Tag: learn

New Habits

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

The hardest thing about life, are these assumptions that we grow up with, from childhood. This idea that everything that you learn, is the same stuff that will carry us through the rest of our lives. Whilst this may be true for some, not every behaviour that we learn is correct.

A lot of times, the behaviours that we learn, are ones that are the best for our individual situtaion that we may have been in. For example, I learned at a young age that it was easier to binge eat my feelings, rather than bother anyone with my problems. This, was something that I felt that was most convienient at the time, but in the long term, it was an issue. My behaviour around food came about in my teenage years, when I started having mental health issues. A lot of people thought it was because I was earning my own money. Whilst having money certainly didn’t help my situation, it didn’t start it. Before my first job, before I earned any of my own money, I was hiding extra food in my room, to binge on later. I was maybe 13 or 14 at the time.

When I started putting weight on, people would make fun. The thing that was my coping mechanism, a way to feel better, was now a reason to feel bad. It didn’t fix anything. It made things worse, I doubled down on what I was doing, and would eat more as I felt worse. During that time, I think that there was this attitude to ignore bullies, you don’t ‘grass’ them in. It felt shameful that these people’s silly comments were getting to me, so I used food as a release. And it never went away, it just became worse.

Over the last few years, I have been trying to work on my mental health. And much of that journey has been spoken of in this blog. It has led to me thinking about my coping mechanisms, which includes my relationship with food. I have started an account on MyFitnessPal, in the aim to record what I am eating. Because when I binge. I mindlessly eat, so I am trying to recognise every food that I eat. Something that sounds basic, but it involves relearning so much stuff.

I guess, what I want to say, is that no one is perfect. Not every behaviour that you have learned is one that will stay with you, for your entire life. Despite the belief that childhood is where you learn new things, you learn something new every single day. As they say, every day is a school day.

Always Learning

~ Sue ~ 1 Comment

There is a problem with education in this country. It has the habit of ruining things which a lot of pupils cam be passionate about. I know that when I was younger, I lost my love of reading, after being forced to write laborious essays and questions on books read during class. I think it was the idea of constantly having my thoughts on novels that I loved critiqued, really sucked any joy out of the reading process for me. 

Over time, my love for reading anything and everything came back to me. I found that I loved reading different types of writing, from formal articles on science to trashy magazines. I love the variety that can be created by the written word. 

As I have gotten older, I have discovered that I do love to learn new things. It was just the formal setup of school, that didn’t agree with me. The biggest problem for me, was, as mentioned above, the constant testing. The constant nagging that you weren’t good enough, just ruined that period of my life. I was beginning to struggle with my mental health, and my grades started to suffer when I couldn’t actually use the things I loved to relax, because I was getting assessed on them 

Now my mental health is a lot better these days, I am trying to make the best of things and try to learn more. I have found a service called Future Learn, which provides free courses online. The courses run from a few weeks, to a couple of months, and are run with the help of many universities from all over the world. The course that I have signed up for, is Community Journalism, which is a 5 week course run by Cardiff University. The course has a variety of steps for every participant to complete every week, with a final test and the option to get a certificate upon completion. The best thing about Future Learn is that there is a wide variety of topics, something for everybody. You can also communicate with people also participating in the course, which means I have the ability to talk to people all over the world. It’s great. 

So, if you are interested in a topic that you would like to study into further, but you maybe don’t have the money to enroll in a course, don’t have the time to study full-time or just want to learn a bit more about something. I recommend that everyone pops onto Future Learn and has a look around and see if there is anything you fancy. Because education is about enlightenment, not examinations.