Beyond The Degree

So here I am at 6:52 am on December 31st, lying in my bed trying to manically be productive and get my academic life together. I realise that I probably should have started this earlier, but I think the deeper rooted point that should be taken from this is how quickly the first term of third year has flown by, and how I have not had time, up until these holidays to really stop and take a break. This is partially down to my studies, partially down to the extra-curricular activities I'm involved in, and just how busy life has been for me trying to work out what I need to do to build a career. Crazy.  The most important thing that I want to look back on this year is the mental progress that I have made. In the second semester of 1st year (2016), I was diagnosed with depression. One of the hardest things about this illness is that I never knew what to expect and when I was going to beat it. This uncertainty unsettled me further as obviously you can't be given a time...

KEY Gam – Godmother or Grandmother Boss-ass –  A boss. The best of the best – a real OG. I was very sceptical about writing about the decay of my mental health from the beginning, and admittedly there are some things I have chosen to leave out and will aim to come back to throughout this month whether that is on this website or in my own personal time. I have decided to write about this because I feel that I am in a place in my life where I am ‘free’. I also know that I can be perceived as joyous and content, but it isn’t always like this. I find my own mental health to be incredibly complex, as there are layers and layers of things that have taken me a while to address and think about. There is so much for me to write down, and if I wrote it all I could probably have enough words to fill about 100 book volumes. For a while, when thinking about my mental health, I used to cringe. I cringed because I felt uncomfortable and ashamed about the personality traits I used to...

Today I am really struggling to get my head around the fact it is August. I know at some point every year we often exclaim how quickly the year has gone but I am going to say it one more time because for real 2017 has flown by. When thinking about my summer break which started in June, I noticed how happy and care-free I have been as nothing is mentally draining me in comparison to the months prior to June and my university studies. It is no secret how badly I deal with stress and anxiety and how they are particularly triggered by university and are heavily driven by education. I thoroughly enjoy the social aspect of university but stress is something I have struggled with since AS Level. I know millions of people go to university and take A Levels, but I think it’s really important to point out that individually some people deal with certain situations better than others and education and academics are just two things I don’t deal very well with. Now as Cliché it may sound ...

Hi guys, I am prone to using social media but often I find myself forgetting it’s open for the world to see. It should be considered that when we use social media and post photo’s, these are things that we are actively choosing to share. We choose to let our followers know about the happy moments, whether that it’s our 3 year anniversary with our partner, or that we are sipping cocktails in the Santorini Sun absorbing that vitamin-D, or that we’ve got that new job which we had strived so hard to get, and if you want to share that then that is fine you have worked hard for it and that is something to be proud of. But what can often be disregarded are the sad times. In a sense, social media can be seen as a blessing. Imagine if Dr. Martin Luther King had Instagram, the protest videos he could have shared would have resulted in further global uproar. Imagine if the suffragettes had Snapchat, then we would have all been forced to watch them chaining themselves to parliament building...