The Plan.

I have created this site to take you through a journey.

This is not a page purely based on telling ‘my story’ but an attempt to raise awareness and education for mental health.

Come next year I will be raising money for the charity called mind by going sober for 3 months, if I raise over £1000 in this time I will be going sober for 6 months.

I have decided to do this as those who know me will also know this will be quite the challenge for me, as since my ‘recovery’ alcohol has played quite a big part and not a particularly positive one.
By going sober I hope to share and educate others who either suffer from mental health problems or do not particularly understand them.

So first as brief as I can be this is where my story begins…

From a young age I have suffered from depression particularly increasing when entering my teenage years, where I was often told this can be a difficult time and typically depression is common. Though the crippling sadness I felt daily did not feel all that common so fairly quickly I tried creating coping mechanisms, the first and most addictive of these for me was self harm which started roughly around the age of 13.
Skipping out all the nitty gritty details this all came to a head around the age of 16 where I had enough of feeling drowned in a constant state of anxiety and overwhelming emotion and started to plan my death. I tried all I could to find reasons to change my mind but planning my exit route became a count down to the day all the suffering would be over.
Luckily that day never came after having an experience which made me decide to give life one more chance.
During this period however I was receiving mental health support with a psychologist and also undergoing art therapy. From this time I don’t remember many specifics besides a few attempts at mentally diagnosing me and constantly turning down the idea of medication.

Moving on to 18+ there was great improvement however depression I noticed is something you become accustomed to and I could always feel it waiting to strike at any moment.
Many distractions were used at this time from smoking to drinking all parts of any form of escapism I could come up with, self harm still being one of them and self harm I have realised comes in many different forms.

Skipping forward again to early 20’s another realisation at this point is no matter where you run to or what you run from eventually it all catches up with you. Depression and self harm became a very real and numbing experience in every day life again and one which I could no longer escape from. At the age of 24 it all got too much again and I attempted an overdose and then despite the attempt not working I tried again later that year, until it became very apparent I desperately needed professional help and ended up in a mental day care centre for 2 weeks.
Here I was eventually diagnosed with BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) and after leaving the day care centre is where the rest of my story continues…