I can’t exactly remember how it started. I’d gone along to a launch event for Time to Change Wales in Venue Cymru in Llandudno. I worked at that time for a housing organisation, and it was just another event I was asked to go to.
As soon as the two ladies started talking, though, the idea behind Time to Change Wales resonated within me. Normally a quiet, shy person, I felt the urge to approach the ladies at the end and introduce myself and ask for more information.
‘Most inspirational people I’ve ever met’
The following week, I was on a training course on how to deliver effective presentations and volunteer for Time to Change Wales with three of the most inspirational people I’ve ever met. We talked about our experiences of stigma and discrimination with our own mental ill health.
For some, that [discrimination] happened in their personal lives; for me, it had been at work: “You see, Shelley, we just can’t have someone vulnerable working with vulnerable people”.
I’d recently become redundant and the echoes of the conversations I’d had with my superiors haunted my nights: “You’re just not stable enough”, “It won’t look good” and “We can’t make allowances” were some of the many comments around my mental health.
‘We travelled all over Wales’
As time went on, we got quite good at delivering presentations (ranging from three people to 200 people at a time). We almost jumped through the toilet window at one place and, in another, the nerves were so bad, I was stuck in the loo five minutes before we were due on stage.
We told our stories of our mental illnesses and the effect they had had on our lives. We spoke to people at events, The National Eisteddfod, conferences, Mental Health Today and Aberystwyth University.
With the support of our mentor, Gail, we travelled all over Wales. We stayed in some random places and learnt some things about ourselves that we didn’t know. As I became more confident, I started to raise my own aspirations for my future. Where once, I’d have been content with a job, now I wanted that job to make a difference.
‘My employers value my experiences’
I wanted to be the hope in someone else’s dark, and so I applied to university. In 2017, I graduated as a mental health nurse. I now work on an inpatient ward in North Wales. I still take medication for my own mental health, but now my employers value my experiences.
I’m more able to speak to my managers if I feel things are not going so well, and I still try to squeeze in some volunteering for Time to Change Wales whenever I can. The project may have changed significantly in the last five years, but the root pursuit of chipping away at stigma and discrimination will always be needed.
Thank you to all the Time to Change Wales staff over the years and my fantastic fellow volunteers – too numerous to mention. Happy Volunteers week! Honoured to call you all friends.