Day 9: Stakes In The Sand

Posted by: Alison Chisnell on: December 9, 2013

• In: Advent | HR for Mental Health
• 6 Comments

It has been an absolute pleasure and a privilege to get to know Charlotte Walker aka @BipolarBlogger this year, both in person and through social media. She is immensely bright, articulate and compelling and offers those unfamiliar with the daily realities of living with a mental health condition a really powerful insight into what matters about the topic and how she experiences life. I can honestly say I have learnt more from her this year than she will probably ever know…and I am sincerely grateful to her for her generosity and consistent searing honesty. You can follow Charlotte on Twitter (@BipolarBlogger) and read more posts from her over on her excellent, award-winning blog.

Artwork for today (and every day!) is by the brilliant Simon Heath.

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2013 began just four months after losing another career. It’s not impossible to retain a profession when you have a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, but it can be extremely difficult, particularly when your episodes last for not months but years. I began the New Year with the knowledge that although my condition was improving, I was still nowhere near able to work full time. I could not cope with a commute and I knew I was not resilient enough to go back to the kind of target-driven public sector job I had always worked at. I would have to do something different – but what? My confidence was low. I did not feel employable.

When my friend Jon Bartlett offered me a chance to take part in an event entitled Human Resources for Mental Health (or #HR4MH), I jumped at the chance (you can read the transcript of my talk, as well as Jon’s reasons for organising the event). I couldn’t put my finger on why, but being there seemed important. I couldn’t have known it, but that early February evening would be a catalyst to beginning to build a new career, for one simple reason: people who heard my talk came forward to tell me that they believed in me. I wasn’t sure that I believed in me, but they did, and they were people I respected.

During 2013 I began to believe in myself more, to push against the boundaries of my illness and find that my limitations were not so fixed as I had once thought. Although I was already comfortable with publically about my mental health if you had told me in February that by June I would speak confidently on live television (Sky News), I would not have believed you. If you had told me in June that in September I would spend an afternoon in Westminster, telling the story to a string of MPs, I would have been amazed. If you had suggested then that by advent 2012 I would have won a prestigious Mind Media Award for my blog, appeared on Woman’s Hour and be waiting to interviewed for Society Guardian, I would probably have laughed. Yet I have done all this and so much more.

At #HR4MH I described living with a fluctuating mental health condition as like being repeatedly inundated by a tidal wave. I’m still not home and dry – I couldn’t manage a nine to five job even now – but I see more dry sand than I did a year ago. When placing my stakes, I have had to bang them in hard, hoping for some structure and security even if the waters rise again. One form of security I particularly need is the financial kind. Some of what I do has begun to pay, but it is not yet enough to live on. I have to fully believe that the things I do – from public speaking to consultancy, from research to writing – are worth paying for, and paying well. So I’ll keep exploring my beach, banging in my stakes just as hard as I can. And when I eventually reach the safety of the dunes I will look back at my haphazard line of stakes and think: I did that.