Arty Kitkat
Wow Nicholaxoo thats amazing - £5 is brilliant. Jessica your hair looks great so I can see that £110 is worth it as it looks quite a complicated style. Bec I'm impressed that you have found someone good for such a good price. I think part of the issue is that St Albans is pricy and a lot of the places are very salony. I used to go to somewhere that used to have a lot of older clients and they were less trendy but did just as good a job. Unfortunately they shut down ages ago 
Unfortunately my local college doesn't do hairdressing, Watford does but after a day at work I'm shattered so its not really an option. I'm happy to stick with cutting my own hair but was just amazed that blokes seem to be able to get such a better deal. Maybe I need to draw on a beard and go to my local barbers
Posts by Arty Kitkat
I'm not sure what the situation is in other countries but here in the UK if you are female and want to get your hair cut you are probably looking at paying a minimum of £30 (I live just outside London so it might be a bit less further North). If you are a man and pop along to your local Barber you could probably get roughly the same cut for less than a £10. How is this fair? I have very low maintenance hair these days and have been cutting it myself for the last 2 years as I just don't have the cash to pay someone £30 to spend 10 or 15 mins cutting an inch of the end of my hair and asking random questions about my holiday/plans for the weekend/weather......
I've grown up having cats and I think the relationship you develop with them is so special. They have such individual personalities and your relationship doesn't gather the same baggage that human ones can so when you loose them it does just feel like this pure grief. Its hard to explain but when my cat Jake died he was only 3 and died of feline leukaemia. It was really quick how he declined and I was absolutely devastated. He was a massive fluffy white and red tabby - we used to say he had long blond hair and I really struggled with him as a kitten. He had this awful knack of pooing on the things that mattered (like my CDT coursework!! ) but once he got through his really kittenish phase he was absolutely adorable. He used to come and visit in the morning and put his face right up by mine while I was in bed and he had the loudest purr and when I was on school holidays he used to lie at my bedroom door (if it was shut) and stick his paw under it and rattle it till I got up and let him in.
Anyway, sorry about my rambling, the point I was going to make before I took a bit of a detour was that although I was utterly devasted initially that was replaced by all these memories and you don't ever loose them.
Thank you. The virtual hug was very much appreciated x
I thought I was having a better today and then in the last 10 minutes I was upstairs in the staff room chatting to one of our volunteers who I've worked with for years and who happens to also be a qualified mh social worker and somehow in our rant and setting the world to rights I told her that I also had mh problems. This was okay but we were talking about the failings of some new systems that are coming in and I think I made myself sound like I was potentially really unstable. Ordinarily, if I was feeling well I'd shrug it off but it now seems to have set off a whole train of thought thats gone down a really negative road. I feel so stupid for not being more careful about what I disclose and how I disclose it and I wish I could just turn the clock back and unsay what I said.
I thought we hadn't seen you about for a bit but had no idea you were going through all of this. It takes a lot of guts to do what you did so well done and welcome back
My mood is all over the place at the moment that I'm finding it really hard to cope. I seem to be managing to go into work and help others with their problems but then when I come to go home I'm shaking and feel tearful. I've also noticed that when I get like this my thoughts are not just negative but they turn really cynical. We have an out of hours mental health helpline that I could call but when I'm like this and when I got home from work today I was crying but I had convinced myself that the helpline was the equivalent of a cake which you cut into and find its just icing. I think my thinking was that it looks inviting but calling it is ultimately pointless. Talking about how I feel to some random stranger feels too hard as I struggle with the phone when it comes to talking about me. I did one thing which I hope will help. I telephoned my psychiatrists secretary and left a message asking for my appointment to be moved forward.
It feels at this moment like I'm managing but I know that a few minutes on my own thinking the wrong kind of thoughts will lead things to spiral. I've been living with this now for over 2 years. I've suffered with depression since I was about 8 and have had about 4 episodes lasting a few years but this one just seems to be going on and on..... It lifts for a bit and then it goes again. Its as if being well(ish) wears me out and I can't keep it up any longer and I crash.
I don't think there was any real or deep reason behind him taking them. I suspect he took them because he could. By this I mean breakups are never clean and tidy in my experience and they can bring out the worst in all of us at times. I've done the pettiest things in the past to make myself feel a bit better and more in control. I spent I whole evening going through old photos and neatly trimming an ex out of all of them. I then cut him into tiny little bits and tipped the bits in the bin. I suspect taking something so personal to you and him made him feel good and in control. As time passes I suspect he will look at them and wonder what the hell was going on in his head but there is so many feelings going on when the break up is fresh that sometimes you do things which make no sense.
Sorry to hear this take whatever time you need, just remember we are here if you need us x
Lakesha, I think what Sheila put is good advice - you battle on and win each day. When I've been at my worst I've struggled to get off the sofa so please don't be too hard on yourself for not doing all the things you used to do. Maybe these things are too much right now and you need to try much smaller things. One of the things I used to do was make myself up a very simple diary sheet with the day at the top and I'd try and right down 3 positive things I'd done. By this I don't mean the everyday stuff I used to do, but smaller scale stuff like picked up prescription, washed hair, took dry clothes of airer, posted a letter..... Also try and remember that a mental illness is every bit as serious and exhausting as a physical one. You therefore won't necessarily have the energy to do the things you did when you were well. Also I find when I'm bad it very difficult to talk face to face or on the phone so I used my mobile to text people and chatted to people online or via forums like this. This is no less valid as chatting face to face, its just using another medium.
In the UK we have Crisis Teams to support people when they are discharged from hospital or on leave or at risk of being hospitalised. That means that people have someone visit them potentially several times a day if needs be to check in with how they are coping. They also link in with a psychiatrist and can tweak medication with minimum fuss. Do you have anything like that in the US?
Oh that is so true Sheila! I see that all the time at work - I was told by a very experience therapist that I know through work that sometimes 'madness' is the only sane reaction to a situation.
I don't even watch TV on my PC. I think I just reached saturation point at the Christmas time before last cos there was so many reality shows and repeats on. I don't mind the odd repeats (especially Morse ) but Friends seemed to be on a loop and I just had enough. I don't miss it, which is odd cos I thought I would. I do wonder where the tv license goes tho - its not Jonathan Ross' back pocket anymore as he's quit so who knows!
You still need a license for some dogs. But anyway you should see the letters they send - Enforcement offers have been authorised to visit 'my postcode'. What's that supposed to mean??? You don't need authorisation to visit a property, gaining entry is another matter.
The December before last me and my bf stopped watching tv. In the May of that year we thought we would take the plunge and got rid of the telly. In the June I wrote to the TV license people and told them and they cancelled the license and no more payments were made. For about the last 6 months the TV license people have been writing increasingly threatening letter which imply that they can come onto our property and check. They can't! All they can do is knock on your and ask to have a look. We are not willing to do this as I partly think its a stupid exercise. I could still have a telly (which we don't) and have it in another room or I could go out and buy one the next day and endless other things. The main reason I won't let them in or play ball is because I have told them I don't have one and I take offence at being asked to prove it. I looked up our legal situation and we are legally within our rights and they do not have any legal jurisdiction. They can't obtain a warrant, they can't search your property, the interview that they do is apparently illegal and they have no grounds for suspicion.
In our attempt to lighten the mood we thought up no end of licenses that if you don't have them you don't have to prove it. I don't have a license to practice medicine but the BMA aren't going to come round and check I'm not pretending to be a doctor. I do have a pilots licence, a driving licence, a fishing license, a dog license, a firearms license! I'm also not James Bond and don't have a license to kill Rah rah rah
Okay, Rant over. Thank you for listening
From what she has said to me it sounds like she will leave. What I'm suspecting she'll do though is just stop using her account, rather than delete it altogether. That way she has the option to come back at a later date when she feels she has a bit more distance from the nasty comments. I think its easy to say she should just ignore them or not let them win as I think the down side of being creative is that you are more sensitive. You only need to look at the depression thread to see how many of us struggle with this. Sometimes even against our better judgement the comments of a stranger can really sting. I got a bit of a tongue lashing of someone recently and the logical part of me was saying to myself, its just one person who doesn't know me and I don't know them, etc.... But unfortunately my brain wasn't playing ball that day and it just made me feel stupid and really horrible about myself. I feel a bit of a fool admitting this but I was in tears and had to give it a day or two before I could read it again and responded.