Part 1 - Inspiration

Hi. I’m Amy.

My friend (B.F.F.), Emma has a Blog, and she suggested that I start one.

Let me tell you a bit about her. We met about 3 years ago when she started working in the office where I work. She was quite quiet to begin with, and there was a couple of years age difference between us. We didn’t work too closely together, so I didn’t really get to know her until the middle of last year.
Another of our work colleagues set up a Birthday surprise for Emma, last June. Her other friends weren’t celebrating, so we decided to show her a fun time, and a large party of us surprised her with a big Birthday bash at the local Indian restaurant. I think that was the beginning of our friendship. That night I got to know this really awesome person, with an amazing sense of humour. Being able to laugh with someone is a joy for me, so after that event, I gravitated more towards Emma, and found myself enjoying her company more and more.

Over the next couple of months, due to some impromptu Saturday overtime, and other events, we got to know each other a lot more and discovered we had a lot more in common than we had at first thought.
I hope she would agree, that now we have had some serious bonding incidents, and about a million laughs, we’ve found a good friend in each other, and hopefully a life-long friendship.

Emma was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes a few months after her twentieth Birthday. It’s not as bad as it could be, but I wish to hell that I could get her a working pancreas on the black market! She has a good sense of humour (at appropriate times) about her disorder, and has been an angel when it comes to my over-curiousness about medical issues. She’s taken the time to explain to me the symptoms and issues connected with being a diabetic, and I would like to think that she knows she doesn’t have to carry the responsibility of being diabetic, alone, particularly when she’s in my company.

Although, she deals (from my point of view, at any rate) absolutely amazingly with her D (as we call it), she still finds a certain amount of therapy in Blogging about her disorder. She’s gleamed a lot of help from certain internet forums (thank you, for the support you provide her; you know who you are), and gained advice from people who themselves have to deal with diabetes on a day to day basis. She’s found this support invaluable, and is now putting her own experiences in the ring in an effort to increase awareness, and help provide support to other people in her situation.

And she’s now encouraging me to do the same. I’m not diabetic, and will never claim to begin or understand everything that she has had to go through in the last couple of years, but I hope that I can continue to provide her support in any way possible, whenever she may need me. She is an inspiration to us all, and the reason that I have made the decision to begin a Blog myself.

I was officially diagnosed with clinical depression when I was 16 years old.

However, I’ve been in and out of therapy since I was 13, and began self harming when I was 14.

I’m now 25 years old (some might say a proper grown up) and have a very different perspective of the world than I did when I was first diagnosed. I’m know that I’m high functioning (can still maintain a certain level of "normalcy", where my condition doesn’t affect too much of my life) with my condition, and am extremely self-aware when it comes to how my illness can play a role in my life, but it is still with me every day. I hope that in starting a Blog, I can come to terms with being mentally ill, and hopefully maybe help others going through what I went through, or suffering with depression themselves.