Mullets for Mental Health.

Anxiety has controlled my life for many years now. 

It’s stopped me doing things I love, stopped me seeing people I love and stopped me being myself which has been harder than anything.
Anxiety can affect people in many ways - just like most mental health conditions. It can make people behave in ways they never usually would, and that’s the thing with mental illness: it’s difficult for people to understand what goes on in people’s minds. Nobody can see that someone is struggling unless they have the confidence to tell someone, and sometimes that just feels too hard. I’ve been there. When anxiety first really gripped me, I was 18, I was a big, 18 year old spending all my time in the gym or playing rugby. ‘I can’t tell people about this’ I used to think but when I didn’t, things only got worse. 

It's not all doom and gloom. Through my experience with anxiety and mental health, anxiety has shown me just how amazing people can be.
There’s been people that have gone above and beyond to help me through it, help me live a life I want to live whilst helping me deal with my personal issues. Those people are amazing people really. 
They lift you up when you feel like nobody else can. They encourage you to do things when you don't feel like you can. They make you believe in yourself regardless of how you feel. Those people are the ones that keep us going. 

Now, I've been lucky. I've had people like that. Not all my life and sometimes I've struggled. But then when I've really struggled, people have always come along and they’ve helped me through the hardest times. They've helped me get out when I didn't want to leave the home. They've helped me start something new when I didn't think I could. They've made me feel welcome when, to be honest, I was scared.

Those are the people that the world needs more of. But not everybody has those people in their lives and so charities are sometimes the only place that people can go to. To have someone to listen, have someone to provide strength when they don't have any and that's why mental health charities are so important and why it's important to raise money for them.

So, my idea is ‘mullets for mental health’. So I'm going to set up just giving page with the aim of receiving  £100 in donations. If it receives £100, great! If not, hopefully, it’s still money raised for mental health charities. But once it receives 100 pounds, then I will have a mullet. Now, anybody that knows me, knows how important my appearance has been to me in the past and that's one of the reasons why I want to do this - to challenge my anxiety. I want to put myself out there and a mullet is certainly a haircut that puts yourself out there! So by doing that, I'm challenging myself and challenging my anxiety by putting myself in a position where I'm a little bit more exposed and I'm happy to do that if it's helping other people. So yeah, once this hits £100, I’ll ask Bethany to shave me a lockdown mullet and I will keep it for as long as the page is raising money. It would be great to see other people joining this, joining the mullet! Because the more people that are doing it, the more awareness is raised for these issues and more money is raised. I haven't shared much of my story, but if people want to message me and want to hear more or feel like they're in a similar position and want to know more on how to help themselves, I'm no expert, but I like to think I've done a lot of reading into and learning about how to help yourself, because it’s difficult to help yourself out of those holes.

So yeah, please share this and spread the word so that we can help people especially during these times where mental health is at the forefront. People are struggling, so it's important to help each other.

Thank you.