This post has been hard to write. I’ve been writing various pieces to post for several months now but this is the one I keep avoiding. As much as I love writing, writing about myself – introducing myself with only a select number of words – is something I’ve always found difficult. Usually I find that words open everything up and make the world bigger but sometimes I think people are the exception to that. How do you fit something as big and intangible as a human being into something as small as a series of words? It’s kind of like when you take a photo of someone and even though it is them, it doesn’t look like them. But this is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, so I’m going to try.

My name is Lauren Alex Hooper and I’m twenty-two years old. I’ve just finished my songwriting degree in London and am working towards my first release as a singersongwriter. Songwriting is my favourite thing in the world and the only time I feel truly calm is when I’ve finished a song. That’s one half of my life. The other half of my life is my struggle with my mental health. Of course, this does often overwhelm the other half. It often overwhelms everything. At this point in time, I have been diagnosed with Depression, Anxiety, Social Anxiety, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, and Autism Spectrum Disorder. These are still fairly recent (two years in the case of the ASD) but I’ve been living with the symptoms of them for a very long time. I’ve tried a lot of things to help with said symptoms. Some have helped, some haven’t. Currently I’m taking medication for the anxiety and going to Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, the best combination I’ve found so far. I hope to talk about all of this in more detail in future posts. If I start to write about it all now, we’ll be at ten thousand words in no time and while I don’t know much about blogging, I’m pretty sure that that’s not the way to start…

I’ve been writing about my experiences with mental illness for a long time but it’s only ever been for me. It’s only ever been a method of coping. But I can’t help thinking about how much it would’ve helped me to know other people felt the same way, had had similar experiences. For such a long time, I couldn’t understand why everyone functioned so much better than me, why I seemed to struggle so much more than everyone else and it wasn’t until I was sixteen that I heard someone talk about experiences that matched mine (it was Stephen Fry – but that’s another story). And that changed everything. I finally felt able to talk to my Mum because I had some context for what I was feeling and ever since that moment, we’ve been looking for answers and support. So I started to think about putting some of this writing (and there’s quite a bit of it) out into the world. Maybe it will help you, maybe it will help me. Here begins a new adventure.