Luke's Story

“My mental health had started to get better and then lockdown happened – and it crashed. It was so difficult.” 

Luke*, 16

For so many young people, the Covid-19 pandemic - and everything that has come with it - has been a challenge. Luke, a young man approaching his GCSEs, has been a mentee of ours since 2019. As a young carer with some health complications, it has been a great privilege to be a part of Luke’s journey.

Luke had always enjoyed coming to the centre for sessions, but when our support moved online he agreed to try video call sessions and threw himself into this new way of support.

Luke has grown dramatically in his positive attitude through our mentoring programme and is thoroughly aware of this! What began as a slight mockery of our encouraging him to change his mindset away from only seeing the negative, turned into a quiet appreciation of this perspective change. Clever use of digital activities helped us approach Luke’s attitude with creativity. During lockdown, we saw Luke often starting sessions with the positives that he had seen that week! 

With anxiety and fears around school, exams and the future weighing heavily, we used carefully designed online resources to help Luke to express his feelings and take stock. Even during one session in which he was feeling stretched emotionally, Luke said that it was "nice to visualise and talk about things".

When we were preparing our new ‘Un/Rest’ resource, helping young people to positively reflect and cope with the impact of the pandemic on their wellbeing, Luke offered to share his experience of both the things he felt he had lost and gained during this time in an audio recording. He started by talking about the impact that lockdown had on his mental health, but then went on to share about how he felt he had “finally found a healthy work/life balance” and that he had been learning to appreciate the small positives in life, like the beauty of nature around him. “I should stop putting so much pressure on getting 100% and accept that I don't have to get 100% - just doing good is enough." - Luke

Most recently, Luke has joined one of our managing emotions group courses, something that he was unwilling to consider before, and came away with a new toolkit to cope with difficult emotions. The course combined digital resources and a physical resource pack through the post, something that we have found to be very effective to reduce the amount of ‘screen time’ and give tangible resources to engage with in the future.

Whilst Luke is still on the daily journey of caring for his mental health at the same time as carrying responsibilities that others his age don’t need to, it is encouraging to see the ways we have been able to support him. He has a great appreciation for what we have done and is becoming more and more aware of the positive impact he can have on his own life.

"I'm pleased with who I am and how I'm turning out - the things that I've done and am adding to society and the world." - Luke

It’s thanks to our amazing supporters and funders that Golddigger Trust is able to support young people like Luke through the pandemic and beyond. Could you give a gift today to help more young people refocus and learn to celebrate the positives within them?

*Names changed for privacy purposes. Stock image used (Mathias P.R. Reding).