By Aimee Wilson
What we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, for all that we love deeply becomes a part of us.
— Helen Keller
Hello! I’m Aimee, fellow mental health blogger (at www.imnotdisordered.co.uk). My guest post today, however, is to mark the official launch of my huge new project, Gracie’s Way. I decided to use this guest post to write about all the things — big, small, technical, emotional, and practical; EVERYTHING! — I’ve needed in the creation journey.
Experience and Inspiration
Of course, the most obviously helpful thing to have in creating this project, was the horrible experience of losing my youngest bunny, Gracie. For around two days I had noticed wet stools (a symptom of Gut Stasis which my first rabbit died from) but because I had two rabbits (Luna being the name of the eldest) I couldn’t tell who was doing it. So, it wasn’t until October 31 that Gracie finally started showing all the other symptoms of Gut Stasis. She stopped eating, she stayed in a hunched-up position, and she wasn’t responding to her name or even to Luna licking her! So, I immediately called the Vet who gave me an appointment for the following morning.
Gracie stayed in the hutch in the same position for at least four hours before going behind the washing machine for at least five hours before I went to bed. When I woke up on November 1, I heard scuffling under my bed. I honestly imagined seeing both rabbits under there and feeling stupid for panicking. But it was Luna. So, I looked in the hutch and then behind washing machine and couldn’t find Gracie and it was only when I went to walk into the sitting room that I saw her outstretched on her side on the floor. I think I spent about five minutes staring at her side just begging for it to rise up and down but there was no movement and I touched her and she was freezing cold and stiff.
I think I cried the most I had in a long time, but I was so stunned at the same time. I mean, yes I knew she was poorly and after losing my first rabbit (Pixie) to it I’m more than aware of the dangers of Gut Stasis in rabbits (though admittedly, I didn’t know until after losing Gracie that it can be fatal within just 24 – 48 hours of the symptoms starting) but I honestly didn’t think for one minute that she was anywhere near dying during the night! Fortunately, as traumatic as it was finding her like that and as heartbreaking as it felt seeing Luna nudge Gracie’s lifeless body and my cat (Ruby) refuse to come into the sitting room until I’d covered Gracie with a blanket, I became grateful for it happening at home. I came to recognise that it meant she had been surrounded by the ones who love her most, in her own home, and not in a scary Vets with tons of drugs going through her system.
For some reason, I took a photo of her and I actually ended up glad that I did because it meant that when the Vet saw the position she’d been in, they could better guess the cause of death. They determined that Gut Stasis can cause seizures, shock, and heart attacks — all of which can cause sudden death in a rabbit. And having some sort of thought on what had caused it was actually helpful for me to accept her death as reality.
Shortly after losing Gracie, I was reminded of an invitation from Waythrough (the charity who provide my Recovery Workers) to attend an event with their Board Members at a new service in Leeds. Initially I was reluctant because I didn’t like the thought of leaving Luna and Ruby for a full day, but then I came to realise that actually, it might feel like a bit of an escape and a relief from things. Both in so far as emotionally because one very difficult thing about losing Gracie at home was that it felt like her death almost permeated everything in the house and it felt like the entire home was grieving and traumatised too. But also physically in putting some distance between me and this sad environment. I’ve worked on one month’s worth of daily content for Gracie’s Way’s Instagram (@gracieswayuk) and there’s one where it’s about what pet bereavement feels like. I’ve done a ton of analogies and one which works well here too, is that it’s “like the house is still standing but the warmth has gone.”
Anyway, I’m so glad I changed my mind because it was at this event in Leeds that the idea for Gracie’s Way was born. Waythrough used to be two organisations until October 2024 when Richmond Fellowship and Humankind (who focused on supporting those with experience of addiction) merged so that they could help people with both their mental health and addictions because they recognised the possibility for a connection or dual diagnosis in a lot of people. It meant that the Leeds service was an addictions service and so when one of the staff said that service users had asked to do some work around bereavement support, they focused on the loss of people through addiction. I mentioned considering doing similar work but around the loss of someone in relation to mental health e.g. suicide. Then, I somehow found the confidence to tell everyone that Gracie had passed two weeks earlier (the event was November 18) and that I thought it would be good to consider work around pet bereavement too. I said that in the Waythrough Life Experience Council I’m part of, we regularly talk about how helpful our pets are for our mental health — with everyone finding benefits in both different and very similar ways — and recovery journey and so I thought it would be something a lot of other service users would support and want to see happen.
Passion, Confidence, and Dedication
With the idea stemming from that Waythrough event, the original plan for Gracie’s Way was for it to be a Waythrough piece of work and so the logo originally had Waythrough’s circular logo as the tail for the rabbit! But on talking things through with the staff member who had invited me to the event and ran the entire thing, we determined that it would be a far longer process to make it happen that way than if I ran with it myself and then asked Waythrough to endorse it. As he pointed out, he was also aware that this project was going to be really influential on my own bereavement journey and he didn’t want that to be stunted or paused in any way.
In deciding to sort of “go it alone” I recognised it was going to take a lot more of a lot of different things from me than it would if I’d been working alongside Waythrough staff and other service users. Passion, confidence, and dedication were three of those things. But especially the confidence bit. Confidence in my career is something I think I’ve only really recently developed and established a decent amount of it(!) this past year or two. I mean, when I first started blogging, if anyone asked what I’m NOT Disordered was about, I would say “just my life ...” And yes, part of the reason for that was that stigma and discrimination around mental illness was — in my opinion — so much more rife back then (January 2013), but ultimately it comes down to confidence and not being confident enough to stand up for myself if I received any horrible comments or responses from stating that I blogged about mental health. That has definitely changed! My confidence in this respect has most definitely improved and my perspective or mindset now is that if I say my content is about mental health, any negative judgements or assumptions etc are a greater and more poor reflection on that person than they are on me.
But there’s another side to improvements around my confidence with my content too and that’s in terms of my skill level and abilities. I’m finally coming to believe that my content is good enough to be promoted and publicised. That it’s of some sort of quality that means it’s deserving of attention. And this confidence has mostly resulted in me feeling more capable and braver in being open and honest and telling complete strangers all about I’m NOT Disordered and the content I create. I’d actually say that I don’t think I’ve handed out more business cards in the first ten years of my blogging career than I have just these past two years!
This confidence has also helped with my recent labelling drama of being called an Influencer. When it was said, I did some research in the hope that my findings would provide me with ammunition to say that I wasn’t one. But no! I found out that some actually even split Influencers into categories depending upon the number of followers. For example, anyone with 10,000 – 100,000 followers are “micro” Influencers and those with over one million are “mega” Influencers (you can read more about it on The Viral Union). I had a chuckle to myself when I thought about how I’m NOT Disordered has over two million and wondered if that made me “double mega”!
Something else that has contributed to improving my self-confidence has been my passion for what I do — blogging, content creation, and just general communications and marketing work. It’s actually something that I’ve mostly harnessed for public speaking opportunities. I’ve found that if I focus on why I’m doing it — what my passion for this industry will gain from a successful speech or presentation e.g. more readers who my content could help, new collaboration opportunities, special experiences etc — then I have much more confidence to get up on a stage in front of hundreds. (My largest was 350 people at a joint Police and NHS event!) I turned my passion into fuel, and my dedication has had a pretty similar influence too in terms of being motivation and confidence-boosting.
Anyway, this new-found career confidence has helped massively in the decision to run with the idea for Gracie’s Way alone because it meant I felt a lot surer that I’m capable of succeeding with it than I would have thought if it had happened a few years ago. I felt certain that I knew what I was doing and that if I discovered something which I didn’t know or understand, then I felt confident I would be able to figure it out too! And that really also illustrates just how important dedication has been for this project. It may have “only” taken around six weeks to put it all together, but there’s actually been a lot of hours spent doing it through those weeks. I’d say, in all honesty, that Gracie’s Way has been more than on par with the workload I took on when I was creating all of the content (one blog post every day from December 1 – 25) for A Secret Blogmas last year.
Creativity
I’ve been a creative person since I was little and used to write short stories about horses going on adventures. (I used to go horse-riding, so I was obsessed with the animal!) I think something that powered me through writing those, was the reaction and support from my Mum and my Nana when they would read them. Apparently, my Nana always used to ask Mum when the next story was coming! Then, when I got older, I began drawing — especially fashion drawing — and actually opted to study Textiles at High School for my GCSE exams. And I think the motivation or the reason for my enjoyment with that was about having some sort of creative release for all the pent-up thoughts and feelings that came with the trauma (which happened during my GCSEs). I liked that being creative allowed me to use my imagination and put a lot of time and concentration into something different that meant I wasn’t overwhelmed by all the thoughts around the trauma as much.
In my blogging career, I feel that my creativity has really stood out these past few years as in 2017 I learnt all about Canva, a digital design tool that’s often used in the communications and marketing industry. The number of functions available on there means your creativity can really shine and flow nicely. Like, there’s very little that you can’t do on there. And so, you can really indulge, develop, and build on your ideas in a way that means you don’t ever feel as though you have to reign things in. To put this into perspective — for anyone who has never used it — even since 2017, pretty much every time I’ve used Canva I’ve discovered a different or new feature. And I think this is a very good quality to have because it means the user is almost always learning. I recognise that might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I think that most Influencers or content creators and those in the communications and marketing industry really enjoy learning new things that can improve their work in so many different ways.
With all these positive opinions of Canva, it was almost predictable that I would use it to create almost all the resources that Gracie’s Way offers and provides. (The only one not to be created on it is the Training Session because it’s on PowerPoint.) I don’t think that I could have done what I have without Canva. I can’t think of alternative websites or methods that would have helped me to produce all the work and content that I have on Canva. Also, in learning new things every time I use it, almost all of the new things I learned or discovered really helped to speed up the entire process of the content creation and allowed me to feel more organised in terms of not feeling that I was rushing to finish everything in time for the launch.
Practical Bits
1. Blogger: I used Blogger (which is owned by Google) as the hosting platform for the Gracie’s Way website because it’s what I use for I’m NOT Disordered so I feel confident that I know it well and can navigate its functions easily and quickly.
2. Canva: I used this digital design tool to create literally all of the resources available on Gracie’s Way. You can find the list of supportive materials for bereaved owners here and those for professionals here.
3. GoDaddy: This was a headache! I purchased I’m NOT Disordered’s URL via GoDaddy so obviously I turned to them again for Gracie’s Way. I originally purchased graciesway.online but it turned out that Blogger doesn’t really forward too well to URLs without www. or without the .co.uk or .com domain. I finally settled on www.graciesway.co.uk but it was a nightmare trying to set it up. I won’t lie, the chat on GoDaddy was horrific in terms of communication and customer service but on the phone? Well, big shout-out to Ethan who said to ask for him for future problems because he’s the only Ethan working for them in the UK! So, there’s a good recommendation if you need assistance with them too.
4. Chat GPT: I used AI a heck of a lot in creating the content and resources for Gracie’s Way and that was mainly because it would have been too large a workload to take on myself. But my other reason for deciding to use it was because it genuinely has some brilliant ideas and information around things I haven’t thought of or didn’t know about. And pet bereavement is obviously a bit of a new subject for me. I have written blog posts on I’m NOT Disordered after the loss of pets prior to Gracie (I’d lost three pets, plus the family cat, before Gracie died) but I had never really delved properly into the topic and researched all the bits I needed to know for the contents of the resources, particularly those I created for professionals.
5. PipDig: I’ve seen the attribution for this company at the bottom of so many blogs that I really admire and which I feel have been influential on my own blogging career, so I turned to them to purchase the design for both I’m NOT Disordered and Gracie’s Way. I chose Tundra because it had the exact layout and aesthetics that I wanted. You can preview it here. If you use WordPress, they do layouts for that too so they’re still definitely worth checking out.
6. Stationery: I’m a huge fan of stationery and have recently taken to assigning one notebook per project I’m working on. For example, I have one for my blog, one for general day-to-day tasks like food shopping and things, one for a secret project launching this April, one for Blogmas, and one for Gracie’s Way! This MILAN pen is my actual, exact pen, and this notebook is very similar to mine.
A Support System
Finally, the support I’ve received in the creation of Gracie’s Way from both loved ones and an absolute stranger has been incredibly influential and important for me. I recognised from Day One that creating a pet bereavement project would be gruelling emotionally and psychologically, as well as the more physical or practical workload. Because of this, I tried to establish a support system before I really got into the project and to a point where I felt there was literally no possibility of turning back!
So, who’s been most helpful?
Well firstly, and most obviously; my Mum! She’s always my greatest cheerleader in all that I do and take on, and Gracie’s Way has been no different. My Mum was actually the first person I called when I found Gracie. (Obviously if I’d thought that there was something I could do to save her, it’d have been a call to the Vets first!) She said it was heart-breaking to hear how devastated I was. From the moment of losing Gracie, whenever I’ve talked about my thoughts and feelings surrounding her death — even recently — she’s done nothing but show/provide me with compassion, empathy, and support. We haven’t had a single conversation about Gracie where I’ve thought, “she doesn’t get it.” And yes, some of that will be that she has gone through her own pet losses — with the greatest being the family dog when she was younger and then our family cat. But I think that her brilliant responses also stem from the unconditional love she has always shown me.
Secondly, my almost-Step Dad! Whilst there’s still probably so much he doesn’t know about because their relationship started sort of recently, he puts in so much effort to be supportive with all that he does know and all that has happened since our families united. And losing Gracie was no different because he drove my Mum straight over to my home and was genuinely emotional when we had a group hug in the corridor of my home.
Third, I’d say my three best-friends — Martin, Jack, and Spencer — have been phenomenal too! They’re each different in terms of the support I feel they offer and provide me, and I really love that they each have their own special qualities because it’s like every angle of my bereavement has support to turn to. And this is similar to a group of other people in the support system: my two Recovery Workers from Waythrough because they’re each so different in the way they work and their personalities and how we get along etc. And it means I feel comfortable saying different things to each of them. For example, one of them is really useful and supportive in talking about positive things and the other is brilliant for when I’m really struggling. So, I love the notion that no matter how I’m thinking or what I’m feeling, there’s someone there.
Finally, I want to recognise and acknowledge the incredibly valuable and respected input and support from all the people who have submitted reviews on the resources that Gracie’s Way offers. I decided to create a Testimonials page on the project’s website because through my mental health journey, I’ve learnt the power of peer guidance and support. I will readily admit that I’m so much more likely to follow the advice of another service user than I would a professional. I figured that I may not be alone in that thought process and that perhaps it runs true to bereavement and really, any other difficult experience in life — that hearing from someone else with a similar experience can be more powerful and important than having a professional speak about it or advise you on it.
It wasn’t until a few days after securing a number of reviews for the bereaved owner’s resources though, that I realised it was equally important to get reviews on the professionals’ materials so that professionals were hearing from their peers too. So, I made contact with three amazing ladies who have had a huge variety of roles in my life and each have such a different career and potential role in pet bereavement. I liked that quality because it felt like having a variety of professionals provide reviews could improve the odds of other professionals finding someone they relate to on the testimonials page.
So, a final huge thank you to everyone who contributed to the Owner Testimonials and Professional Testimonials on the website.
Photos by Aimee Wilson.
