it to blow. I'm ready for the release so I can start over. But it isn't coming. Why isn't it coming I need it to come! I really do. Without it breathing is becoming harder by the second. I'm full of all these emotions that I need to let out but I can't. They're there but they're not. I'm depressed but I'm not. Because even though the feelings are there I can't actually feel them properly. They don't do what they used to do. People ...