Oaty Banana Cookies

I've finally got round to putting up one of my own recipes, which was meant to be the other focus of my blog!


I love experimenting and seeing how things turn out, and banana and oats are two or my favourite ingredients to experiment with, so what better to start of the baking section of the blog with than oaty banana cookies?


These cookies are dead simple and come out with a lovely crunchy top and chewy middle.


Ingredients:

• 150g Bananas (peeled weight)
• 150g Margarine or unsalted butter
• 150g Sugar (either caster or granulated will be fine)
• 150g Self-raising flour (I think it gives just and extra lightness)
• 100g Oats (just standard porridge oats are fine!)

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 180C (160C fan) 
2. Cream together the butter and sugar
3. Mix in the flour until a smooth paste forms 
4. Mash the banana and add to the mix and stir until well combined 
5. Stir in the oats until evenly distributed
6. Line a large baking tray with baking parchment 
7. Spoon dollops of mix onto the baking tray and flatten slightly, leave plenty of room in-between as the spread when baking!
8. Bake in the oven for 25-30 minutes until lightly golden brown on top
9. Allow to cool on the tray for a while before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely

Makes about 12 rather large cookies or 18-24 more sensibly sized ones! 

A new year calls for a new blog post.

I'm not quite sure what to make of 2011. As I'm writing this I'm still being held hostage by one of the worst depressive episodes of my life. (That's what I feel like a hostage, I can't escape, I just want to be free from the pain and the darkness.) Which is a problem as it clouds my vision of what the year has held for me.

I should be remembering 2011 for the fantastic friends I've made, the friends that have always been there for me and the amazing things that have been achieved by the students' organisations I'm lucky enough to be a part of. But I can't. 

All I can look back and see are the stupid things I've done, the silly things I've said and the regrets I have. I think it's made even worse by the fact that I know that I should be looking at the good rather than the bad. It's something that I've been struggling with for a while; my ability to step outside my own depression and see things with clarity. I just wish I always saw things with such clarity. 

But for a moment I will consider my year with clarity, 2011 was the year I:

Realised and accepted that I'm ill

Found out that being open and honest will show you who your true friends are

Made me more grateful than ever for the fantastic people I have in my life, even if I am not good at showing what they mean to me

Understood that it will take time for me to be well enough to do certain things, and it's ok to take that time, the jobs and degree can wait

Realised that sometimes it's ok to put myself first, even if I still struggle to do this

Found out that social networking can both mess you up and save you 

So my hopes for 2012:

That I'm well enough to complete my degree

I find a way to always see with the clarity that I sometimes manage

That I'm always there for the people that mean the world to me when they need me

That I'm able to tell people how much they mean to me

That I can continue to be honest, because it helps me and hopefully it can help other people

To be able to better see myself as others see me

And of course:

That the Tigers bring home some silverware 

I manage to finally perfect my Pimm's cupcakes

For Team GB to meet their medal targets, and I fall in love with the Olympics all over again.

So here's to 2012, may it be the best year yet!

I may be depressed but I am the SAME PERSON

I have had a really bad week, and its been made worse by the fact that a number of people have "unfriended" me on facebook after I made a status update openly talking about my experience with seeing the psychiatrist and about how at that moment in time I was feeling very suicidal.


What I don't understand is the way that some people treat you very differently before and after knowing you have mental health problems or are suicidal.


I am the same person, I am the girl you met at the party, the girl you played football with, the girl you know through your friend, the girl you worked with and the girl you went to school with. I am still her, I have always been her and I always will be her.


Yes I'm evolving as a person but everyone is, so why should it make any difference now that you know a tiny bit more about my medical history. For the record I've also had my tonsils out and I'm also having an echocardiogram soon if that makes any difference to your feelings on me as a person. No? Didn't think so, so why does it matter that I'm clinically depressed?! 


Also it's not like I've become depressed over night, the majority of people I know I have met, or at least got to know a lot better since I've been on antidepressants. And for long periods before I was prescribed any kind of medication I was experiencing many of the same symptoms that I experience now, so chances are most people I know have not known me when I have not been unwell.


The thing that I don't like is that sometimes I feel that I can't be the open honest person that I am, because of how other people will react. I hate altering myself because of other people. I will dress how I want. I will say what I think. And I WILL talk about my depression, because I'm not ashamed, and it shouldn't change what you think of me. 


(Also I would like to say that I am incredibly grateful for the wonderful kind words that I have received over the last few days. I have some truly amazing people in my life, that I feel most of the time I do not deserve and even though I say this you do not give up on me. I am, although I frequently cannot see it, extremely blessed.) 

It will get better.

"It will get better" that's what I have to keep telling myself, it's difficult to believe at the moment, and that's the problem, you can't listen to reason when you feel like this especially when the voice of reason is coming from you. 

It's even harder to believe that it will get better when you've been so low that not being alive has truly seemed like the best option, only to get better to a place where you can function on a vaguely normal level before being plunged back into shear darkness. How do I know that this episode will not be never ending? I can't even guarantee that I will never be back hear again. 

This abstract idea (that I will be better again- it really does seem completely abstract, right now n dimensional cubes seem far less abstract), that I seem to be grasping for seems so far out of reach that I don't even know why I'm reaching for it. It doesn't seem worth the effort, it really doesn't. But I know I must, I must. I want to be well and logically I know that other people want me to be well (rather than dead, but yes, since when has depression been logical?!). 

I'm going to the psychiatrist on Monday, and I'm guessing they will alter my medication. I can only hope it helps, because right now I'm scared, fed up, feeling lost within myself and frankly exhausted. Oh and awake at gone 3am, it's nice that insomnia has made an unwelcome return along with a bad episode of trichotillomania. 

This is poorly written, but as I say it's gone 3am, and yer I'm not at my best, but it needed to be written. Or at least I felt it did. 

On realising and then accepting that I’m ill.

For a long time I’ve accepted that I am depressed. I also have accepted for a long time that I am disabled, as I have multiple invisible impairments. But for some reason I never really thought of myself as ill, despite the fact that I’ve been trudging back and forth to the doctors with quite alarming regularity over the last few years, for some reason I saw my depression as something other than illness, as just a part of me of who I was.

That was until this summer, it wasn’t until I started living in a house with people other than my parents and talking more openly to some of my friends that I realised that a very large number of my thought processes are atypical. I just assumed as I had always felt like this, that lots of other people had also felt like this and it was completely normal to do so. So here are a few of my atypical thought processes that I assumed normal:

Self hatred:- I’m not just talking momentary passing self hatred as I’m reliably informed of the normality of that, but total and sometimes overwhelming self hatred. And I don’t ever remember not feeling like this, I don’t ever remember liking myself.

Wishing I were dead:- This goes hand in hand with the above, but I guess slightly more severe. Again I’m informed that not everyone goes to bed wishing that they won’t wake up in the morning – who knew?! But I wouldn’t say for me this is feeling suicidal, for me being suicidal is actually wishing to act on these feelings. And I don’t think I’ve been suicidal my whole life but I have thought the world would be a better place if I were dead.

The fear of the worst when people aren’t where you expect them to be:- So if someone is late, or not in the house when I expect them to be I fear the worst, that they’re dead, that there’s been some kind of terrible accident, that someone they love had died and they’ve had to go and sort things out, ect, ect. I’m told that doing this isn’t completely atypical it’s just the speed at which I get these feelings, it can be within seconds, and I can’t focus on anything else whist this is going through my mind.

The belief that my friend’s aren’t my friends:- I believe my friends are part of a big conspiracy and they’re all just acting, and one day they’re all going to simultaneously turn around and leave me as part of one big practical joke. I’m going to log onto facebook and have no friends but have 800+ messages just saying “AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!” I don’t think that as I’ve gone through life I’ve made better friends, I just feel like I’ve become friends with better actors.

A complete inability to accept compliments:- compliment me on anything and one of a few things will happen: I’ll pull a face, I’ll laugh it off, I’ll ignore it completely or I’ll come up with a some kind of self deprecating retort. I just don’t believe any of the compliments that people give me, so I bash them away as quick as I can.

So putting all of these things together has made me realise, I’m ill, and I have been for the majority of my life, but with these and certain other situational things (I’ve recently been told I have PTSD amongst other issues) right now I’m really unwell, and it’s unpleasant, and I want to be better, it’s just I’ve been ill for so long that I don’t know what it’s like to be well.     

The NHS is there to make me better right?

I’ve had a pretty darn rough couple of weeks and I thought I’d talk about what I’d been through.

I was sent to an emergency assessment with a community psychiatric nurse because the counsellor at my university service (I’m taking some time out of my studies and I was given special funding to have six sessions whilst technically not a student) was really worried about me with regards to thoughts of self harm and suicide.I didn’t feel that the assessment was a very good experience, you sit a suicidal person down and ask them to go talk through everything that makes them feel bad and then just send them out into the world again. Also I was accused of finding the proceedings “boring” because I was slouching in my chair and not wanting to make eye contact, in actual fact I just find any form of talking therapy both physically and emotionally draining.   

I was told I would hear in 1-2 weeks what they decided so I went on as normally as I could given that I was in the middle of one of the worst depressive episodes of my life.

So a couple of Fridays ago, just over a week later, I receive the letter from the nurse, I was already in a pretty bad place because I was post night out and nights out are never very good for me because it’s a time at which I feel most inferior to my peers and especially to my close friends. Also this particular night a friend of mine had said something truly awful to me when I was in a really bad state.

I open the letter and I’m told that after a meeting with the rest of the team they have decided that “We do not think that at this time we have anything to offer you” and that should my “symptoms become worse” they would be happy to reassess me. Needless to say it wasn’t what I need to hear, it just made me feel that there really wasn’t any point in living any more, if a service that was meant to be keeping me alive was turning me away when I was, at some points, really battling incredibly hard not to step out in front of a car I really had no idea how I was going to be worse without actually doing something serious to myself. I think this way of talking to severely depressed people is at best irresponsible and at worse downright dangerous.

So I spiralled into a really bad place, I so wanted to be dead, I was having near constant visions of serious self harm, and was just so, so scared of what I might do to myself. I didn’t want to go into the kitchen because there were sharp things and hot things there and I didn’t want to leave the house because of the traffic, so I didn’t. I pretty much stayed in my room for 3 days, I cancelled all of my plans that meant leaving the house and I needed my housemate to prepare food for me.

Fortunately I had my final session with my counsellor on the Monday morning, however I knew I wouldn’t be able to get there myself, I was lucky enough that my mum was able to take the day off work so she could drive me (no crossing roads needed).

My counsellor was fantastic; she rang the nurse but was told I would have to be reassessed (I think I was unable to adequately articulate my situation for a variety of reasons in my original assessment), and my GP to try and get me an emergency appointment as I was probably the worst I’ve ever been. On getting in touch with my GP she was told that going to A&E would probably be best, and she also explained this to my mum.

My memories of A&E are hazy, however a few things stick in my mind, when I was seen by the doctor I was told there was nothing “medically” wrong with me but there was something psychologically wrong with me. I can only assume that he had meant to say that there was nothing physically wrong with me. But it still smacks of an attitude that I still believe is present amongst those in the general medical profession, that treating mental illness isn’t “proper” medicine.

Also a couple of things that the mental health nurse that I saw said,  firstly that I had been wrongly assessed and that I needed to be seen by a psychiatrist, not a community nurse and that if he had a pound for every time a patient had been assessed by the wrong person and ended up presenting in A&E he would be a rich man. So if it happens so often why isn’t something being done about it?! That’s the problem, those of us that want to fight for better services are those with the least capacity to be able to.

Secondly he also said that he would much rather see me in A&E like I was on that day rather than with a stomach full of paracetamol and that if I ever thought that I needed to be in A&E but didn’t have a way of getting there just to ring 999. This is probably the best thing that could have been said in that situation.

It’s been a week since then and I’m much better, I’m no longer completely scared of myself but I am still in a very bad place, and I’m just grateful for my friends and my parents. I also saw my GP today and she agreed that the letter was extremely badly phrased, and basically had to apologise for what I’d been through. 

Why I'm part of the fight for free education

Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

Firstly let me start by outlining my philosophical view on education. I believe that education has its own intrinsic value and that education should be aimed purely at increasing, deepening and diversifying our own and our society’s knowledge. I do not see the value in education in order to simply gain a collection of qualifications, or to increase personal earning potential.

So with that said I am very uncomfortable with the shift in emphasis of the benefits of university study away from personal, social and academic development and towards future economic reward. I have sat through a number of admissions presentations where several slides and many minutes have been devoted to the salaries of graduates of Russell Group universities as compared with other universities. With further slides on the career choices of graduates broken down by both sector and by subject studied. I do not want to have to tell potential students that the reason that they should come to university is so that they can earn much more money than they could do otherwise, it just doesn’t feel right.

So who am I fighting for free education on behalf of? Not me, I’m through the system with fees of just over £3000 a year, which whilst not what I would wish for is at least (as someone who has worked since the age of 15) a tangible amount of money, unlike £9000, which I can’t even comprehend, and is indeed more than many people earn in a year. I’m fighting for students that are still in school and, just like me, have fallen totally in love with an academic subject and want to study it to an even higher level, but who have no idea what “getting a degree” actually means. I like many other students have no point of reference for “graduates”, I’m first generation of my family to attend university and the only adults I had contact with growing up who had attended university were my teachers, which only gives a very narrow view of what is possible with a degree. Despite many of friends graduating this year they are still in the very early stages of their “lives with a degree” so that’s also not much help to my wider view of how my life will be altered.  

Also no matter how much we push that repayments are linked to earnings and the fees and maintenance loans will only be paid back when graduates are earning over a certain wage, debt is still that: debt. Furthermore students from families with the lowest incomes are the most debt adverse, and I would certainly be running screaming from the prospect of nearly £40,000 of student debt for 3 years of study. Why spend three years racking up debt when you could spend 3 years working hard and earning money? This question is especially hard to come up with answers to if you don’t know anyone who’s chosen to do this, and you’ve seen your parents/grandparents/relatives/family friends doing just fine thank you very much without a university education.

So in summation: I want all students, regardless of background, who have fallen in love with a subject to not feel that there is anything preventing them from studying it further. That is why I’m part of the fight for free education.