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You Are a King (or Queen) in Your Own Kingdom

Wake up and live your life on your own terms, you are a king in your own kingdom, a god in your own universe. — Bangambiki Habyarimana We’d been discussing life stuff. End of life stuff, actually. Wills and obituaries and eulogies and celebration of life arrangements. That kind of thing. The kind of thing I’d scarcely thought about until a few years ago. A day may come when I have it all in order. But — as Aragorn might say — it is not this day. This day I have something different in mind. Related, but different. Because all this end of life talk got me thinking about what’s most important about a person. How can we hope to capture the essence of a lifetime, a life, a whole entire person, in a few hundred words? A “standard comprehensive obituary” is somewhere between two hundred and four hundred words. A eulogy is usually longer, between five hundred and a thousand words, “lasting approximately three to five minutes when spoken.” Forgive me for thinking this is scarcely en...
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Recent posts

The View from Base Camp: How to Support Your Friend When Their Mental Health Puts Them at Risk

TW: Mention of suicidality and self-harm
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Our Minds Aren't Always Our Best Friend: Changing the Stories We Tell Ourselves

TW: Mention of suicide and suicidality
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Our Top Posts of the Month (August 2026)

Check out our top blog posts for the past month. Posts are listed by the number of page views they attracted during the month, most popular first.
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The Impact Pet Bereavement Content Can Have on Mental Health

By Aimee, Project Lead of Gracie’s Way, for National Grief Awareness Day 2026 Never above you. Never below you. Always beside you. — Walter Winchell Firstly, I’d like to start this guest post for National Grief Awareness Day 2026 on Gum On My Shoe, with the biggest thank you to Martin for allowing me the opportunity to write this piece and feature this very important topic on such a big platform. You may have seen my name on this blog previously but being referred to as another blogger (on www.imnotdisordered.co.uk ), but this post comes to you from my position of Project Lead of the pet bereavement project I launched in January called Gracie’s Way ( www.graciesway.co.uk ). I’ve decided to use this guest post to focus on the impact that pet bereavement content can have on a person’s mental health — with no relevance to whether they’ve lost a pet or whether they had even just begun searching for such content! And that’s why it matters so much — people are seeing this e...
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You Don't Owe Anyone a Performance: How to Grieve Gently Around the People You Love

Founded in 2014, National Grief Awareness Day , also known as National Bereavement Day, is marked each August 30. Its purpose is to raise awareness of how grief affects people in different ways, to encourage conversations about loss and bereavement, and to share information and resources. Related campaigns include Dying Matters Awareness Week in May and National Grief Awareness Week in December. We’ve marked several of these with such posts as Why Talking About Death Matters by celebrant Lisa Judson, a Q&A with Aimee Wilson, Project Lead of the pet bereavement project Gracie’s Way , and There’s No Wrong Way to Grieve: Thoughts on Loss and Mourning . As I was researching a topic for this post I came across two quotations. The first is by Swiss-American psychiatrist and author Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not “get over” the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the...
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"Where Do You Get Your Ideas?" 12 Things That Inspire Me to Write a New Blog Post Every Week

There is no such thing as a new idea. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. — Mark Twain Here at Gum on My Shoe we share new content every week. We published 73 posts last year. The year before it was 63. In 2023 it was 61. At the time of writing, we’ve published 828 posts since our blog started in 2013. Most of the content is written by me personally. That’s a lot of words to a tight, albeit self-imposed, schedule. If you’re wondering how I stay motivated and inspired, keep reading. Here are a dozen things that inspire me, with a few examples of each. Our blog focuses on mental health and supportive friendships but most of these ideas are relevant to other topics and themes. 1. Conversations Many of my blog posts are inspired by conversations with Fran, other friends, colleagues, and even complete strangers. Sometimes it’s the conversation itself that inspires me but a single turn of phrase, question, or insight can be enough...
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