Ashleigh's Blog

Calendars, to-do lists, organised bullet journals with cute headlines... We've all fallen for them. In fact, there are whole sections of TikTok, YouTube and Pinterest dedicated to "studyspo" - the art of showing off fancy, colour-coded stationery designed to make work or study look glamorous and fun.  I should know, because I feel like I've tried every productivity tip, every study method, every pastel gel pen set you can think of but the result is always the same. I get at most a couple of weeks of pure bliss, getting everything done that I want to and then the belligerent dopamine-hungry goblin in my brain throws its toys out of the pram and calls it quits. Suddenly all of my routines are gone, Pomodoro method is out of the window and I feel once again frustrated at myself for not being able to do what everyone else does.  When I realised I was neurodivergent, this meant unpacking everything that I knew about productivity. First, I felt a huge amount of relief that...

This is the final post that I'll be making in this series, and it's probably the one that I find most important. Strength is something which none of us seem to think we have, particularly as women. We have this idea that our reserve of strength is so small and if something bad or upsetting were to happen, we would never cope. But that's just not true. Strength, to me, means supporting yourself. If you can go through hell and pick yourself back up and carry on, that's the ultimate sign of strength. There are so many of us that, whether we know it or not, find it easier to rely on others to hold us up or just plaster over the issue, and I'll be the first to hold my hands up and say that I was guilty of this for a long time. But what takes real strength is looking after yourself and holding yourself up, facing your issues without fear, whilst also asking for help but only when you need it.  The reason I left this particular theme until last, is because this is a trai...

For the second post of this series, I wanted to focus on the topic of dedication. This is a quality which isn't often recognised, but the fact remains that hard work pays off and being dedicated to something important to you is an extremely admirable quality. Just like my last post about confidence, I asked women close to me what their views are on the subject, but first of all, I’d like to talk about what dedication means to me. From my point of view, you can be dedicated to anything – your career, hobbies, relationships… some people are even dedicated to being an arse! Dedication is about finding what you’re good at, what you enjoy and what you stand for and pouring your all into it. For me, I've always been extremely dedicated to my studies and that's been an outlet for me, even in the toughest times. I love languages and writing and I know with certainty that they are my passion in life, so I will continue to dedicate myself to them as much as possible. It’...

The past few weeks I've been feeling much more confident and t o celebrate this sudden and welcome change, I'd like to start a series on my blog to empower women and invite them to feel proud to be confident. After reflecting on why I struggled with this for so long, I realised a lot about how our society views confident and powerful women, and often, it's not in a particularly positive light.  One time, after I was kind of feeling myself (I promise, a rare occurrence) a boy actually said that I should be careful because men don't like confident women. I think that we as women should just take the time to think about that. This is the world we live in, and we should have the strength to challenge it, if not for ourselves then for our daughters. AND as I post this, it is International Women's Day! I'm going to hop off my soapbox for now, but for this series, I will be asking different women close to me what their views are on different topics and what the...