A gruelling schedule of door-knocking to drum up local support for candidates was encouraged, and the campaigning expectations completely took over my life. My hours were tracked mercilessly in an app by the local campaigning team that fed them back to the regional bosses.
To be fair, when you're young and naive, that probably does feel like a gruelling slog...
In the run-up to an election, you are expected to complete five two-hour sessions a week, with an extra weekend session every fortnight on top, alongside your day job.But she won. And then the real 'problems' started.
The real issues started when I had to go back to my day job. Being a councillor is not a full-time role, and it was one for which I took home less than £13,000 a year, despite my rent alone being £11,000.
Which if you already had a job meant your rent was paid and you had an 'extra' £2k on top of that, as well as your day job salary, doesn't it?
A typical day would involve using my lunch break to join a council meeting on my phone and then after work, picking up a sandwich for dinner on the way to a three-hour evening meeting that would often overrun. The next evening or weekend would be more campaigning, meeting a local group or holding my ward surgery.
And it didn't occur to you that this would happen? Did you think they'd invent several hours more in the day for you to do this?
When I was eventually signed off work with exhaustion, the mental health practitioner told me I needed to spend more time with my friends and family. But when?You had no clue what it was going to demand of you? And that's someone else's fault, of course.
