Hey guys!
It's been a couple of months since I last did a mental health post, but since it's mental health awareness week, I thought that now would be the perfect time, also the theme this year is anxiety, so I feel I can play a part in this year's awareness week. Although this post isn't about anxiety and I'm sure you're sick of me talking about it by now (you can see all my mental health related posts here and there's a fair few on anxiety) this post will be focused on how your illness doesn't define you.

So I've always thought, if there's one small good detail about having a mental illness, it's that yes, other people may be able to do stuff a lot easier than you, but they're never challenging themselves. When you have a mental illness and you have to do something that may seem completely super easy for someone else, you're always challenging yourself and helping yourself and that makes for one awesome person.

I know that right now I'm feeling very hypocritical writing this post as I'm currently looking for a job and when you're applying for jobs, it feels very much like your illness defines you. You have to make the decision of not mentioning your illness or mentioning it and not getting the job, which absolutely sucks and that shouldn't be the way things are. But it does make you begin to think "oh god, my illness does define me". But I can promise you, it absolutely doesn't.

If you're reading this now, it obviously means you haven't given up and I'm proud of you for that. We all have bad days, some worse than others.

If our illnesses defined us, we would be walking around with a things over our heads that say "ANXIETY: I get anxious a lot.", "DEPRESSION: I'm often feel empty." "BI-POLAR: I have intense mood-swings."
Imagine how judgey people would be? The good thing about that not existing, is that we can often choose who judges us. We don't have to make people aware we have an illness, because it's something that goes on inside our heads. No one else can hear it, see it or feel it except us. We have a choice of who we can tell our problems too, we have a choice of who we want to trust.

So I suppose what I'm trying to say is, trust who you want to trust, challenge yourself everyday, try to be the best person you can be. And do not let your illness define you.

I have a lot of pride and love towards people who are so open about their illnesses. I also have a lot of pride and love towards people who aren't quite ready to open up about it yet, a time will come when you've bottled it up so much that it will all come pouring out.

(Jeez, I feel like a rambly preacher. I'm not sure how rambly this post was, it was a spur of the moment post and I did no planning for this so it may be taken down within the next week but whatever.)

If you ever need to talk, go and add my personal facebook (here) and send me a message, or follow me on Twitter (here) and give me a dm. I'm never ever going to turn anybody away.

You too can join in the chat about mental health this week by going on twitter and using the hashtag #mentalhealthawarenessweek and let your tweets run wild.

That's all for now,
Rachel. xo