I'm taking part in The White Collar Fight Club event in aid of CALM, on 17 March 2023 Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) is a charity united against suicide. This means standing up to feeling shit, standing up to stereotypes, and standing together to show that life is always worth living. It only costs £8 for CALM to answer a potentially lifesaving call or webchat. Your support will help CALM continue to be there for anyone who needs them. CALM is there for everyone struggling with life, no matter who they are, where they're from or what they're going through. Whether that be mental health issues, debt, addiction, job loss, divorce, homelessness, they've got your backs.

For me, it’s personal. Most don’t know this but about two years ago in between Lockdowns I started to slide into depression. Normally I’m quite resilient but I was faced with multiple big hits…isolation from lockdowns as an extrovert, grief, feeling the weight of not having kids, etc. Each of those on their own were manageable but combined were just overwhelming for me and I couldn’t deal. I thought I could just power through it without professional help but I was wrong. It was this cloud I couldn’t shake and left me alternating with feelings of anxiety, hopelessness, sadness and bitterness. Most people couldn’t tell and those friends who could didn’t understand what was wrong with me which made me feel more isolated and just made it worse. To be honest I didn’t know what was wrong with me. Months later things got so bad that I found myself in a very dark place and standing at the precipice. It was at that crucial moment where I finally broke and accepted that I needed help. I started seeing a therapist to start helping me make sense of the crumbling world I saw all around me. I also started boxing aka punch therapy which helped me find strength again and brought me into a community of amazing, genuine people who have become some of my biggest supporters and close friends. 

Here is where I’d like to say everything turned around overnight and was good as new but it wasn’t. The damage was done and the problems didn’t just go away. But things did start to get better, and continues to get better. Therapy continues to help me to understand myself and deal with big things that I had swept under the rug for years and helped me to not beat myself up over things outside of my control. 

This fight is important to me because not everyone has resources to get therapy but in a world as crazy as ours, people need access to mental health resources more than ever. I fight to make sure others have access to help that quite literally saved my life. And I fight for myself, as a marker that in situations where I felt weak, that I now have strength to overcome and fight for myself.