A much-needed update

Hello. I’m Ginny. Thank you for visiting.

I’m a Catholic, married lady living in East Anglia in England, UK. Through my own and my loved ones’ lived experiences, I’ve become passionate about mental health and well-being, the understanding of the lived experience of mental ill health, access to treatment, and learning more about how we can support each others’ mental health in community networks, especially in the context of our faith. I live with borderline / emotionally unstable personality disorder, complex post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and an eating disorder. I also live with several physical health conditions and disabilities including hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, ME/CFS, fibromyalgia, endometriosis and a back injury. Since very early childhood I was a carer for a parent with psychosis. I’m currently a carer for other loved ones who live with mental and physical ill health, giving emotional support. I volunteer when I am able – I facilitate craft activities to support mental health and well-being and I speak with medical students and researchers about my own lived experience of mental and physical health and treatment.

Why write this blog?

I started this blog back in 2015 when I had recently begun group therapy for borderline / emotionally unstable personality disorder (BPD or EUPD). I hoped that sharing my journey through therapy would help others who are struggling. I thought I’d write posts linked to the therapy sessions. Quickly, I discovered that I couldn’t do this, not week by week anyhow. Sometimes, it was just too painful. Often, I wanted to write about my lived experience set in the context of my whole life journey and recovery process. Therapy ended and I wanted to keep writing – and I definitely was not “fixed”! I’m still not, six years later. There are always going to be ways in which I differ from someone who hasn’t suffered early life trauma and who hasn’t got mental and physical disabilities. I hope I’m gradually learning to live with and through my conditions, not be crushed by them. As I go, I hope that sharing my experience may be helpful to someone somewhere. I know that in my journey as someone with multiple diagnoses and also as a carer, learning from someone else’s lived experience interests and really helps me (and no less so when it differs from my own). In my voluntary work, I’ve been very thankful to be told by professionals that hearing first hand lived experience gives a new, different perspective from reading textbooks. Textbooks tend to focus on behaviours, one junior doctor told me, whereas speaking to those with lived experience can tell you much more about what living with a condition feels like and what’s going on below the surface when a particular outward “behaviour” is observed. I think this dialogue is particularly important where conditions like EUPD/BPD are concerned, where I think the sufferer’s internal experience and history are often poorly understood. So, I hope that this blog and discussions that may take place in the comments will be of value to help others. Thank you for stopping by. Thank you for reading this far. Please do leave a comment and share what you are comfortable with of your own story.

Why the long gap with no new posts?!

During the past three years I have not been able to write. Largely this has been due to my own poor physical health, as well as my caring responsibilities as two loved ones are seriously unwell. There have been some significant life changes too including recently having moved house. I’m now at a point that it feels that I can write again. I feel I can share something real and vulnerable and also share hope. I thought about completely restarting my blog, or at least deleting old posts. A lot about how I think and live has changed. Part of me that wants everything perfect is also ashamed of the gap! However, this kind of shame leads to no good. Sharing vulnerably means sharing the reality of the up and down and the change in our calling at different stages of life. The lows and highs are okay. It’s okay not to be able to do everything. It’s okay to respond to different needs and priorities. It’s okay that my reality a year or five years ago was different from my reality now. Also, there are comments on some of the older posts, which readers took time to write and that discussion is important. So, I’m not deleting anything. It’s good to be back. I ask for your patience whilst I redevelop the structure of this blog (what days I will post, for instance). Ttfn (ta ta for now!) Ginny x

My Latest Posts

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