EMILY BUCHANAN

[emily-buchanan]

How to help a friend with depression

Back in January I wrote about my history with mental illness and briefly touched on the language we choose to talk about depression. Here, I'd like to gi...

I’ve written a blog for the Huffington Post about how to help a friend with depression. Hope you find useful.

[emily-buchanan]

Boomers

When the facts met the myths they were useless In a campaign that relied on lies, you were clueless So you took out your fear on a ballot paper But instead of making Britain greater You replaced the elite with the elite dictator And confiscated freedom from your kids, and theirs As if our appetite for progress needs punishing

But we’re already choking Choking on your debts Choking on your dirty air Choking on your indifference Choking on your hate and your wealth and on the weight of every racist insipid old white man you call leader

What’s wrong with you? You’re scared of immigrants but you live in Tiverton and grow Murdoch’s media empire with your Daily Mail subscription Always going on about The Sorry State of Britain Political Correctness: the 21st Century Villain

Well sorry if the way that my generation Don’t discriminate or hate against race or religion is somehow challenging your ill-got position Your privilege earned from years of wealth acquisition

The thing I don’t get is: why did you have children? If you don’t care about the next generation? Where’s your guilt? Where’s your apprehension At burdening us with economic devastation? At depleting resources and cutting down forests? But hey! At least you can quietly retire to Dorset And die without trial before you’re forced to address it

Your short sightedness is a disease Your greed it breeds hate and leaves me ill at ease so tell me: How are we supposed to forge a future From the smoldering carcass of this fatality? ‘Cause in case you didn't know, we can’t eat our nationality

But you. Your retirement payments go up with inflation And we foot the bill for your state pension And we bear the shame from your flirtation with fascism And we have to sit opposite you at dinner tables And hold our tongues. Bite them off when you call us lazy Saying how you lived off 50p a week Yeah, well Freddo’s have doubled since I was a kid But you don’t see me going on about it So don’t tell me I’ve suffered less When I’m set to spend my life fighting you for progress When I’m already sick of the sight of you And your vice-like grip on our politics Because when you finally call it quits and leave us to it We’ll be staring down the barrel of the apocalypse Thanks for nothing

[emily-buchanan]

A week defined by hate

In what was one of the worst weeks in recent memory, my face was all over the world’s media. I was in The Daily Mirror, CBS, The Huffington Post, The International Business Times, Examiner, Heavy, Upworthy, AOL, The Guardian, Yahoo, The Digital Journal, Straits Times, Bangkok Post and, most bizarrely of all, I was on the front page of yesterday’s Shanghai Daily (much to the amusement of my friend who spotted the headline in China). Why? Because, in a week defined by hate, I got angry and I got active.

I woke up on Monday morning to the news that 49 people had been shot and killed at a gay club in Orlando. I wept in bed as I scrolled through the outpouring of grief on Twitter and the day was spent in a bleary-eyed stupor. Later, I went to the vigil in Soho and sobbed in the street as 49 multicoloured balloons drifted up into the sky to the soaring sounds of the London Gay Men’s Chorus. Strangers hugged me and squeezed my shoulders and wiped the mascara from under my eyes and the binaries of human existence were palpable that day and I felt it crushing me like a hundred thousand million bricks.

Then Bob Geldof and Nigel Farage exchanged horn blows and hand gestures on the Thames and the pantomime of the EU referendum became Spitting Image incarnate. It was mildly amusing, for a bit, until Farage unveiled his new Vote Leave poster in all of its hideous barbarity and we hastility tweeted stills from Nazi documentaries and felt sick to the stomach and panicked that history was repeating itself in the worst way possible.

Then the Labour MP and humanitarian Jo Cox was brutally murdered by a far right extremist and for a day it felt like the world was ending and we were being swallowed up by hate and turned inside out by fear and I was angry and frightened and distraught again. Another woman murdered for having the audacity to speak up for justice and unity and love. At the hands of another man.

Over the weekend I needed to do something good. To connect with people and smile. So I took part in Avaaz’s kissing chain that travelled from Rome through Berlin, to Paris and finally to London. I wore glitter on my eyelids and and waved a European flag and kissed an Italian man on the cheek and told him I didn’t want to break up. He laughed. We all sang and shouted ‘love wins!’ and touched and smiled with our mouths and our eyes, unified in our need to be reminded of human kindness. I went home feeling buoyed up on the warmth of strangers and ate a roast dinner with my boyfriend and talked about our wedding day.

The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return. The Moulin Rouge slogan might seem passé 15 years on but last week I truly understood and lived those words. I let love spill out of me because I didn’t have any other way to cope with the relentless cruelty of human life on earth. Maybe that’s why my picture was everywhere? Because I went out and allowed myself to feel those feelings publicly, with an open heart and an open face. Open to healing through community. Open to mourning the death of people I never knew. Open to finding hope in the hearts of people I’ll never meet again. Open and hurting and hopeful.

I don’t know. All I know is that we have to carry on hoping and loving. Because that’s all we’ve got. And it’s the only way we’ll win.

[emily-buchanan]

I stand with Orlando

[emily-buchanan]

Here's how I feel about Brexit. Full text below:

It's the biggest decision of our time but I can't make fact from fiction Can someone explain if we should remain or if brexit is a fascist ambition?  

Vote Leave says the EU opens our doors to immigrants and ISIS Yet to them immigration means the same thing as refugees in crisis They talk about human beings as pests, swarming at the floodgate But surely a campaign that shirks the blame has already lost the debate?

See, I’m much more interested in answers than scapegoating a migrant Like, if the NHS is really broke then how can we afford Trident? And if Mr Farage really cares about saving girls from violent skirmishes Then why isn’t he doing more to protect domestic violence services?

Meanwhile Remain warns of economic risk Of the British values we'd be betraying And yet no one seems to be talking about the benefits of staying Like 1 in 10 jobs, investments, exports, fundamental worker's rights Research funding, energy security, clean water and cheap flights Freedom of travel, equal pay, binding green legislation Holidays, sangria, maternity leave, protection from discrimination

But when Vote Leave deliver their fear with such articulate authority It's tricky to see beyond their spin so, we blame an ethnic minority? No I’m sorry I won’t have Bigotry will not define my nation These fear-mongering falsehoods just serve to divide us and feed off our frustration

Yes, I know our country’s a mess. I know we need someone to blame But instead let’s defy the plutocracy and unite in our fight to remain I know the EU’s not perfect and our relationship is strained The only way to rekindle peace is from the inside, as part of the change

VOTE IN

[emily-buchanan]

Find me in the tropical garden

[emily-buchanan]

Oh my gosh how lovely is Portugal? Such a beautiful part of the world.

[emily-buchanan]

Last week we climbed over a fence. We broke an injunction. We set up a TV set in a field leased for fracking. We filmed a one-off episode of the #FrackFreeBakeOff. Sophie and Emma Thompson went head-to-head, tasked with baking renewable energy showstoppers... and then the landowner came along with a tank full of shit and sprayed it all over our beautiful, peaceful, wholesome creation, driving around and around in endless circles like a putrid hawk descending on prey with nothing but bunting for protection. On the train home I had a little lonely exhausted cry at the deplorable few, so intent on destruction. But then I looked out at the sun setting over the Lancashire countryside and at the wind turbines dancing through pink clouds on blue hills. And I reminded myself that a better life for our species is possible, because I see it every day in the good and gentle people who are already creating it.

[emily-buchanan]

Spring has sprung and my heart is full of flora

[emily-buchanan]

Plants give me life, genuinely

[emily-buchanan]

A trip to the Barbican Conservatory

[emily-buchanan]

My sister took this picture of Jasper National Park in Canada and it looks like an incredible oil painting of utopia and I can’t get over it. 

[emily-buchanan]

Confessions of a closet depressive

I’ve had depression on and off for 10 years and I’ve hidden it from just about everyone.

I've written something that I've been wanting to write for years and given recent reports about the crisis facing mental health care in the UK, I think now is the time to do it. So I did it. Here it is.

[emily-buchanan]

You are Greenpeace - Thank You!

Every single action makes a difference. We couldn't have done all we did in 2015 without your help. You are Greenpeace. Thank you! www.greenpeace.org/joinus

Steadily growing my portfolio as a voice over for Greenpeace UK. Happy with that. It's one step closer to being Jennifer Lawrence... sort of? Anyway this is very inspiring, look at everything we did in 2015! Here’s to another amazing year!

[emily-buchanan]

Loved photographing these penguins at London zoo today! Graceful little swimmers.

[emily-buchanan]

Hey there Madagascan comet moth who only lives for a week bc he got no mouth 😶

[emily-buchanan]

Last weekend we occupied Tate Britain’s 1840 gallery and gave each other tattoos of our ‘Birthmark’ - the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere in the year of our births. As Matt Lodder so eloquently writes for The Independent:

“Two dozen other activists and performers were similarly inked with their carbon Birthmark. Tattoo machines hummed and buzzed, oscillating like oil pumps, casting dark marks onto our skins. These inky black numbers are heavy with symbolism; distilled metaphors for the damage of climate change.

Using a technology – the tattoo machine – born from and hardly changed since Victorian times, they’re made through pain and bloodshed. Like atmospheric pollution, they are extraordinarily difficult to remove. Black and streaking, they condemn BP’s deadly spills in the Gulf of Mexico as well as the oil industry’s staining of other landscapes – such as the Lake Michigan BP spill of 2014, or the North Sea disaster in 2012…

We gave small parts of our bodies yesterday in the service of an awakening conscience: that we must no longer afford BP the right to tattoo our cultural institutions with corporate marks, and to use art and culture to cleanse its crimes from the public consciousness. The marks on our bodies will last longer than the BP logos on Tate’s walls.”

Video by Disobedient Films