A journal entry…

I hate the fact that I have not had the time to write since starting university this year. I think about it all the time but I always seem to have something that needs to be done. Nevertheless, I am here now writing this post. Better late than never.

A lot has happened since I last wrote and I have reached extremely positive states and dropped back down to low ones. I am feeling very low tonight, which is why I cannot sleep. I have started my counselling and worked on great tips to help with my anxiety. If you have not done a worry tree before, try it! I hope to share more tips with you very soon. What I have not addressed yet is depression. I thought it may be good for me to read a journal that I wrote back in July when my depression was at its worst to make me reflect on how far I have come and I wanted to share an entry with you.

‘ I don’t know what else I can say . I cant even think straight let alone talk. Its all one big jumbled up mess again in my head. Like a pair of headphones or a necklace that ends up in that awful tangle that can take hours to undo. The last week has been hell and I haven’t even had time to write, or maybe I just didn’t find time. I’ve gone back to wanting to sleep every moment that I don’t have anything important to do. Even then I cant sleep without having nightmares. I thought Angel would be with me everyday to help guide me but maybe they have a limit on how many times they can interfere. I have gone back to square one all over again. I cant understand how my feelings are such a rollercoaster and neither can he. One moment I sit and day dream, about the future, about buying houses, having children. I see a time where I am completely content and no longer feel pain, no longer fear. There are times where I sit or lay in his arms and cant stop smiling. I say I love you so often and kiss him so much that he actually finds it annoying and asks me to chill out. In those moments I have found my passion again. I don’t feel lost, I feel like a happy healthy girl, vibrant with goals, and so set and driven to reach them. But just moments later I can feel the complete opposite. I am lost with no direction, no idea what path I should take, no idea what choices to make , and here I often find myself making the wrong ones. How can this be? How can my thoughts and feelings change in what seems like the flip of a coin by a person playing a game with my life. Sometimes if I am lucky I may land on heads every time he flips it in that one day. More often than not I get my fair share of tails. Even writing this, the choice of words I have used I am beginning to see that I have little belief in having control over my own life. I think I’ve struggled since a little girl to believe that I can decide what happens and whether I can be happy. Why would I choose to be abused? I cant have wanted that, I cant have consciously taken steps to cause that to happen, could I? Maybe now as an adult I need to start realising that I do now have power over my life. Now I do have control over the situations I put myself in. Deep down I know its down to me to find a way to get passed these feelings so that I can live a life. But in moments like this I am not living at all , and all I think about is going to sleep and never waking up.’

I wanted to share this entry because it relates to my counselling session this week. Reading back over this its clear that at the time I was trying to say that my past experiences were controlling my life, and in particular the abuse. My Counsellor told me that I must work on comforting the little girl from my past who lives inside me. I must tell her she is safe now and that she cannot be hurt anymore. I must do what was not done all those years ago so that she can be at peace and let the current me have control back.

Many of my other blog posts focus on gaining control of your own mind. I really do believe that is the key to happiness and success.

Until next time.

Contributing to the future of others…

I have said since my son was born that I want to make a difference in the world. That I wanted have a positive impact on peoples life, to make the hard times just that little bit easier.

It soon occurred to me that there is no plain and simple way to do this. There is not just one act that will help you meet this goal. Instead, you must do little things, all the time. These things add up, and eventually you will have impacted many lives in many ways.

Last night I was sat in my car and I wasn’t even paying attention to the radio until a phrase caught my attention. “Childhood Sexual Abuse”. Automatically I tuned in. The Truth Project were advertising for people to share their stories of CSA. So this evening I had a look on their website and read about what they do. They are working on the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse. All they are asking for is victims or survivors to share their stories with them so that they can gain an understanding of what is working well and what is failing in the current system. Their aim is to provide better protection for the children of the future, and of course have a better system to receive those who have been unfortunate enough to be a victim.

As difficult as it is to sit down and tell your story to someone, I signed myself up. This is one thing that I can do, to try to help the children of the future. One thing that I can do to help make the world a better place, for my sons generation and the generation to come. There are so many little things, that we could all do daily, that together, will make a difference.

If you are a CSA victim or survivor, please have a look at their page and see if you can help too!

Ps. I haven’t had much time to write lately, but I have set up a new Instagram with regular positive, inspirational posts.. Please follow it @beyourowninspiration_

Thank you!!

Until next time.

Emotional Intelligence – The power of the mind, yet again!

So this week I had a uni task and it has really inspired me to write this post. The task was to prepare a three minute speech on why we should receive a graduate trainee manager position. That was it, no elaboration on the job description whatsoever.

I decided that I’d focus on my interpersonal skills and how they would enable me to be good at management. I thought about what I think makes a good manager, and what I like about managers that I have had in the past and I ended up going into great detail about emotional intelligence. I had some training on this a few years ago in one of my previous jobs. They believed that It would be really beneficial to all staff members, at the time I didn’t understand how it was relevant to the job. After the emotional crisis that I have just been through, and the better understanding of life, I finally get it!

What is emotional intelligence? well.. for those of you who may not know let me give you a brief explanation.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand our own emotions as well as the emotions of others, and furthermore to use that understanding in order to guide ourselves or another.

I cannot believe how well this links in to combatting depression and anxiety. Being able to recognise when we feel a certain way, understanding why, and then adapting our behaviour in response to that emotion. That is exactly what we need to be doing in order to achieve our desired outcome.

It would benefit everybody to be able to manage themselves, whether they struggle with mental health or not, but what really inspires me the most about this concept is the consideration of others emotions. I have been focusing on the benefits of this in terms of employability. How you could be a better manager if you were able to understand the feelings of your employees and adapt your methods as a result of this. As a really basic example, it is your responsibility as manager to increase sales. You are able to recognise that employee A feels disappointed and disheartened when they complete a sale but receive no recognition for it. You come to learn that employee A loves to feel like their efforts are acknowledged and appreciated immediately after a sale. Therefore, you simply congratulate them and reward them with some sort of recognition incentive. This causes employee A to feel positive emotions, and so causes them to enter the next negotiation with a really positive mindset. As a manger, its a double whammy. You have made your employee feel important, made them happy and you are also growing business!

This does not just apply to your careers either. Imagine how much better your relationships with friends and family could be if you were more intelligent in their emotions? This is not be confused with the concept of allowing people to make excuses, and perhaps even abolishes the idea. The more emotionally intelligent you become the more that you understand and appreciate that whether they seem reasonable or not to yourself, everyone is affected by emotions in different ways. Recognising when your friend is experiencing an emotion, and knowing what you can do to guide them away from that emotion into a more positive one is a truly invaluable trait to have.

If you have never heard of it before, I urge you to spend 10-15 minutes to just research it. It will be really beneficial to your life and your career no matter what it is that you do!

Remember, we are all here on this planet together. Selfishness will not achieve you success, you will reach far greater in life If you allow yourself to be helped by others and help others yourself.

Until next time.

The greatest strength lies inside your mind.

If your reading this blog it is probably because your mind currently, or at some point during your life, seems to have taken control of itself and your life, and you feel like you can’t stop yourself from feeling a certain way or doing certain things.

I know when I was feeling my lowest that I thought there was no way out. I thought that the only way I could escape my mind, which had run free and messed up so many things in my life, was to take my life. It seemed impossible at the time, that the very tool which was destroying my life was also the only tool that could build up the life that I want to live. The mind is key to success. Whether that be setting up a business, pulling yourself out of depression or climbing mount Everest. You can’t do any of those things without your mind, a positive mind-set is a catalyst for success.

There are so many things that I do or don’t do in my life, that I want to do or to not do. Let me give you some examples. I have got much better at managing my money, ensuring that I am not left with absolutely nothing for any period of time but I’d really like to save and I’m not hitting my savings goals at this moment in time. There is only one reason why. I haven’t got the right mindset yet. I know what I want to save for, but I do not have the determination to fully commit. I have stopped myself from buying expensive things that I don’t need, but I still end up spending unnecessarily, usually on food. If I want to save money, I need to have the willpower or it will never happen and willpower comes from the mind.

Let me tell you where I have practiced this successfully. In some of my other posts I mention the break up that happened almost 2 months ago with my ex boyfriend. I kept saying, and kept thinking that I wouldn’t ever be able to love again. And, if I am to be completely honest I am still not sure that I will. However, what I have done is changed my mind-set, and I am using my emotions and heartbreak to my advantage. Let me tell you how. I am very afraid, to let anyone else in after all of the past experiences that I have had, but, it is my dream to have a loving relationship, to settle down and it always has been. I am a really family orientated girl, very maternal, and my idea of happiness sits comfortably in the family life regime. So why should I remain a single parent, with only one child, when my dream is to have more than one child and to marry? I shouldn’t. Just because I have had my heart broken, I shouldn’t run away from my dreams because if I don’t then at least I have a chance of reaching them right? Okay so this is what I have been doing…

In the 2 months that I have been single I have only felt well enough to talk to another male in the last two weeks. I discussed it with my councillor and she and I developed a few things that we should do in order to help me get back into the world of dating, but protect myself from making the wrong choices. One thing that I mentioned to her was doing things too soon, from getting intimate, to becoming in a relationship and introducing my child. So I have created a list of 5 questions that I must ask any man that I am seeking that kind of relationship with. It is not an interview so they will not be word for word, and I will be slipping them into natural conversations where they are applicable. This is to help me to identify at an early stage whether the person has the traits and personality that I am looking for, before things start to get to complicated.

Now I feel myself drifting away from my actual intended point here, the power of the mind, but methodology is important too. So basically what I am doing is taking things very slowly, and ensuring that I am finding out the important things sooner rather than later. If you have read my earlier blogs you may know that I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. I want to explain a little bit about how that has affected my relationships, and particularly my sex life so that you can understand why I feel I have made great progress over the last 2 weeks. My experiences as a child made me grow up feeling like no more than a sex doll, sad, but its true. Now some survivors go the opposite way, they have a fear of people going anywhere near them or touching them physically and so become afraid of sex following the trauma. For me, the experience was very different. Due to re-victimisation very shortly after the first spate of abuse I entered my teenage to adult years feeling as though I was worth nothing more than sex. Like that was the only thing I was good at, the only purpose that I had. My brain had also programmed itself into believing that my opinions, my desires, what I wanted, had no significance. Therefore, if a male wanted me, I would often consent even if I didn’t truly want to. Many will say that this makes me a slut, but I am not offended by their thoughts or comments because they don’t understand what I went through and what it did to my head. I no longer have to be ashamed because I have discovered the issue, and I have addressed it and now I have put my plans into action using nothing but my mind. On every occasion that I have seen this one guy over the last two weeks I have gone no further than to kiss him. I regret to say that this an achievement for me. No matter that I had alcohol in my system, no matter that he was trying to persuade me to change my mind. I went into his company telling myself that I was not going to give any sexual contact and I stuck to my guns every single time. Part of this is to see if he respects my wishes, or whether sex is all he wants. Part of it is to make him chase and see him put in the effort. But do you know what the most important part of it has been? Showing myself that I CAN do anything that I set my mind to. I don’t have to be a slave to sex as the males of the past made my mind believe. I can be whoever I want to be. I deserve more than giving myself up straight away, I deserve to grafted for, but I have to make that happen.

The above example may be un-relatable to many of you reading it, but the point that I want to get across is that you can change lifetime habits, you can change habitual thinking patterns, cognitive distortions that have been instilled in you since a very young age. The key is the mind. You must use your mind, you must adapt your mind-set. The behaviours and everything else required for your success will follow once your mind has found the right path.

Believe in yourself, challenge yourself. You are your best supporter and your worst enemy. Once you unlock the full potential of your mind, you can be unstoppable.

I hope this post inspires you to test the powers of your own mind, success is like dominoes! Once you achieve one goal, you believe, and once you believe, you can begin to smash all of your goals one after the other in succession.

Good luck.

Until next time.

Anxiety through negative associations…

Next weekend I am going to Amsterdam. I should be overly excited, but I’m a tad confused and anxious.

Let’s go back a few months, I had my 21st birthday, I didnt do anything big to celebrate it, but I was going to Tenerife a few days after and that would be my time to celebrate with my friends and family. I think back to that holiday and how it was both the best and worst holiday of my life. I feel so much guilt because I feel like I ruined it for myself, and for everyone else that came along. I wasn’t myself on that holiday, usually when I am away I am in my element. I make lots of great memories and I have major holiday blues for weeks afterwards. But this holiday was the beginning of my melt down.

I had been feeling unwell for months before this mentally, may be even longer. Let’s say from summer time last year I started to suffer with my anxiety and depression worse than ever before. Then I got with my ex and things started to get better, because I had all of the good things that I wanted in life. But at the same time, they started getting worse, because I had more to loose, more to be afraid of. This started to slowly nag at me and build up. Then combined with pregnancy hormones o had my first break down, I didn’t know at the time that it was due to pregnancy. I threw my toys out of the pram and spent a few weeks with emotions flying around all over the place, typical of me when I’m pregnant. Let me warn you now, if I’m ever acting completing pyscho hand me a pregnancy test that is more than likely the answer!

The discovery was soon met by a traumatic misscarraige. The worst experience I have ever had in my life so far and from that point on I struggled to see a day go by where I was truly content and happy. Instead I became more depressed. I spent one whole lunch break crying to myself, having an anxiety attack in my car because I felt guilty for the loss, for misscarrying. I felt like I couldn’t get excited about my own upcoming birthday because it was my fault that the little child that started growing inside me would never have a birth day at all.

So by the time the holiday came round, I was not in a good place. I had a very good few days with my boyfriend before we went. He made me so unbelievably happy on my birthday, and that was when I realised that I really loved that man and that I finally had everything that I wanted but I just needed to get better to see it. I remember sitting on the hair salon before we went, reading hapiful magazine and sending him a picture of something that I read, promising I was going to get myself better. But we went on the holiday and I couldn’t let go of the pain inside me. I was sleeping in, being lazy, and I neglected valuable time with my family and friends that I don’t get to see very often because my head just wasnt there with me. But at the same time as not being able to enjoy it like I should have, I spent a whole week of quality time with my new founded family and that felt perfect. Waking up every morning, and going to sleep every night with my two favourite boys was incredible. It made my love grow so much stronger and I was looking forward to making that a regular occurrence in the near future.

The end of that holiday was the end of my happiness for a while, we came home and we argued for weeks. Certain things happened and the relationship was on very thin ice. Then we went to Paris, and the ice broke. I think I was the one that plunged deep into the freezing water below and he just stood on the ice above looking down into the whole were I once stood. It has taken me weeks to so much as smile and laugh, but I am starting to get better now. The journey home from Paris was the worst imaginable, I cried from the moment we arrived at the airport until the moment I slept on the plane. It was a traumatic experience in itself, embarrassing, awkward, extremely upsetting.

I feel in a slightly better place now but I am scared to drive the same drive to the airport, to walk into the same departure lounge and board the same airline. I don’t know how that is going to make me feel and I really hope that it doesn’t put me in the wrong mindset for my break Way because I just want to enjoy myself and let go of all this pain and negativity.

But the brain can be a bitch at times, it will associate that orange and white plane, the pretzel company where I bought him his first ever pretzel, even the toilets that I waited beside for him. My brain will associate all of those things with the whole episode of depression that I have just been through and I don’t quite know yet how I’m going to tackle that.

My last two holidays have been destructive to my life. Hopefully third time lucky.

Until next time.

Off Guard

Its 3am in the morning, I have an early start, I should be fast asleep. Instead my emotions have been caught off guard and I’m stuck thinking about my ex, everything about him.

As I lay here in my bed I close my eyes and try to imagine the feeling of his mattress beneath me, the heaviness of his duvet. The smell of his room, of this aftershave. The feeling of his soft skin against my cheek as I lay with my head on his chest. I used to do that every weekend. That was my home. See the truth is, nowhere has ever really felt like home to me before.

My first house, where I grew up, was ruined by memories of my first abuser. I can’t think back and picture my bedroom without picturing him there with me. No matter what memory I have, it always ends up coming back to him. I remember being in the front attick room of our house, I had always shared with my brother on the floor below but the lodger had moved out and I could finally have my own room. All girly. I remember that room, one Christmas Eve, I thought I would be able to hear santa land on my roof because I was so close. A little girl excited for Christmas. But then I remember that same room, that same bed. I remember being completely naked laying on the bed beneath him completely naked. I didn’t have that room for long, so now that I think about it, my sexual journey started before I stopped believing in Santa Claus. What kind of a childhood is that?

The next house I lived in he also visited once or twice, and whilst not much happened there it was were I was living when I first spoke up about what had happened. My memories of that house are surrounded by police interviews and interrogation and upset within my family. It seems like all of the good memories I ever had in either house only come back very rarely but these ones I could relive every moment, every fine detail at any point.

The house I lived in after that, during my teenage years, where my mum still lives now. That was where I was living during my second episode of abuse. The bed that I layed in when I was 13 years old, with a man who was 24. The convincing rapist, the groomer. It’s no wonder I have no self esteem, and no ability to believe in myself when I let that happen to me. Why didn’t I stop it? Why didn’t I see that it was wrong?

I moved to my father’s house for a little while, which is where I currently live now. It doesn’t feel like home, not one bit. I think that’s just because I am not close to anyone here, apart from my son, but he will be with me wherever I go. It’s not mine, I’ve not been able to decorate my room, I’m bound by rules, I don’t feel free. More than anything I feel lonely, and when I’m lonely, like this very moment, my thoughts consume me. And I cry, I cry until I fall asleep.

Before returning here, I lived in a flat with my ex and my baby. It would have felt like home if it wasn’t the very place that I was attacked whilst pregnant. Full of raging arguments, a place where I often felt low and didn’t want to live anymore.

My ex’s house started to feel like home. Whilst we bickered about things and had disagreements we never had a fight, he never physically hurt me, he never raped me. It was the only bed that I layed my head to sleep on where I was safe. Whilst I never felt safe mentally, because I felt like the whole world was attacking me, him included. Compared to the rest of my life this was a safe haven. With more happy memories than bad ones. With more positives than negatives. One place that I actually felt loved and welcomed. I felt like I was actually wanted there.

I think of the feeling of his teeny tight curls between my fingers. I loved playing with his hair, it felt so different to any other head I’d touched. That’s why I liked it so much. As I squished the strands in my fingers I dreamt of having little babies with the same hair, that I would play with in the same way until it wasn’t cool for me to do it anymore. I think of how our lips met when we kissed, his were like a big soft cushion. Never had a kiss that felt so right before.

Now I can’t even reply to a text. Every time I engage in conversation with him I feel at rock bottom, and I don’t want to live anymore. I’ve had a long time to work out why my head is so messed up, and I know the causes of most of my struggles and emotions, but not this one. The only thing I know is that not talking to him at all has helped me to start seeing a future for myself, but clearly it does not mean that I do not think about him. It does not mean that I do not miss him. My councillor asked me last week what I wanted and I said I don’t know. She likes to remind me that I may well find someone else who treats me better than I have ever been treated before. Fills me with optimism. It’s true, I could. But how do I know? I’m afraid. I’m afraid to ever let anyone in again. I’m afraid to date, I’m afraid to let anyone fall in love with me because they may no longer want me when they find out what I’ve been through and how it affects my life. I’m afraid of abondonment. My ex felt like I caught him under false pretences. Clearly the way I was acting when he fell for me, the person I was then, I am not able to manage all the time. How long can it last? I may find someone else, I may be able to be the good me for a week, a month, a year. Long enough to attract them. But what happens if I come back to this place, what happens when I’m struggling, when I’m hurting. Even though it’s not their fault, they may leave me, again, because I’m not the person they thought I was. How will I ever attract someone if I’m honest with them at the start? How do you say to someone.. oh by the way, before you fall in love with me, i was abused as a child, as a teenager, subject to domestic violence when I was just an adult and that has made me fragile. I have issues with trust and sometimes i just may not want to be alive. Be lucky if they even pay half the bill and don’t run from the restaurant before finishing their food.

I don’t know. It’s all I keep saying, to everyone, to myself. I don’t know what to make of the situation. I don’t know what I want for the future. I don’t know if I’ll ever love again. I’m just stuck here in limbo.

Until next time.

The days we don’t want to talk about…

I’ve been deciding whether to write this post or not, but at this present time I feel stable enough to share it, and I think it’s important for people following my blog to know the truth.

Those of you who suffer with depression all know how your thinking can get to a crucial point quite easily. In the weeks leading up to my breakdown I would not say I was suicidal. I was very, very low. The thoughts that often went through my head were ‘It would be easier if I just died, if a car just happened to hit me head on right now as I drive down this road, and it all be over in an instant”. That’s what I wanted, an instantaneous death, that was no one’s fault, just an accident, too quick for me to feel, that would just end my suffering. I would along with these thoughts think about how it would only take a slight jerk of my hand at 60mph to throw me off the road into the ditch beside it, wondering if that would be enough to kill me and ensure nobody else was injured. These thoughts became more and more common, and whilst I was not making plans to end my life, I didn’t want to live.

After my breakdown, and my break-up, which was the icing on the cake and pretty much caused my break down those thoughts started to change. I continued to feel like I’d be better of dead, but I believed it much more than I did before. Before the break up I felt like I was clinging on to my life, and the rope was cutting my hands and I was considering letting go. After the break up I felt like there was nothing left to hold on for. By that I do not mean that my ex boyfriend was all I had to love for, because I have my son and he is worth more to me than anyone ever could. When I say I felt like I had nothing left to hold on for I was thinking of myself. I already felt undeserving of love, undeserving of friendships, undeserving of anything good in life, and the break up put a x1000 on those feelings. Now I definitely didn’t deserve love because the only person claiming to love me had just left me, why would they leave me unless I didn’t deserve that love? It’s a complicated web of thoughts that go on in there, bit the end result was that I felt even more worthless and I didn’t want to live at all. I felt so bad about myself that I believed my son would be better off without me too. It’s manipulative, depression, it brainwashes you into believing the most awful things. And I apologise to my son now, should you ever read this when you grow up, that I felt like my battle was too hard to fight even to stay by your side.

2 weeks ago I made a plan. It all got way too much and it wasn’t a well thought through plan, it was a quick last minute one that would have been devestating had I not been stopped. I waited for a Friday when I knew my little boy would be safe on the care of his father, I awoke in the morning and I put on a nice dress. I did my make up, and I did my hair nice, just as I did it in Paris because I wanted to do something different for my man. I wanted to look nice, on my last day. I packed my lunch bag for work however not with lunch. I placed a bottle of water and as many packets of paracetamol that I could find, any tablets that I had kept back, antibiotics, steroids, anything. I went to work that day, and I ate nothing. O ended up being sent home early because I was so down, but I didn’t go home. I went straight to the place that I had decided I wanted to be when I ended it. My phone rang over and over but I ignored it. I had arrived far too early, it was only early afternoon and people were about, walking there dogs, watching the birds. So I just slept, I slept in my car on and off for hours. I was waiting for it to get dark. I had so many nightmares, nightmares that I was running away from things, storms, the devil, but I was trapped and each time I couldn’t get away. That’s how my mind felt, I was trapped and everything was telling me to surrender. One of my friends found me just before nightfall, when she arrived I was looking down at my phone. She does not know this, nobody know this. I had already taken all of the pills out of their packets, I picked up my phone, that I had not been on all day, to have one last look through my photos, the memories I had made so that they would be the last thing on my mind. As she found me I was sobbing, looking at a photo of my baby boy in the day he was born. That was going to be the hardest part never seeing him again. She saved my life, had she not have searched for me and night had fallen I do believe I would have taken those pills.

I am nowhere near happy, I am not even reaching neutral yet, but I do feel like at present I am out of the danger zone. For how long, I do not know. There is one thing that sets me off, and I instantly start thinking on a very negative trail and that’s my ex. I am doing everything i can to try to avoid him, because I do not understand as of yet why seeing him, hearing him, talking to him is doing this to me so I don’t know how to control it. The more we talk the more I want to die. It’s horrible to say but it’s true. So I am trying my best to avoid all contact, but I have not mastered it yet and sometimes I slip up and start a conversation that never ends well for me.

Looking at the positives, and I hope o do not jinx this… 2 weeks later I am still alive. The nightmares are beginning to ease, although I’m still not sleeping well. But I guess my brain is starting to feel some relief, o have taken actions to reduce the things that were causing me to feel that way and there is much less pressure, which is allowing me to start to recover, very slowly. I have hope now, that I will get better someday.

If you have found yourself in that position, or you are in that position now. Please know that you can get past it. You will not pass it and be magically back to normal, but you will be able to see a future again instead of only seeing a wooden box. My heart goes out to you all, you are not alone.

Until next time.

Saturday night – face mask, dressing gown and motivational speeches!

So in my last post I said I was going to start doing three things each day to take better care of myself. Brush my hair (seems a simple task I know, but not so simple for those who suffer with depression), uptake a skincare regime, and go to the gym. So far so good, I have been doing all of these things and I am already starting to feel better about myself.

Time is such a precious thing, but often we do not use it wisely, and often we don’t even consider how we are using it. I was thinking the other day about all the things that we don’t do, like taking off our make up, because we choose not to find the time. And of course all of the things that we do find time for, like scrolling through social media, that may not be so important. Let’s face it, brushing my hair and washing my face will give me many more benefits than looking at my Facebook newsfeed. It suddenly occured to me that there is time for everything, and that we should make time for everything, even things that may be considered wasteful. Everyday does not need a scheduled timetable that must be adhered to but why can’t we give it a basic structure. I spoke in my anxiety checklist about finding the time each day to meditate. I have now decided that there are three categories that I want to make sure I include in every day. All of these things are ” me time ” , whether you get half an hour, an hour or three hours of ” me time ” each day I think this is a really good way to utilise the time that you have.

The first category is self care, as I discussed in my last post, skincare, excercise, meditation, massages, facials, manicures. Anything that you can do or like to do to take care of your health, your image, your well-being. Hence why I’m sitting in bed with a face mask, I’ve already removed my make up, washed my face, now I need to wash off the facemask and apply my night cream.

The second thing I want to utilise my ” me time” with is something with purpose, something important or inspiring. Something that’s going to help you go forwards in life. Whether it be listening to motivational speeches, researching something, writing a blog, looking into ways to make your dreams a reality. Whatever it is that is going to help you keep moving forward, rather than get stuck in the present without being able to make the changes needed to really achieve your goals.

And finally, junk time. It may seem a little unfair to call it junk, because, to us its entertaining. Whilst it may not be useful to our future, whilst we may not learn anything, entertainment is needed for our well being. We need to have a laugh every now and then, free our minds from everything and just relax, a little like a child again, that knows nothing but playing games . This could be watching a film, reading a fiction book, scrolling through social media, going out for drinks, video calling a friend, playing a game. I think this is the category that often many people don’t struggle to find time for, but spend too much time doing these things and neglecting the other things needed in life for a healthy balance. Some people are quite the opposite and do not find any time for their own entertainment and this adds more stress and unhappiness to their lives. If we work hard we can play hard right? But you have to be doing the work, you have to be caring for yourself, and you have to be doing things that are useful as well as playing if you want to be successful and happy. There’s no point in watching every film on Netflix but feeling like your going nowhere in your life and complaining that you didn’t have time to paint your nails.

Make time for everything that’s important, and also make time for those who things that are not so important but nonetheless vital to stop us from becoming insanely over worked.

Until next time.

Starting with myself – from the outside in

It probably took me an hour to brush my hair last night after the shower, lots of miracle oil, a fine comb and clumps of hair all over the bedroom floor…

Yeah it’s safe to say I’ve been neglecting my self care in recent weeks with my low mood, I can’t remember the last time o brushed my hair properly. I had alot of time to think as I was doing this, and I felt guilty. How could I let myself get into this kind of a mess, and how can I ever feel good about myself when im in this kind of a mess. I always say I’m going to start taking care of myself and then I just slip back into bad habits and laziness. But it’s important, and I need to change that now, if I keep doing things for long enough they will just become habit and I won’t have to think about them anymore.

I need to start learning to love myself and be happy with who I am, for me the hardest things to change, the hardest things to be happy about are on the inside, so I’m going to start with the outside to make it a little easier. The first thing I’m going to make sure that I do everyday is take care of my hair, brushing it daily and applying treatments as often as needed to start repairing it. I want nice long healthy hair, so I needed to start giving my hair the time that it deserves. The second thing that I’m going to do is take care of my skin, I am more often than not lazy and sleep with my make up, which is not healthy and rarely ever mositurise. So I have given myself a skincare regime to follow each day, washing my face with a scrub, cleansing it and removing any left over make up and then applying a balm. Hopefully I will see an improvement in my skin and feel better about my face by doing this. The third thing that I am going to do is get back into the habit of going to the gym, which I have let slip in recent months. My body is probably the one thing that I am confident about, I like the body that I have and I’m going to continue to maintain it and also improve it. Something that shouldn’t take too much effort.

Starting with these slightly easier tasks, once completed, once they become rituals, I will start adding more and more things in, all related to self care in order to help me learn to love myself. For example, eating more healthily and ensuring I have regular health check ups, and the big one, stop smoking!

I will get there, day by day, taking baby steps.

Until next time.

Just a little lighter

You know how heavy your purse or wallet is when you have gathered a collection of coins? They are quite weighty when you have accumulated a few right? Imagine my shoulders bear the weight of pound coins, all lined up from the top of each arm to my neck, towering over my head.

Today I feel like maybe just one of those coins have been lifted, and put elsewhere. It’s not a great deal of difference but it’s something, just something that teeny little bit better than the day before. I have slowly started to cut something our of my life, bit by bit, day by day, and I feel the pennies may be starting to drop. People always say that if you go into something with a negative attitude you will likely have a negative outcome. The same can be said for the things and the people you surround yourself with. If you continue to talk to people that out you down, you will continue to feel low. If you continue to spend time with people that encourage you to do bad things, you will more than likely so bad things. If you want to stop doing those things, having those feelings, not only do you have to train your brain, learn to control it. You also have to choose to remove the things that are getting in the way of our a ability to get to where we want to be.

We all too often blame ourselves, we think that we need to be better. We need to get better at dealing with our thoughts and feelings. We should be stronger, we are not like normal people. Then we feel like we aren’t deserving of anything. But we are not all bad, and sometimes we are right about things, more often than not our feelings are justified. When someone is putting us down, instead of feeling like we need a thousand counselling sessions to be able to take that out down, and not let it make us feel like we are better of dead, why not take the put down out of the equation. We may need professional help to learn how to cope with certain things, in life we will always come across people who will out us down, and we do need to learn how to deal with that in the moment. But what we must not do is allow someone to put us down continuously.

I had my first counselling session yesterday. We didn’t get through much, didn’t even finish my story. I only have a very limited number of sessions with this counsellor, so we have agreed to focus on my self-esteem, to make me feel better about myself as a push start to my recovery. Today I went back to the gym, which also made me feel much better than I thought it would, I just had to find the motivation. On Monday I felt like I had no chance of seeing the end of this year, today I am open to the possibility that I may be able to stay here a little longer. But I may skip at any time, the oath is very rocky at the monent.

Until next time.