Hey Hey Its Jade

Ok, so when I was 16 I started a charity called The Lawrence Effect. I wanted to help homeless people so I started with giving out lunches in central London every Sunday, I called it Lawrence Lunches. At the time, it looked like this could be my greatest achievement, it was something I had wanted to do for a while but in hindsight it was actually my greatest failure. Cool, so let me start from the beginning. I've already spoken about my grandma and how she's my best friend but to be honest that’s a relatively new friendship. The original favourite person in my family was my grandad. Now, I'm not going to talk about him too much because I don't have time to start crying and getting all emotional I have things to do. But long story short he was the funniest, kindest, smartest person ever, he filled the role of an active father figure in my life and is probably the reason why I wasn't completely messed up by my parents' divorce. So, as a key positive influ...

Regardless of how close you are to me you probably don't know this but my sister is autistic. However, because she's very high functioning it's only something she was diagnosed with abut 3 years ago. Just for clarification she's on the autistic spectrum and she has what used to be called Aspergers' syndrome but is now all included on the autistic spectrum. Obviously, I'm not angry that she's autistic but on Thursday at school there was an incident with some people in her year. Ok, so, they were all chilling in the common room (she's 16 so she's started sixth form) and someone started making fun of people with disabilities. As someone that is on the spectrum she felt offended and told everyone that she's high functioning however some people would still classify her as disabled and therefore what they were saying was rude and they should stop. They proceeded to laugh at her and started making jokes about her. Initially, she tried to grin and bare...

Hiya, yeah hey so I'm back to random thoughts at early hours of the morning. Ok cool. So, on Wednesday I went to a careers event that involved networking. I hate networking. For me the core idea of networking is to establish relationships with people, relationships that could be mutually beneficial to your career. So, basically making work friends. I think networking is essential and once the relationship is formed I don't really have an issue with building it, it's the initial stage I hate. From a young age, I've had a stammer and luckily, it's gotten better but it's still there. To be honest it's a real confidence buster. Quite a few years ago there was this TV show on Channel 4 called   Educating Yorkshire  and there was this boy that had a really bad stammer and I remember people at school talking about the show and laughing at him. I thought this must be the way they laugh at me. What makes my stammer worse is that it's not an insecurit...

So, as a black girl my view of the world is different than my white counterparts due to my experience. Fact. But recently the term “people of colour” has been floating around to group together the experience of all people that are not white and I disagree with that. Up until very recently I was pro the use of the term because when talking about race relations it is dangerous to assume that only black people suffer as this is simply not true. So, by considering what other ethnic minorities go through, I thought, gave clout to the issue of race as when more people are included the issue is harder to ignore. Now, before I start just a little disclaimer. I'm not trying to offend anyone by dismissing the issues that other “people of colour” face but I don't think that it's same as black people and therefore shouldn't be collated together. The funny thing is, last year I had the same discussion with someone on my course and she argued that being black is harder than ...