Steph's Travel Adventures

 Now you'll have to excuse me on this one, I am relatively new to the area of mental health when it comes to seeing mental health professionals, but I have dealt with my own mental health for some time now, has this been easy? No, it hasn't. My mental health comes in various forms, the most common - anxiety. Earlier this year, on the 26th of April, when I had my first appointment with a psychiatrist, I was diagnosed with situational anxiety. Still, I also had to cope with another big topic which is suicide. Recently this one has not been easy. I have been back and forth to doctor's appointments over the past month or so because I have had multiple things wrong; for example, I had to syringe out my ears, and I went back to a doctor's appointment to do with a burn. Why do I open up about mental health, you ask? Well, the thing is, like most people, I don't really want to, but it relieves frustration and some other emotions if people do open up about mental health as a...

 Dancing through life without legs, no one can dance without legs, not even me. So much so that I have a ladder in my room that I used to pull up on, but since I got my new chair, I haven't done any yet, so when I do, I'll clue the view. Before I swapped my chairs, I developed my own form of pole dancing, which was different from the traditional sense but still dancing all the same. It has been a sporadic hobby for me, which I started when I was younger and then stopped for a while until picking it back up last year, where I performed it mostly without fear. Throughout my initial startup sessions last year, I would close my door and curtain so I could be free to be me with my knees against my bed; I would do ab work like no one else ever could, as it was unique to my chair and the positioning was in front of a busy stage where kids played at the fair. As a young kid in primary school, I took part in ballet classes with my friend Sophie and a bunch of my other friends. I current...

 In recent times this has been a very hard thing to do. Naturally, because my team is now so large, it is tough to juggle people's uni schedules around my rosters because I usually have to fit in with people's uni schedules instead of fitting in with my roster. I currently have 15 members of staff on a fortnightly rotating roster, and having to accommodate so many different people can be very draining; believe me, I don't do it because I want to; I do it because I have to otherwise, I wouldn't be able to live normally without assistance. Another thing with having a physical disability and managing such a big team is that you always feel like YOUR constantly on call, and what I mean by this is people can call in sick at any given moment. You'd have to be willing to coordinate replacements; believe me, this is not my favourite thing to do. It is actually very draining, especially in the early hours of the morning when you're trying to sleep, I can't tell you h...