​Mental health is a funny thing.

This last year, mine has been very up and down. And it has affected my writing (you may have noticed this blog went dormant).

This is new territory for me – writing has been an outlet for me as long as I can remember, and I’ve never had a block like the one I’ve experienced this past year. I either can’t write at all, or anything I do write feels subpar and my anxiety overwhelms me and I can’t post it.

This last year, I moved out of my parents’ home and started renting in Wimbledon with my best friend. I started a new job at a marketing agency, taking a break from journalism to regroup after a string of rejections throughout the pandemic – it’s a job I never saw myself doing but I enjoy it and have now moved into a senior role. I threw myself back into dating and started a relationship. The last couple months, it feels like everything is coming together again and I’m finally starting to find my peace.

Writing feels good again. I feel good again.

Part of this is down to learning how to take control of my anxiety. Before moving, I was in counselling for a year, and it really helped me to nail down where my anxieties came from and what would trigger me into a spiral of anxiety and depression. I learnt some tools to help me work through the spiral and not end up feeling overwhelmed by my thoughts. However, putting this into practice has been a challenge. For the first six months of 2022 I struggled using them and was still trying to figure out how to even recognise the spiral was starting. Once I was able to recognise the pattern and notice how I would feel at the beginning of a spiral, it then took a couple more months to know how to use these tools effectively. Now, I can (mostly!).

There are still times where I can’t quite pull myself out in time, but those are becoming a lot less frequent. I have also learnt when I need to let myself feel those feelings and just take a day to ride it out – sometimes this feels a lot better.

I’m only at the beginning of this journey, and I know it will take a long time to fully be in control of my mental health, but it feels good to know I’m progressing instead of standing still.

It also feels good to write about it.

Wow.
 
2022 is here! And I, for one, am feeling eerily optimistic about the year ahead.
 
Next week I start a new job and I move out of my parents’ house and into a flat in London with one of my closest friends. After being stuck in a weird limbo for the last almost-two years, I finally feel like I’m moving forward and my life is beginning.
 
I’m taking fantastic people with me into the new year and I hope to spend as much time as I can with them, to make up for what we lost during the pandemic.
 
I am filled with new motivation and creativity that I haven’t felt since leaving university – speaking of, I will finally get a graduation this year!
 
There’s something about this year that I can’t quite put my finger on, but I feel lighter and more optimistic than I have felt in a long time and I cannot wait to see what happens.

​Bee Clean have a fantastic range, and they don’t stop at soap. They also make scrubs, lotion bars, lip balms, and shaving soap and accessories, plus they’re working on even more products. They are so reasonably priced it’s almost unbelievable and some of their scents are intriguing to say the least (beer scented, anyone?).
 
Make sure to give this Yorkshire business some love, and you will be helping our bees and planet too! If you do, make sure to use the code* NIAMH10 at checkout for 10% off your order.
 
Give them a follow (@BeeCleanSoaps on Facebook and Instagram)!
 
*this is not an affiliate link.

For International Women’s Day, I wanted to talk about Equal Pay Day, something that is very important but not many people know about (in the UK at least). The date of Equal Pay Day (EPD) changes every year and is celebrated slightly differently in each country, but at its core it is a day that recognises the gender pay gap.
 
In the UK, EPD usually falls in November and it marks the day that women effectively would stop earning money for the year if they were paid the same hourly amount as men when they reached their pay amount. For example, if a man earns £12.50 an hour to make £26,000 a year, a woman earning £12.50 an hour at the same rate would reach her salary of £22,204 by November for doing the same job.
 
The Fawcett Society calculate this each year by taking the full-time mean average gender pay gap across all companies and workers to work out EPD. In 2018, that day was November 10th. In 2019 it was November 14th. In 2020 it was November 20th.

​Luckily, this shows that the gender pay gap is closing in the UK. However, the gap is still 11.5% for full-time workers according to the Fawcett Society, which is still way too high and shows that we still have a long way to go.
 
The USA and Germany celebrate EPD slightly differently. They mark it as the day women make as much as men did in the last year. For example, if a man earnt €26,000 between January and December 2019, women in the same roles won’t meet the same €26,000 until March or April 2020.
 
Germany is shown to have one of the biggest gender pay gaps in Europe. In a report gathered by DeutscheWelle, in2018 women made 20% less than men, and this only went down by 1% in 2019. As EPD has not happened yet, their gap is yet to be released for 2020. For comparison, the EU has an average 15% gender pay gap across the bloc, went down to 14.5% in 2019 and then 14.1% in 2020.

​In the USA, there is the March EPD for women, but there are also four other EPD that cover Asian-American women, African and Black American women, Native American women, and Latinx women. In 2019, these days were (in list order) March 5th, August 22nd, September 23rd, and November 20th. Mothers also have a separate day – in 2018 this was June 10th.

​This year, the average day will fall on March 24th. Women earnt $0.82 for every dollar men earnt last year.
 
The gender pay gap isn’t going to go away quickly. This is only a brief overview on how big the problem is. This year’s theme for International Woman’s Day is Choose to Challenge – this year I choose to challenge gender pay disparity and will be educating myself on this issue as much as I can over the next year. I will also be marking as many Equal Pay Days this year as I can. I urge you to do the same. It is only when we work together that we can stop injustice and disparity in the world.

This was another movie that was part of the Netflix rom com era article!