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 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 ...

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...

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...

As a student with mental health problems, is applying for DSA really worth applying for? I'm starting university in September, and as someone with a major anxiety disorder, this can be a very daunting time. Not only am I going to have to get used to a brand new routine in my life, I'm going to have to get used to a new environment, meet new people, have a much larger workload than I've ever had and heck, it's even going to be even more travelling than I've ever had to do to get to my place of education. So what do I do if it's too much for my brain to cope with, I end up having too many panic attacks that I cannot make it in and I end up having to drop out of university. That's where DSA (Disabled Students' Allowance) come in. The sad thing I think is that I didn't find out about this until a speaker came to my college to talk about student finance and even then only spent around 30 seconds on the subject. DSA is basically when as a student ...