Hi there! [takes her cup of camomile tea and sits down]. You want to know a bit about me? Ok, where should i start. I'm currently a student doing an MA and diploma combined in Social Work. I'm doing the mental health pathway, something that has interested me since I was doing a mental health rehab ward as part of my general nurse training. I'm doing research at the moment for my disertation. I know I want to do it about self-harm but haven't honed it down much more than that yet. Prob be a feminist critique cos I'm a bit of a feminist at heart. I'm a christian too and a lot of people may think these 2 things aren't compatable but I don't see a problem personally. I'm currently taking driving lessons and have my test later this month. I used to be a biker and had a Kawasaki ER500 but a crash while on the back of my husbands trike put paid to my biking days. Oh yes, I suppose now would be a good time to mention my other half, Russ, or Rook as he usually uses for a nick, who hasn't made it over here yet. He's got a daughter, 17, who lives mostly with her mum. We haven't got any kids between us but we do have 2 dogs, Sam and Pippin. Well, I guess that enough for starters or there won't be anything else to ask me. I'll do my best to answer any questions with total truth and honesty. Fire away!
Hey wow! The whole kids issue. I've never felt its been right to have kids at the time and situation we were in. Now I'm 40 I think having kids would have far more risks for the child having lifelong health problems so I wouldn't want to do that to the child. Both Rook and I have inherited depression so the liklihood is any child would have to cope with that anyway. So no, I don't want to have kids, but sometimes I get fleeting regrets about it. My first degree is an easier question - social work studies, qualified with a 2:1 in 2003.
Yeah, I have got very down and for long periods of time but I'm quite up at the moment. When its just mild I do stuff like listening to cool music, having long pampering sessions (bubble baths, books and sometimes candles and/or incense do it for me). I always find that getting out into the countryside or especially to the beach is very therapeutic. Once I can drive and have a car at least i won't have to wait for Rook to take me any more. I find it hard to pray when I'm really down but its always easier when I can see and hear creation around me. I also find exercise helps, especially aquarobics cos I can do that without pressure on my knackered ankle. Talking to people on forums like this is also good :gossip:
Thank you for your questions! I definately believe in monogamy, although possibly serial monogamy. My lifetime ambition - ooh thats hard. There are loads of things I really want to do before I shuffle off but I'm not sure any of them count as a lifetime ambition. I suppose one of the things I've always wanted to do is go up in a hot air balloon, but I also want to visit so many places, get a custom built trike and ride it in big ride-outs, & write and publish an academic text (on feminist views of mental health in case you hadn't guessed from my intro), but I'm not sure any of those are things I've always wanted to do, but are things that seem important to me here and now.
My living room is a kind of mustard yellow/dark sand colour and my study where I do most of my living is terracotta! Good to see you too mate
I left school at 18 and went straight into general nursing. My teachers all wanted me to go to uni but it was made quite clear to me that I'd lived off my parents for long enough and I WAS going to start earning money. I stayed with nursing until 2000 when a combination of stress and frustration made me look at other options. I'd really enjoyed my mental health placement as a student nurse and started some advocacy work with a mental health advocacy programme so it seemed a logical next step to find work with that client group. I decided social work offered me slightly more autonomy than nursing. I went for a degree first in case I changed my mind as I thought I'd be able to use it for other stuff, and at the end of it was offered a place on a masters course.
Thats not as straight forward to answer as it might sound. As a little kid, I was sent to Sunday school but I think that that had more to do with how my parents wanted to spend Sunday morning than any deep seated religious feelings they had. The nearest church was a bretheren - a most strange and very misogynistic branch of christianity that believed in women covering their heads and staying silent. As soon as I was old enough to make the decision I left! As a teenager, life at home was pretty awful. My parents weren't a lot of help - in fact they made stuff worse. A teacher at school put me in touch with a friend of his who did a lot of youth work and also went to a pentecostal church. It seemed a good way of spending time out of the house and so I started going along. That was the first time that the stuff said at the front seemed to make sense. I started to feel I was ok, that I was the way that I'd been created and that God actually liked me as I was. It came as a huge shock to me. The other people in the church also treated me as someone who they were pleased to have around, and I actually felt accepted and well, loved, I guess. After a few weeks of going, my parents decided they wanted to come too. I think they'd seen a change in me and it had made them look at their own spiritual lives. To cut a long story short they 'became christians' for want of a better way of phrasing it. Unfortunately it didn't change theri parenting skills but thats another story. My first husband wasn't a christian. He was some sort of a quaker when we met, but that soon dropped away and I lost any faith I'd had when life started spiralling downwards at a rate of knots. When I lost 2 close friends within 6 months of that marriage ending I'd had enough of God all together. Then about 12 years ago, we met up with this biker guy called Oz. He's totally crazy and we got on like a house on fire. Then he invited Russ and I to his church and after weeks of finding excuses we finally went. And again, what I heard made sense to me. And I decided to give christianity another go, this time with the sort of proviso that if God was real, he'd prove it. And he has. Now, my faith is pretty much central to my life. When I pray, I feel so close to the divine, I've seen real answer to prayer. I believe that what Jesus is reported as saying is true - if it wasn't he was one crazy madman, and anyone who says basically love for each other is what its all about is no madman in my book. I believe that love for God can be expressed in many ways but basically entails loving people and taking care of this incredible world we're living in. I'm sorry if this answer is too rambling or doesn't make too much sense. Come back at me if you want and I'll try again!
No never. Not having kids I guess I was never asked and I'm not sure I'd know how to cope with a group of someone else's kids!
Hiyah honey! Great to meet you again. The doggies are both well. Pippin is still pretty crazy but has mellowed a bit. Sam is just being Sam, playing for sympathy and rolling his eyes at some of the mad things Pip gets up to. How you doing?
