jumper dweller

  Red. Green. Amber. The tables almost glowed with these colours. This childish traffic light lollipop system let everyone know just how ill you were. Green - you could be trusted with your food. You wouldn’t pop a bagel in your pocket piece by piece or snaffle a slice of cake into the sleeve of your cardigan. Amber - you were getting there. Mouthful by mouthful you were trusted more. The more you ate, the more responsibility for yourself you gained. You weren’t sure you wanted it. Red - you were not able to feed yourself. You had to be cajoled, watched or forced. Each excruciating bite lasted a lifetime, but you had forty minutes to eat your lunch.   At the time, I was innocent to this world. It was October and I was delusional about two things at least: my parents’ imposter status and also the eating disorder I flirted with over dinner. I was light, light enough to be assumed part of the eating disorder treatment plan on the unit by the other young people. Yet I was unaware of this

  It's cold. I'm always so cold. My hands quiver blue and wrists bloom purple, after days of bang, bang, banging my wrist on the arm of my chair. I don't think I'm okay, but I don't think I'm not okay either. I think, I think, I think I'm breaking. I am on the children's ward. I have not seen my real parents for months. Some strange people visit sometimes. I hide from them. They are not my parents. They are often nice and I begin to trust them, then they'll do something off-kilter and I shy away again, like a beaten dog.  I had climbed out of a window, bawled through the lane outside the house and taken solace at a friend's home up the road. Gently I was led back to my childhood home and bundled into the car, driven to the hospital and admitted in hopes of finding a way to avoid another inpatient admission. We couldn't find one.  I arrive at the unit, brittle. Last time I was in this position, I had a home, but now I'm adrift. My parents

 I feel like a time traveller. I've awoken in 2021, sleeping through a pandemic and my teenage years, now in my mid-twenties. I have no dinner-party-appropriate anecdotes. Only mental ill-health with bouts of questionable wellness. I have been in four different mental hospitals, which I predict could be four more than most people. No one talks about it, including me. Like, at all.  Whenever someone talks about mental illness, there is this most impenetrable silence, followed by: 'I knew someone who was depressed once.' Or a casual, almost nonchalant change of subject. I mean, we talk about mental health a lot - how to keep it afloat, how to do 'self-care' in a commercially-assisted sense. It's all body butters and face masks.  I don't like it when people reduce preventing mental illness down to looking after yourself or not. That is a large part of it, a whole team of people looked after me at my worst. Most things cannot be made better with a face mask.  It

****disclaimer**** I never got round to publishing this archived post on my blog, Jumper Dweller, aka where you find yourself now. It seems now quite pertinent in light of current and recent events. I’m sending love and positivity to whoever and wherever you are, all of you! So anyway, here’s a post from long ago, dragged from the archive. Enjoy! ****disclaimer over**** Good day, folks! It's been a while since I last blogged, but today I felt inspired when it came to today's topic: self-soothing using fashion/personal style and how that can help with recovery. Self-soothe is a DBT technique, which is designed to help manage distress and reduce maladaptive behaviours. There are many ways to practise self-soothe - you might use nice smelling hand or body cream or read positive messages given to you by friends to trigger positive emotions. Today I wanted to propose that personal style and 'dressing up' in particular can act as a self-soothe activity. Dressing up

Ambition . It's a highly prized quality in our modern world, and while it can be a very helpful and rewarding one, it's not always the road to a more general state than happiness: contentment. That's what I would like to discuss in this post. Seneca, a Greek philosopher, (to paraphrase to the nth degree) stated that man consistently seeks more leisure time, to enjoy life and moreover, to be content. And yet we find ourselves prioritising a busy lifestyle over our own wellbeing . Why? Can we choose not to? Of course.  I quite often have people ask me why I chose to "stand in a shop" when I have a degree under my belt and a lot of life experience considering I'm only 24 (nearly). The truth is: 1) I love my job : the people are great, clothes are my thing and honestly talking to such a variety of people makes my day! and b) I don't want a career where I'm simply running its treadmill to earn money to buy things I don't need so that I can ki

I've spoken about maximalism a little bit (okay, a lot. I'm a maximalist so it would be as such!) on this blog and it's something I wanted to address quickly on this calm Sunday evening. We are just about to have an Indian takeaway, so I'll make it snappy.  Minimalism can be very beneficial, but it's not the only option I'd struggled and strived to achieve some abstract goal I called minimalism: very few possessions, no attachment to physical objects but rather obsessed by a desire to move from place to place hassle-free because I own virtually nothing.  This, it has dawned on me, is not always helpful. Owning close-to-nothing won't necessarily make you happy, and admittedly this is a more extreme, idealised notion of minimalism, but all the same I want to argue that possessions can be incredibly powerful because it is opulence, rather than consumerism that we need to be our mindset.  Opulence is not excessive wealth or a product