jumper dweller

  There is so much that I can't tell you about my third admission, so much I can't remember. Illness blurs the details and the privacy I owe to my friends erases the daily minutiae of the unit. In short, I had been sectioned - section three, six months. A treatment order, that in retrospect, could probably have been avoided. Or maybe that is just what I like to tell myself when I think about it late at night.  I had found myself in a field, shivering in the early evening sun. It was July, I was in love, but still very, very ill. I had been taken on four occasions to our local accident and emergency department that week. I was, as I read later in my unit-admission report, 'no longer manageable in the community'. I was sad, but determined. I was determined to make an exit any way I could. Instead I was flown to Woking, heavily sedated - so much so that I have no memory of the journey there and was deemed 'unresponsive' in my admission interview.  I digress. So man...

  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 unawar...

  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...

I feel like, for some strange reason, we millennials are drifting aimlessly somewhere in the ether. We are by no means directionless, far from it. We are instead surrounded by so. many. options. And yet none of them seem viable.  It's 1am, no, sorry 2am - an hour has passed since I gave up on sleep and began to jot down (also known as: scribble down manically before the ideas somehow escape me) a plan for the future.  Not so long ago it was considered 'normal' to have a five year plan: go to university, get a good job, find a partner, marry said partner, and have children, get old, die. That was most people's plans, or so it seemed. Of course, there were 'eccentrics' that deemed this linear life too straightforward, choosing to live in communes, off-grid and reliant on the land. Okay, I exaggerate the polarities of these two more-or-less untrue stereotypes, but I digress.  A game-plan for life was set out for us, as detailed above. But now, ...

Hi folks, it's been a while, eh? Sorry about that... The truth is that I've been tired, some may even say 'burnt out', and am just about coping with my current workload while juggling a whole bunch of projects I've been brewing up: taxidermist aspirations, an MA beginning imminently, reading, getting up at 5(ish)am and attempting to be kinder to myself. Some of them will, I'm sure, prove more successful than others, but hey-ho. In this post, I wanted to discuss something I've been thinking about recently: doing things purely for yourself and no one else. In all honesty, I struggle with this whole concept. I incessantly seek assurance in the opinions' of others because I don't trust my own mind to supply it for me. I think this is reasonably common in general, but is particularly so in those with mental health issues. It's strange to think that we can believe thoughts that distress us so furiously, but a single second of positive self-ta...

Bloody Hell, folks. It's been a while. A hot minute, some would say. Firstly, a sincere sorry for not writing on here for ages. It's been a crazy few months marked by illness, indecision (or the malevolent goblin of indecision, 'the duck of indecision' - I'll put a pic of him at the end) and inner turmoil and frustration. But tonight I felt inspired and wanted to write a little something about how I would go about constructing an identity when a) you don't feel like you really have one, and 2) there is a pull from society/peers/family to just be like everyone else (primarily so that you remain unproblematic and therefore fit seamlessly into the world we live in, its qualms unnoticed and its wonders ignored). So I have a couple of tips (can I really call them that? Let's say ideas) that might kickstart you (and me, goodness knows I need it!) into discovering more so who we are and who we want to be! Right, shall we get started? Have a kit-kat (ak...

My capsule wardrobe!  Minimalism is, to many people, an extremely attractive yet lofty ideal. Own as few things as possible, only those that serve you and are functional for you and beautiful to you. For me, it was a concept I valued but I considered it entirely impossible, in practical terms, to implement in my day to day life. Maybe some you feel the same? Weighed down by possessions (literally so when moving from place to place) and unable to separate you from your stuff . Consumerism has been bred into us.  So, I hear you ask: 1) how are you going to implement minimalist ideals and b) why are you even trying since you are most likely doomed to fail? 1) Live with as little as is comfortable for as long as is comfortable. Ultimately, although I did a big wardrobe declutter and discarded (aka gave to charity) all the fallen apples (aka the clothes I really didn't care about all that much), I haven't abandoned the majority of my clothing though it no lon...

A subtle dash of rainbow..? You hear exhibitionist and you think narcissist.  These two can correlate, but they're far from one in the same. An art exhibition is not a display of the artist's internalised narcissism, but rather a message to the world concerning something they believe to be important and worthy of note.  A portion of my clothing collection!  Fashion is the same for me. I have often spoken on this blog about why our style is our initial message to the world about who we are, but take that one step further: what if our style could represent more than that? What if it could demonstrate a series of beliefs or an ethos that we wish to embody? What if by people looking at us we were in fact sharing with them what we hold key to our personal ethics? It's possible, certainly.  I am, in this sense of the term, a low-key exhibitionist. I don't shout or scream or act outlandishly to encourage people to look. I don't even really wa...

For some unknown, or at the least semi-unknown reason, it is ridiculously difficult for me to be kind to myself. I'm sure many of you reading (if there are actually 'many' of you in the first place?) will be able to identify with that. In a culture where every single achievable thing is quantified and compared with everyone else's achievable things, it's unsurprisingly that we young whippersnappers struggle to admit that we have value and worth aside from what we create/our grades/our monetary assets. Everything is about consuming, growing and competing, and that is just not a culture that cultivates kindness.  Self care! It is a radical thing, these days, to treat yourself nicely. We preach self-care as gospel, but it's far from bubble baths (Lush being our treat of choice), painting nails and applying some oddly cooling face mask. Self-care is our weapon, our fortress against low self-esteem. Once we value ourselves as people, looking after ourse...

  A happy Louise!  Hi folks! Me again. Long time, no write (?)... In truth, the title of this blog post, 'Super Busy', has been indicative of my past (aka-til-now) and future (aka-henceforth) state. It's bloody difficult to balance work, study and generally being a human being. So, here are a few tips (it's going to be a short post today, folks, I'm currently procrastinating from uni work, sorry!)  Today's outfit! Stay Accepting: enjoy who you are and STOP COMPARING  This tip is a good one, if I do say so myself. It can be really difficult to accept the situation you're in. Maybe uni seems overwhelming or you just don't like your new haircut (okay, both relevant for me...), but ultimately, nothing lasts forever and the achievement gained from waiting things out, whether that be an MA degree or long hair after the pixie-grow-out phase, is always worth it. Time is a wonderful thing and it passes all too quickly, so enjoy where you ar...

Q: Can I make this blazer work? A: Barely... I've not written about this before, and honestly, I've only recently come to understand it myself. A friend and I were discussing last night why I just cannot seem to get out of my overdraft: clothes. It's as simple as that, I love clothes too much. This then made me wonder: where does this thirst for newness come from in terms of clothing? Partly consumerism, no doubt. But I believe the root is in my deep need for change, for vitality and vibrancy, and for the ability to be someone who I am not yet but might one day be.  It's difficult because I do not want to stop buying clothing. But I know I must. My bank balance silently laments at its minus figure, induced by the addiction (dare I call it that?) to change. I have come to the conclusion that I want to be someone else but me.  On this blog, I've celebrated 'the chameleon' but it, as with most things, comes with a downside. I am permanently poor...