I felt like I'd failed at a lot of things.
I felt like I'd failed at my A-levels,
at going to uni, at being a functional human being.
For a good number of years I was clinically depressed.
So, I went through years of not being able to do anything,
not enjoying anything.
My life changed quite a lot after the depression,
because I sort of had it in undertones
throughout most of my life.
But I didn't want to get too wrapped up in it,
because I was very focused on school and my future and things.
I'd be revising almost every day and I was an A, A-star student
in pretty much everything.
By the time I got to my A-levels,
my mind sort of just had enough of it.
It was after a suicide attempt that everything went mad in my life.
Overnight, pretty much, it was just,
I'm not going to school any more,
I had to go into the hospital, like an ADTU, an acute day centre.
Normally you're meant to spend about two weeks there.
I ended up spending two months there.
After that I had to try and get things back to normal.
So, it was just a matter of finding a hobby,
finding something that I could do. But obviously I was so depressed,
that I didn't really want to do anything.
At that moment in time I didn't want to think about the things
that I had lost and stuff. I just wanted to start something new.
So, I thought about other things that I enjoyed.
And I like cosplay. So, I just started trying that out
and it ended up being a really good hobby of mine.
Cosplay has definitely helped me to be more open about things,
because the main problem with depression is sort of
keeping it to yourself and letting it build up and build up,
until it just overflows.
It really sort of separates you from yourself for a while.
Just having a whole nother person, a whole nother character
that you're able to control,
is just a lot of relief from not being able to control your own life.
I'm probably most well-known for cosplaying as
the Other Mother from Coraline.
She comes across sort of nice and friendly at first,
but really, she has malicious undertones
and secretly wants to keep
Coraline, the main character, there for ever.
I like the sort of nice appearance at first,
and then how she sort of transforms into this villain.
It feels like everyone in the cosplay community
has their own sort of problems and their own thing
that they're going through at the time.
But cosplay is sort of an escape from that.
It just allows me to be creative and freer and try new things
that I hadn't considered before,
and just have fun and escape from the stresses of daily life.
I think if I never tried cosplay, then I'd be in a much lower place,
because I wouldn't have had that creative outlet
that helped me get out of my depression.
It allowed me to step out of myself for a while
and just experience new things from a different view.