I’ve been nominated for three different blog awards by several lovely bloggers:

Blogger Recognition Award: Alys and Alicia

Blogger Appreciation Award: Nuclear Asteria.

Liebster Award: The Colour of Madness

A huge thank you to all of these ladies, who are fantastic bloggers.  If you haven’t checked them out yet, you should definitely do so!  I love these blog awards because they’re such a great way to discover new blogs, but I’m doing this as a mashup so it’s not as overwhelming for me.  Figuring out who I should nominate is always hard, because I love you all.  However, to keep me from spending too many hours on this, I’m picking a random assortment from this amazing blogosphere that I feel so lucky to be a part of.

Blogger Recognition Award

1. Show your gratitude to the person who nominated you and provide a link back to the person’s blog.
2. Give a brief story of your blog.
3. Share two or more pieces of advice for beginner bloggers.
4. Choose 10 other bloggers to nominate.
5. Comment on each blog by letting them know they’ve been nominated and provide a link to your award post.

Blogger Appreciation Award

Here are the rules:

• Thank the blogger who nominated you and provide a link back to their site.
• Write a paragraph of something positive about yourself.
• Nominate and notify as many bloggers as you wish.
• Use the award image.

Rules of the Liebster Award 2018

The winning blog wins a prize. Each blog gets one entry. To enter you must:

• Link to my blog post in your Liebster Award blog post.
• Answer the questions given to you (if nominated, if you were not nominated you can use my questions).
•  Create more questions for your 5-11 nominees to answer (judged on uniqueness and creativity).
• Comment on this blog post with a link DIRECTLY to your Liebster award. (To make it easy for the judge to read them all.)
• Entries start 1st Jan 2018 and ends on 25th Dec 2018. The winner will be picked on the 31st of December

Now that the rules are out of the way, here are my answers and nominees….

Blogger Recognition Award:

• My blog’s story: I’ve always cared about challenging mental illness stigma, but for a long time I stayed away from social media because it just made me feel crappy about myself.  Last fall I had a lot of time on my hands because I wasn’t working much, and I was looking for something that would help give me a sense of purpose and feel less isolated, so my blog was born
• Advice for beginner bloggers: Write about what matters to you, not about what you think other people want to read.  Engage in the blogging community and all the support that it has to offer.  These kinds of award posts can be a great way to get hooked into that.

My nominees for the Blogger Recognition Award:

• Ease the Ride
• Mindful of My Mess
• Motivation Against Depression
• Stigma Unraveled
• The Doors to Wisdom
• This Takes Courage

Blogger Appreciation Award – something positive about me: I am a damn good nurse.  I work in mental health, and I consistently get feedback from my clients that they feel I listen to them and treat them with respect and compassion.  I’ve had more than one nasty manager who questioned my abilities as a nurse not because of my work with clients but because I spoke my mind and called bullsh*t on policies that went against my values.  Yet even at my most depressed, I knew that not only were they @ssholes, but they were just plain wrong.

My nominees for the Blogger Appreciation Award:

• Anxious Elephant
• Bella Living with Mental Illness
• Bipolar Barb
• Missing in Sight
• My Loud Bipolar Whispers
• Therapy Bits

Questions from Kate at Colour of Madness for the Liebster Award:

1. What is your favourite sense and why? (as in taste, touch, smell etc)  I would have to say vision because it plays such an important role in my passion, travelling.
2. If you found $1000 in a bag at the local park and nobody seemed to be around, what would you do with it? I’d be torn between turning it in to the police station so maybe its owner could claim it, or donating it to charity.
3. Do your friends and family read your blog? If not, why not and if so, how does it change the way you write?  No, and I prefer it that way because I don’t feel the need to check myself at all in my writing.
4. What is the quirkiest little habit you have that you just can’t break?  It’s not quirky, but I do have quite the potty mouth, although I’m not sure the issue is I can’t break the habit or I just don’t give a sh*t.  Probably the latter.
5. What is your favourite post from your own blog and why? I don’t have one, because they’re all about things that are interesting/relevant/important to me.
6. If you could go back in time and speak to your 16yr old self, but only for 5 minutes, what would you say?  I’d say don’t waste a single day of being well.
7. What is your favourite physical feature and why?  I like that I’m tall (5’8″), because it’s the one feature that there’s nothing at all I’d want to change about.
8. Are you a Winter person or a Summer person? Summer.  Bring on the sunshine.
9. If you could bring a celebrity back from the dead and take them out for the afternoon, who would you choose and where would you go? Nelson Mandela would be amazing to meet, but I might be tempted to go for someone scary and creepy.
10. Who would have the best chance of survival in a Zombie apocalypse, you or your best friend? Why?  I don’t actually have friends any more, because I’ve pushed them all away.  I think I’d be ready to join team Zombie.
11. This is the big one guys… The toilet paper roll. Under or over?  I’m militant about this one: over.  I just don’t understand why anyone would want under.  Over is like the toilet paper being presented to you on a silver platter – who doesn’t want service like that?

My nominees for the Liebster Award: I pass on the same questions to you.

• Chloe Bellerby on Mental Illness
• Me, Myself, and Mental Illness
• The Fight From Within
• The Jessica Effect
• The Narcissist’s Daughter
• Thriving Through Bipolar

If you’ve already been nominated for the award I nominated you for, please feel free to switch to a different award.  And if you don’t have the time/energy/inclination to do an award post that is 110% okay.  They can be exhausting!

I do hope, though, that people will check out all the blogs that I’ve mentioned, because they’re awesome.  Thanks again to Alys, Alicia, Asteria, and Kate for nominating me