"...Most of all, talking matters; honest conversations between me and you and everyone we know. Not pretending we’re OK when we’re struggling, not shoving pastries at ‘skinny’ people in the office or gossiping about them behind their back, but genuine, honest talk. If you, or someone close to you, has disordered eating patterns, if you’re weighing yourself obsessively or exercising excessively, if you’re bingeing or purging after meals, the first thing to know is that there is nothing to be ashamed of. You’re not alone: many people – young, old, female, male, underweight and overweight and everything in between – feel the same way." 

This is an extract from my article for Stylist Magazine, out this week. You can read the full version here http://www.stylist.co.uk/life/stylist-hears-first-hand-what-it-s-like-to-live-with-mental-illness

If you don't know Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill, you need to read it pronto! Such beautiful writing, I can't recommend it highly enough. A few favourite snippets:

“The baby’s eyes were dark, almost black, and when I nursed her in the middle of the night, she’d stare at me with a stunned, shipwrecked look as if my body were the island she’d washed up on.”

“My agent has a theory. She says every marriage is jerry-rigged. Even the ones that look reasonable from the outside are held together inside with chewing gum and wire and string.”

“How had she become one of those people who wears yoga pants all day? She used to make fun of those people. With their happiness maps and their gratitude journals and their bags made out of recycled tire treads. But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.” 

"The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind. (Fun fact.)” 
 

“Life may not have a purpose, but it certainly has consequences, one of which is the accumulation of a vast, coastal shelf of uncut, 100 per-cent-pure-regret. And this will happen whether you have no kids, one kid, or a dozen.” Geoff Dyer