Abigail's Anxieties

The weekly catch up #4 A week in my life condensed down into one post 17th July-23rd July Before I start this weekly catch up, I just wanted to say that we've made it to one whole month of doing these weekly catch ups which to me is a big deal. Often I lose motivation very easily due to my depression but I glad that this is the one thing I managed to stick with, so YAY!!! Monday- now this Monday, I really needed a day to look after myself and my skin as I had been breaking out a lot due to stresses at home and having good skin always helps me mentally (you can read why  here  in a past post) so I spent my day giving my face a good wash, did a face mask and some others things. But before I was given the chance to start my mini spa day, something else that I had to deal with popped up. Isn't that always the way?  But this was good news, it was the news of my DSA equipment and the fact that I was able to get it delivered THAT WEEK!! I wasn't expectin...

The things no one tells you about depression and anxiety  The things you don't get told about depression and anxiety, written from the perspective of someone with both. So as many of you reading this will already know, I have been suffering from mental health problems for most of my life, but I myself was only diagnosed in February 2015. Everything before that was my parent's mental health problems influencing my life.  Both of my parents have got mental health problems, which my mum having depression and anxiety (the exact same as me) and my dad having both of them as well but many more problems along with them. He hasn't been in work for nearly 4 years due to a complete mental breakdown at his last job (something which we still, as a family, find hard to talk about). Much like 33.1% of those with mental health problems*.  Since then, he has been a mere shell of a man that he used to be. Don't get me wrong, he still has his great days where he s...

The setting up of my DSA equipment What it was like for me to have my DSA equipment delivered and set up So today was finally the day I had my DSA equipment delivered and set up for me. And honestly was much easier than I was expecting it to be. I wasn't really sure was expecting, but I certainly wasn't expecting it to only take around 15 minutes to get all of the software downloaded onto my laptop. The most challenging part was probably trying to make small talk with the man delivering, that's the one thing I struggle most with my anxiety; making small talk with people I don't know. Luckily the delivery man was quite understanding about this, and my mum happened to be in the room with me and she's great at making small talk so that took a bit of the pressure off me. The most challenging part was properly once the delivery man left because I just want to jump right in and have a go with all the equipment and software, and instead of having the delivery ...

Life certainly is strange How the PS4 game "life is strange" had a bigger impact on me than I thought it would. *SPOILER ALERT* So if you've read some of my other posts then you'll now that I like to play video games, and when my boyfriend saw that "Life is Strange" was one of the free games for PlayStation Plus, he knew it was right up my alley and instantly downloaded all 5 episodes for me, (I know guys, #relationshipgoals am I right?). Anyway, as I was playing through the game the topics in it started to become darker and darker and honestly, I didn't think that a game would be able to have such a mental and emotional impact on me.  The first time I was overcome with emotions was when the protagonist Max entered an alternative timeline which caused her best friend Chole to become a quadriplegic who felt she was surviving rather than living. After spending some time with her she asks you a very big favour; can you turn up her dosage of...

The weekly catch up #3 A week in my life condensed down into one post 10th July-16th July Monday & Tuesday- Much like Monday and Tuesday of last week, not a lot happened. I've come to the realisation that I really need to fin d something for myself to do on a Monday, even if it's just going out for a 5-minute walk because the more I find myself not having anything to do, the more motivation I'm losing to do anything else during the week and if I truly want to do well in university then I think now's the time to start getting myself into a good Monday morning routine. Surprise surprise on Tuesday I was over at my boyfriend's, but the poor thing ended up getting quite ill, so ill in fact that in the middle of July he was shivering and complaining of being cold. So I ended up being nurse for the day but to be honest, I really didn't mind. I mean, I love the man, so if that means I have to look after him when he's ill then, of course, that's what ...

Out Out Damned Spot My skin care routine Not long ago I showed you all my  hair care routine  and how it improves my mental health. So now I've decided to show my skin care routine and how taking care of my skin also helps me.  Now, I have far from perfect skin (I mean come on, I am a teenager...just about...) but trust me when I say compared to how it was in my early teens, it's doing pretty good. But it hasn't come without hard work. For instance, my skin got so bad that I bad to go onto long term antibiotics which you take for a minimum of 2 years (don't worry, this type doesn't become resistant to the body) and these combined with the time I take to take care of my skin it has done wonderous things.  As for what it's done for my anxiety and depression, we have to go back to when my skin was at it's worst. At this time in my life, it seemed as if it was just thing after another and having acne didn't help, it made my depression get wors...

DSA UPDATE This isn't going to be a long post but more of a follow-up on my previous post about DSA (which I recommend you read here  first so that everything here makes sense).  I wanted to let everyone know that I'VE BEEN APPROVED!!! I'm now going to list off everything that I have been approved for and how it is going to help me. However, everyone (including myself) has to bear in mind that I'm not going to have this from the offset of university as I actually have to be attending classes before I can get all this with is understandable. I mean, they don't want to pay for everything and give it to me if I end up not even doing the course.  Now that that disclaimer is out of the way, let's get to the list: Text -to-speech software with a wireless headset- very often I am sitting and looking over notes so much that I won't even get up to eat in fear that if I don't read over them enough I will never understand them. I also sometimes don...

So I'm a knitter... And a disorganised one at that! A lot of people seem to be surprised by that fact that I, a 19-year-old girl, likes to spend her nights staying in a knitting rather than going out on the town. But to be completely honest, my idea of a good night is staying in and doing my own thing, which is usually either playing video games or, on most nights, knitting. I put this down to two things: me having anxiety and therefore I feel more comfortable staying in and in general having an "old soul". I started knitting  and crocheting at the age of 3 with my grandma insisting that I learned the skill as one day I would find it useful (either that or she was looking for something for me to do so I'd stop running around the place) and since then I've been hooked (crocheting puns for the win). Over the years I've been homing in my skills and moving on to more and more items which to me now seem simple but to others seem nearly impossible to ma...

The weekly catch up #2 A week in my life condensed down into one post  3rd July-9th July Monday & Tuesday- I've decided to put Monday and Tuesday together as my week didn't really start until Wednesday. On Monday however, my dad did have the diabetic clinic with some good news; he's lost a few pounds in weight and everything is good which as a family we are very thankful for. You see, even before being diagnosed as diabetic he had a lot of mental health problems which affected our family as a whole and after the diagnoses it affected us more as we now had to change all the food we had in the house to low sugar options and unfortunately all of my dad's favourite foods happen to have sugar in it so it caused his anger to rise. So all in all, this was the good news we needed at the start of this week. Tuesday was just another day of hanging out with my boyfriend playing video games, and I have to say I'm loving until dawn at the moment. Wednesday- Wednes...

Hair Hair everywhere How I take care of my crazy, curly hair.   Just to let you know, most of the products I use come from the UK store BodyCare and you cannot see their products online so I'm afraid that I cannot link them for you, sorry about that.   There is no denying that my hair is crazy, curly around 95% of the time. I blame the fact that I am both part Scottish and part Irish and therefore it's down to my genes (that also explains why I'm a redhead). Anyway, it has taken me many years to accept just how my hair looks and the right way to take care of it.  Now you may be asking "but Abbie, how does your hair link to your anxiety and mental well-being?". Well you see, when I was around 6/7 years old, for whatever which we still don't know to this day, my hair was falling out to the point where I had bald spots on my head and I would wake up to clumps of hair on my pillow. The only solution to this was to have my remaining hair cut very short to ...