Living In The Brambles: Suzi's Musings, #1

By Suzi French

This debut poetry collection details the author's experiences with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Depression and Anxiety. It shares some of her poems, both Haiku and traditional rhyming, about these subjects. Suzi is going to donate 25% of the profits from her book sales to the charities MIND and OCD UK. Most of us have some experience of depression, whether it be ourselves or someone we know. Suzi wrote this book in the hope that her personal journey would help others see a way out of their own dark places. It gives a brief summary of her painful journey from her nursing career, through various self-employment roles, to her current role as an author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Suzi French
• Release date: Jan 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393727408

Book preview

About Me

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I am currently fast approaching the age of sixty, and am lucky enough to live in a beautiful part of Devon, very close to the Grand Western Canal. I share my home with my amazing husband and my beautiful, three-legged Burmilla cat called Nala (or Tripod, as my husband insists on calling her)

I have been self-employed for the last eleven years, after suffering from a major mental health breakdown. I was diagnosed with OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder), depression, and GAD (generalised anxiety disorder).

I had to reinvent myself back then and change the direction of my life. I hope my writing will show others what is possible and how it is never about what we face in life, but more about how we react to our circumstances.  One of the things I now know is that I never want to go back to being employed. Employment saw me give away too much power and control to another individual. They then didn’t fulfil their responsibilities in respect of having that much control over another’s direction. I hated feeling that lack of control and helplessness in relation to my working life. My therapists suspected that it was this that led to me developing my mental health problems back then.

At the time I first