Silver Linings - Day 25 (Christmas Day)

Day 25 (Monday 25th December 2017 - Christmas Day)

Happy Christmas!  Regardless of your religious beliefs, may you enjoy light and bright times, filled with love and laughter, and, if your life is beset with troubles, experience respite from the worst the dark can bring. A number of this Series' authors have written about their own personal struggles during the year. I know of others who either have decided either not to share their pain or who chose not to contribute a piece at all, due to finding the current demands of life almost too much to bear. Traditionally today is a day of generosity, please spare some thoughts and/or provide support to those in need, grief or pain.

Today's post is by a new voice to the Advent Blogs - Paula Whylie. As you will see when you read her piece, Paula belives in providing love and support. I think it is an ideal post for Christmas Day. Paula is the Engagement and Development Manager for the charity Bolton at Home. I first met Paula via Twitter, her handle is @Paula_BaH. She is a loving wife and daughter, proud mother to three wonderful children and devoted carer of Eric a handsome, clever and cuddly young "Staffie" (Staffordshire Bull Terrior). She is an accomplished artist, even though she modestly refers to her drawings as doodles. She believes in trying to make the world a better place and often does through her sheer passion and exuberance. 

Paula selected her own illustrations for today's post. 

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It’s the first time ice contributed to Kate’s (@KateGL) annual Advent Blog although I’ve been writing the occasional blog on and off for a while now, some for the lovely folk at www.thecounsellorscafe.co.uk some on Medium  and the odd few here there and everywhere, I started blogging after experiencing a bout of poor mental health which distanced me from my friends, family and work for a period of around eight months. I learnt a lot about myself during that time and have continued to do so. My first lesson was every cloud has a silver lining.

After some of my darkness had lifted I wrote The Day the Dam Burst it was a cathartic experience and one I’d recommend to anyone (even if you don’t publish it) as it serves as a reminder that you’re stronger than you think you are. I experienced loneliness which is hard to describe, if I think of it as a painting its Edvard Munch’s The Scream.  The impact of feeling lonely was another lesson which in retrospect I was glad to be taught, it made me think differently about my lovely mum who lives alone and whilst we’ve always been close, thinking differently about what life is like for her has made a difference to how we spend time together.

Earlier this year I wrote A Genuine Smile about my mums seventieth birthday. I’m smiling now as I write this, as this year we carried on giving her some sort of treat each weekend from picnics in her lounge as she’s mainly house bound to buying her a stuffed dog when we got a puppy earlier on in the year, Mum’s dogs called Ralph as she sits cuddling him. We’re also trying to make December as special as possible for her again by giving her a treat each weekend leading up to December and each time we give her something she always replies “I’ll bloody kill you, don’t waste your money on me” at which point we all laugh.

This year Age Concern UK have launched their  #NoOneShouldHaveNoOne campaign to help address the fact that almost 1 million older people feel lonelier at Christmas than any other time of the year. Loneliness is a social monster, it lurks in dark places and creeps up on our loved ones, I live and work in Bolton and its estimated we have around 4160 lonely people. We are lucky to have another Angel @KatieHuddleUp set up a business in Bolton this year and she’s not prepared to let this continue, Katie and her team are inviting anyone who feels lonely on Christmas Day to join them at @HuddleUpAllSouls 

Whilst I wouldn’t wish poor mental health on anyone, my silver lining was realising that I could make a difference by talking openly about my mental health in the workplace and home, which I have done and will continue to do so as its enabled many conversations to take place and support to be put into place, for that I’m grateful to take something positive from the experience.

                  

Angels around you at all times

Day 25 (Sunday 25th December 2016)

25% increase in UK trained doctors is planned by the UK Government to

enable the UK to become "self-sufficient". This plan was 

announced in October 2016 and will take effect as from 2018.

Doctors' Training places are set to expand from 6,000 to 7,500 pa.

Currently 25% of doctors working for the NHS were trained abroad.

For those of you who are celebrating today, I wish you a very Happy Christmas. Regardless of your religious beliefs, I hope that the next few days are good and that they provide you with some time to recharge and connect with loved ones and friends. I am spending the day with my family in London.

Our Christmas Day post comes from the wonderful Michael Carty. He is seen by many as the connective glue that holds many in the HR social media community together. Always interested, always mindful of others and respectful - a true gentleman. Michael is a thoughtful and talented blogger - you can read his words on Tumblr.

Michael has for many years followed and commented on HR for XpertHR and is known as a benchmarking guru who can make sense of complex analytical data and communicate it in an easily understood manner to others less capable than himself. He is active and supportive on social media (often encouraging people to attend tweet-ups and events), indeed he and I first met at a tweet-up and over the years we have established a close friendship. You can follow him on Twitter (his handle is @MJCarty)

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Angels around you at all times

For much of 2016, the world has seemed an appallingly cruel place. There has been much to make a heart feel heavy and hollow. Comfort and joy - those traditional fixtures of the festive season - might seem in short supply. But even in these times they are still there, as abundant as they have ever been. Angels are not on high. They are around you at all times. You just have to ask for their help.

"I can't believe people care about me like that, and they don't even know me." 

Hearing these words brought tears to my eyes in public at the start of this month. 

These words come from a story that seems - the more I think about it - like a modern-day, real-life It's a Wonderful Life. Angels play a key role in this story. So does Twitter.

The tears came as I was walking to the train station through the bustle and tacky Christmas lights of a noisy and busy part of South London on my commute home. I was listening to an episode of RuPaul's consistently delightful What's The Tee podcast. He was talking to his podcast co-host - and fellow RuPaul's Drag Race judge - Michelle Visage about Jake.

The media recently picked up on Michelle Visage using Twitter to crowdsource help for Jake, a gay and trans teen from Elizabethtown, Kentucky (you can read one brief account here). Jake's mother had banished him from the family home on grounds of his sexuality, telling him by text message (as Visage recounts it): 

"We didn’t raise you to be like this. That’s not the way God wanted it. No, you can’t come home."

Jake set up a Twitter account to reach out to Michelle Visage, who shared a screengrab of the text message, and asking for reassurance that life might get better for Jake from the wider community.

She responded to Jake with words of support and reassurance, and shared Jake's situation with her own Twitter followers. "Floods of tweets" came through, with people offering moral support, help, jobs, food and shelter for Jake. 

Both Jake and Visage were overwhelmed and humbled by the love and kindness out there. Through the advice and support offered by Visage and legions of perfect strangers, Jake has made tentative progress with his mother and been able to move back into the family home. He is by no means out of the woods ("I fear for him" when Jake raises the trans issue with his mother, says Visage). But Visage is there for him. As is a new support network of thousands of friends. 

Michelle Visage is humble about her role in Jake's story:

"I knew that I don't have that many followers - 290,000 or whatever. All I did was tweet it and it got picked up. But it wasn't meant to be about that. It was meant to be about - anybody would do this. And thank you so much for this help. And because of this help, this kid saw that he was loved. It just goes to show you how strong and how resilient and how amazing our community is when we pull together."

RuPaul takes up this theme:

"I wonder how many people have this story to tell? So many people go through this. And so many people survive. I've said this before. There are angels around you at all times. But because you have free will, they will not intervene unless you say: 'I. Need. Help.' Boom. It's done. And that's what happened with this kid."

Angels. Friends rallying to offer support. This could be a modern It’s a Wonderful Life. No man is a failure who has friends.

Back in 2014, I wrote the following about our hostess in this advent blogs series, Mrs Kate Griffiths-Lambeth: 

"I said to Ailsa Suttie earlier this year that Kate is perhaps the closest person to an angel that any of us are ever likely to meet. Kate has time for everyone, judges no-one, and is generous with her wisdom and support. Here are some beautiful words from a post she wrote last year: 'Life is so short, but it offers an amazing journey, it would be a shame not to appreciate and enjoy each precious step.'"

There are angels around you at all times. Kate is one. I want to thank Kate for all she has done and does for me, for our community, for perfect strangers about whom none of us but Kate will ever know. 

Kate when a little girl

Please join me in raising a toast to our wonderful advent blogs hostess, Mrs Kate Griffiths-Lambeth. And if you are on Twitter, please, please tweet her a Christmas message of gratitude and love.