Hello all,

I have decided to start a weekly, bi-weekly blog covering many topics and life experiences that I feel may be helpful to everyone.

For my first blog I thought it would be a good idea to explain a little bit about who I am.

My name is Elliot Patrick Beckett, I am 16 years old (17 on Monday) I live in Cleveland in Australia but I am a British Citizen.

I was born on the 14th November 1994 in Birmingham city hospital.

I grew up in a place called Dudley, no not the Harry potter character, where I lived for about 12ish years.

During my time in Dudley I was not a very happy child and I was depressed for a long time. This was mainly due to a long term effect of bullying from members of my primary school. I consider these years to be some of my darkest in my life because I was contemplating suicide for a long time.

When I was in year 5 my parents decided that the city life was not a good one for us so that year my family and I moved to Cornwall. Cornwall was an interesting place because it was totally different from city life.
My family moved into a small village called Trispin where I attended the last year of primary school and my sister started secondary school.

Life in Cornwall was good and it helped me to start to recover from the depression of bullying, however after a year of living there things weren't going well. The economic climate at that time forced my parents to have to get new jobs which meant that we could no longer live in Cornwall.

As both of my parents took jobs that required them to travel around the south west of England they decided that we would need to live somewhere centrally in the region and also somewhere with good transport links E.G motorways.

After a bit of research and searching we found a good house in a town called Bridgwater. The town was bigger than Trispin but still smaller than Birmingham so it suited everyone's needs (As me and my sister became older we got bored of the village life)

Me and my sister both joined Chilton Trinity Technology college. Chilton was a great school, I have some of my favourite memories from that school and also all of my closet friends came from their. The school and the people in it helped me over most of my depression; yes I still had bad days but mostly good ones.

During my years at that school I learnt a great many things, not just academic stuff but also leadership qualities, support training and also I learnt a lot about who I am (See kids it is worth paying attention in school)

While at Chilton I became respected by the staff and did my best to help out. I became an ambassador for the school, a peer supporter, a prefect and also part of the Heads Leadership team (Top students in the school) Also I was given a few awards for subject work and a citizenship award.

I was at Chilton from year 7 right through to year 11 and a few months before I left my family began to talk about moving to Australia. We started to plan the move because England was going crazy, prices were incredibly high and also the warmer weather would be better for my mother (She has chronic knee pain and prone to kidney infections in winter due to the cold)

When I left Chilton and especially the last day I was really sad knowing that it could be the last time I see any of my friends for a very long time (At that point we did not have a visa yet) I did manage to meet up with my closet friends before I left and also I managed to go to my school prom. Prom was a fantastic night and I am really glad I went.

Over the next few weeks there was a lot of heartache from telling my Grandparents that we were moving to Australia and a lot of nerves. The visa only got approved a week before we were due to ship our furniture.

Once all of our stuff had gone and our dog, my house was empty and it did not feel like home anymore. I had the sudden realisation that it was really happening, I was really moving to Australia.

We landed in Australia about 3 months ago and our lives are slowly returning to normal. I have a new school and have started to make friends again but there are times where I feel surprised that I live in Australia and also when I miss my old friends. I still talk to them a lot but it isn't the same as it once was.

So that has been a brief life history of me and the main messages from it are that I have been through a lot in life, I have learnt a lot from mistakes and others so I can understand how some people here may feel. Also for those who do think that life is bad and they see no end my advice to you is to talk to your friends because they do care about you. My friends helped me through a lot and I would not be the same person I am today without them.

Thank you for reading this, I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any questions PM me or add a comment.

See you around
Elliot