The Life of Rachel

Halloween begins to draw closer every day, with the cold wrapping its icy fingers around your skin, the coloured leaves covering the ground like confetti and the darkness beginning to invade our days by creeping in on us early in the cold evenings. Why do we celebrate Halloween? I’m only too glad to share the story behind it all. Halloween originated from an old Celtic festival called Samhain which marked the end of summer and the beginning of winter. Death was associated with this time of the year and the barrier between the world of the dead and the living was at its thinnest, meaning spirits wreaked havoc upon the living. Samhain was a time of bonfires, where crops were burned, and animals were sacrificed. The Celts dressed up in costumes which mainly consisted of animal heads and skins. Throughout the years, costumes became a big thing among people when celebrating Halloween. People believed that the spirits who roamed the streets would leave them be if they wore costumes, it...

When I started my job back in April 2019, I had no idea (well, none of us had any idea) that a year later our economy and everything else would suffer under the hands of a Covid-19 pandemic. I remember sitting at my kitchen table with my Mum one day before work and she asked: "Has this been labelled a pandemic yet?" I just shrugged. A few days later and it had been officially labelled a pandemic. Little did I know though that things were about to get worse from there on..... March 2020: Every single day coming into work was filled with dread and fear of the unknown. This was before people started wearing masks, but the odd customer would come in with a scarf wrapped around their nose and mouth. On a normal day, a customer wouldn't mind you standing extra close to them while you packed the stock on the shelf beside them, but since Covid-19 had hit Ireland, people literally jumped away from you. It felt very strange, but people were scared and that's understandable, but...

The self conscious part of myself is telling me not to share this online, that you can't make people understand what you are going through, but that isn't the goal here; the goal is to reach out to those who suffer in silence and extend a virtual hand and ear to listen to. There are others out there who need to know they aren't alone in this world, how they aren't travelling down the road alone of suffering with a mental illness. I read somewhere that we live in a world where people will rush to sign your cast if you've broken an arm or a leg, but when it comes to telling people how you feel on the inside they will indiscreetly turn the other way and run. C'mon guys, can't you be a little more discreet than that? However, we should all try to erase the negative stigma that surrounds the whole topic of mental health and replace it with a more positive stigma. Which reminds me, today's topic is panic attacks! Yay!  I was only eight years old when I suffere...

“Hey, look at the American over there….” “Go back to your own country, you don’t belong here” “Are you an immigrant of some sort?” “Stop lying about being Irish, you’re a yank, just own up to it” “You’ve made up so many excuses for yourself that you have actually started to believe them” From the age of three years old, I used to binge watch Friends most afternoons with my Nan when she was alive. They were moments that I would do anything to re-live again, but little did I know how great an impact those programmes would have on myself as a person in the years to come. As I grew a little older to the age of four and five, Nickelodeon became a huge part of my childhood. Shows like Drake and Josh, Neds declassified school survival guide and Zoey 101 were TV programmes that I watched for hours on end. It wasn’t until the first comment about my accent was passed at the age of 6 that I started to turn against myself. I was always degraded for sounding different; people made me ...

When we turn on the news channel, what do we see? When we flick through the feeds on social media platforms, what do we read? When we turn on the radio, what do we hear? These are three different questions, but they all share the same answer. In times like these it is not just important to look after ourselves physically, but mentally too. A pandemic such as this is one not only takes a toll on how we live our lives, but to how this new change in lifestyle and fear of the known and unknown will make us feel on the inside. As someone who deals with anxiety on a daily basis, I can empathise with what a lot of the world’s population is going through and many people choose not to speak of it for fear of having it come to life or it may just be thoughts that are better kept secret. These thoughts shouldn’t be kept on the inside, they should be let out so others can help ease the burden of them. However, if people are too anxious to say them out loud then allow me to help with that; i...

Anxiety....  What does that word make you think? Does it make you think about how it’s only just a word, a substitute for feeling worried? Well, in my opinion,  you’re wrong, it’s so much more than that. I deal with it  daily and so do  many others.  Actually, we  don’t even d eal with it, we suffer from it. However, some of us deal with it in the shadows, trying to hide it in the darkness because if it peeks itself out into the light,  we are afraid people won’t understand it and that’s the harsh reality of today’s world. A lot o f people don’t have the slightest clue of what some of us go through  on a daily basis ,  yet they still tell us “Don’t be worrying yourself, just chill”. Trust me, if we could do that,  we would in a heartbeat with no hesitation, but it’s never been that simple . I’m constantly seeing the same m ental h ealth post on social media platforms that reads,  “We live in a society where if we break a bone eve...

Oh my days, this is incredibly weird being online like this, on an actual page. What is happening?  I suppose I should skip the really boring parts like I'm 21 years old, I'm a customer assistant in Tesco and I write for a college newspaper, but where's the fun in skipping boring introductions like that? No, I am here because of you, my strange yet lovable followers of Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat. It seems that sharing my opinions, funny anecdotes, stories and bits of advice has gotten the attention from a relatively big audience and it has made me come out of my shell, the line of my comfort zone has been crossed thanks to you! I suppose it all started with a new app to hit our PlayStore Apps called Yolo, otherwise known as an anonymous question app. I suppose I gave into the social peer pressures because a lot of people were doing it online so I thought why not? The response I got was huge, my phone has never overheated so fast because of so many notifications com...