This year has been pretty shit. We don’t have the horrific death toll from Covid-19 that other countries have, but we still spent what felt like years in lockdown (decades, if you’re Victorian) Businesses closed and some haven’t and won’t open their doors again. Unemployment is huge, the economy has taken a massive hit and we’re still living under a cloud of anxiety. It’s not exactly a recipe for fun times, is it?
Stay home, keep 1.5 metres from people of you do go out, avoid public transport if you can, try to work from home…
It’s a weird time full of fear and anxiety and FEELINGS and also BOREDOM. Are you feeling that way? I’m gonna go through some of my feelings, particularly about social distance and what we should do. It might help me sort them out. It might help you sort yours out. Or maybe you’ll offer me some brilliant insight in the comments. Or I will shed some light for you, who knows? I’m just gonna tip my brain contents out on the table and sort into piles, so to speak.
**This is an anonymous guest post. It contains material that some will find distressing.**
If you haven’t yet heard about 13 Reasons Why, it’s a show on Netflix that has the world talking. In 13 episodes, we discover the reasons that led 17-year-old Hannah Baker to commit suicide. It talks about so many important issues that, in my experience, many adults trivialised.
At 31, watching 13 Reasons Why has been too close for comfort. It brought back all those memories and feelings I had as a teenager trying to navigate through life while horrible things kept happening to me.
Trigger warning: Talks about depression, self-harm and sexual assault.
This is a guest post written by someone who prefers to remain anonymous.
Depression is something I have struggled with for as long as I remember. I think I might have been around 9 when it first started, and when you’re a kid you just get called a sook, a cry-baby or an attention-seeker. I got the same responses into my teen years, when I did speak up and try to get some help.
I was just a kid who had nothing to be depressed about, right?
I remember being in year 6 and so skinny that my hip bones stuck out. I had to wear jeans that were too big just so they would accommodate my protruding bones. I was wearing a ladies size 8 and the kids at school called me fat because I was no longer wearing kid’s sizing. At night, once my family had all gone to bed, I would take a saucepan into the bathroom and repeatedly hit my stomach and hip bones because I believed it would make me skinnier and, therefore, more likable. I know it sounds nuts, but this is how I felt I could deal with it.