ISBN: 978-1-78382-143-3
Published: 2014
Pages: 86
Key Themes: Mental Health, Poetry, Illustration, Self-Harm

Description

This book brings together some of Victoria Grace Reynolds musings, thoughts and feelings about her sense of herself, her experiences with mental health services, her commitment to survival and the strategies she used, as well as her paradoxical commitment to destroying herself through herself harm. She expresses and illuminates the many complexities of her life in prose and poetry and in the striking and disturbing images she created.

About the Author

Victoria Grace Reynolds 12.12.1978 to 15.12.2011, was 3 days past her 33rd birthday when she died as a result of serious and complex selfharm. She grew up and went to school in the rural countryside, and spent as much time outdoors as possible. She spent a gap year in America as a nanny before returning to the UK to study for a degree in Criminology. Although she did not complete her degree she achieved a Diploma in Higher Education, worked as a Health Care Assistant, engaged in voluntary work and courses in further and higher education and was working towards completing her degree, this time in Literature, a subject to which she was well suited. She was a member of a research group exploring the benefits and barriers of education for those with mental health difficulties and coauthored a paper on the subject. She was an outstanding student and a gifted, creative and complex young woman. She overdosed, used ligatures, ingested weedkiller, slug pellets and rat poison. She cut with broken glass, knives, scalpels. She bled. she wrote, she drew and painted, she sewed and knitted. She wondered how she stayed alive so long. These writings and images give some indication of how she did so.