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Showing posts from August, 2016

My experience with anxiety

This is quite a scary entry for me to write, but I've been thinking about it for a while. Mental illness is often stigmatised and not talked about, so if talking about my experience could help even a tiny bit to destigmatise it, then it'll be worth it. And also I find it sometimes helps to write things down. So here goes.  Towards the end of this (academic) year, I went through a difficult time. Some bad things happened, and I made some very difficult decisions, and I fell. Hard. I wasn't sure how to get back up. My self esteem was at an all time low. I couldn't see a way out of the pain I was experiencing, but I had to. Life at Oxford doesn't stop for mental illness. Over the course of a term, after I got up the courage to ask for help, with support from friends and understanding tutors I slowly managed to find my way through it. But at that time, for the first time in my life, I suffered from quite severe anxiety.  Before my experience with anxiety this ye

An open letter to the owners of Brandy Melville

An open letter to the owners of Brandy Melville. To whom it may concern, I don't know if you will see this (you probably won't), but I am so angered by my experience in your store that I had to do something about it. I've been shopping at Brandy Melville for about 3 or 4 years now. My mum and I first discovered your shop when I was around 17 (and much skinnier than I am now) and I loved it. Your clothes were comfy, the fabric was soft, and pretty much everything was stylish. We'd take a trip to the King's road every time I went to London with my family and I'd come home with at least 3 or 4 items. My two sisters and I are constantly stealing each others' Brandy clothes (they have been the cause of some of our most explosive arguments). At that time your clothes mostly consisted of loose-fitting t shirts, or elasticated shorts, so it didn't really bother me that your shop didn't seem to have more than one size, because it fitted me anyway, and n