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.

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.

What is happening to me?! – the physical side

Here I am, laying in bed wondering what this night will bring…

Do you know I can’t remember the time that I last had a full night’s sleep without waking every few hours with a nightmare, needing the toilet or just pure restlessness. Last night was horrendous, I finished work by 11, came home and got straight into bed. If was asleep by half 12. It was a few minutes after 5 before I awoke fully. I had a few stirs Inbetween but this time I was eyes open and there was no going back. I had a pain in my inner upper right thigh, it was the worst pain that I have ever felt in my legs, ever. I laid there for a minute or two, trying to take it in but I thought it would just pass, maybe I’d just slept funny. The longer I lay there the worse it got, I was waiting to myself, and breathing heavy, feeling a panick attack coming on. The centre of the pain we as in my inner thigh, but I felt it begin spreading, over my knees and down my shin towards my foot. I went to the toilet and thought maybe somehow it would relieve it, I hobbled there holding on to the walls not being able to put any pressure on my leg. I came back to bed and the pain was worse than before, I was buying the pillow, to stop me from crying out as the pain took over my limb. What is this? Where had it come from? I felt fine physically when I went to bed. I started to Google it , as we all do. It came up with some kind of problem where you have pressure on you nerves in the leg causing you discomfort, but I have done nothing different to any of night so I don’t know why it would come on suddenly. It’s either that or a blood clot, according to the internet but I’m trying to rule out worst case scenario. I laid just a little longer, and the tears started to follow, not just due to the pain but I thought maybe this is the world giving me what I wanted. I wanted to die so maybe my body is slowly giving up on me and this is the last night I’ll hold my baby boy in my arms.

I decided to go downstairs and take some painkillers, it has to be bad for me to get out of bed when I’m tired on a cold night. As I came back into the room I turned my light on which awoke my little boy who said ” I don’t want the light on mummy”. So sweet an innocent. The painkillers started to kick in and the pain began to ease allowing me to call back to sleep. I’ve been taken painkillers regularly this evening, each time I’ve felt the pain coming back. I’ve no idea if it’s connected to my mental well-being so far, but it’s something else to add to the list.

What I have been suffering with for the last 5 or 6 weeks is what appears to be symptoms of IBS. The doctor won’t actually diagnose it as such until you’ve had it for three months, but I’m halfway there. My body alternates between constipation and diarrhea, sometimes it feels like I have both at the same time which I originally thought was impossible, I thought I was going mad, but it’s true. No trip to the toilet is normal for me anymore. I have severe pains in my abdomin after eating, they come over me like waves of contractions giving birth. My temperature rises, my head starts to swear and I feel myself wrapping my arms round my belly and clenching my sides waiting for it to pass. I feel gassy and bloated constantly, and I have the tiniest meals, less than my 2 year old boy before I feel full to the rim and start urging as I try to put more food down me.

Sleep, don’t even talk to me about sleep. I can go to bed for 10 hours or more and feel like I’ve not slept at all. I constantly feel drained, fatigued. Everyday functioning becomes a challenge for me, feeling like I’m running on empty no matter what I do to try and fill the tank. This just makes me moodier and fuels my low mood, anxiety, depression.

I am blown away by how much affect these mental problems can cause your actual physical body. Not only do you have to fight the mind but this too. Now I understand why people can’t go to work, can’t get on with their life when they feel this way because it’s harder than everything I’ve ever tried before. We all as hunan beings get annoyed and upset about things, we get angry and things may play on our mind more than we’d like. But we get over them, most of the thine, and continue each day as best we can. Can you believe that those thoughts in your mind can actually control your body too and stop you from living a normal easy life. Things are so difficult mentally that they actually make you ill physically too.

Isn’t it scary how it only takes people to get you into this state where your body starts to give up on you.

Until next time.

Understanding Self-Esteem

When thinking about problems that one may have with their mental health I used to think only of anxiety and depression, and forget that there are other things that contribute to mental health such as stress, anger and self-esteem.

“self–esteem reflects a person’s overall subjective emotional evaluation of his or her own worth. It is a judgment of oneself as well as an attitude toward the self.”

Search the word on the internet and you will come across many definitions like the one above. When I used to think about self-esteem I thought it was solely about appearance, are you happy with what you look like, are you comfortable with your weight, do you consider yourself to be attractive. But I have come to realise that there is much more to self-esteem than anyone thinks at first glance, and that it has a major impact on my life and the things that I do every single day. My ex boyfriend used to ask me a question such as “what would you like for dinner?” and then follow it up almost immediately with ” don’t even say you don’t mind”. I always used to say you know how indecisive I am, I like it when other people make choices for me. Only in the last few days have I actually learnt that my indecisiveness is a result of my low self-esteem. Having no confidence and belief in yourself, fearing that you will make the wrong choice, makes you not want to be responsible for the choice at all. Whether its just going to affect yourself of whether its going to impact others, and that is even scarier. You don’t want to suggest somewhere to eat, just in-case the person you go with doesn’t like it, and then associates that experience with you and blames you for it. Decisions, they occur numerous times on a daily basis, and being indecisive is something that I do automatically every time and would never have thought it had anything to do with my self-esteem!

So what are the signs that you have low self-esteem? You may be well aware that you have a struggle at the moment but you may not have thought that self-esteem was something that you need to work on to help you fight. Here are some common signs that you have low self-esteem:-

Feelings of hate or dislike to yourself
Feeling worthless or not good enough
Being unable to make decisions or assert yourself
Feeling like no one likes you
blaming yourself for things that aren’t your fault
Feeling guilty for spending time or money on yourself
Being unable to recognise your strengths
Feeling undeserving of happiness
Having a negative outlook
Lack of confidence
Inability to express your needs
Focusing on your weaknesses
Feelings of shame, depression, or anxiety
Belief that others are better than you
Trouble accepting positive feedback
Fear of failure

How many of these do you experience? I think I suffer with all of them. Damn that’s pretty scary! No wonder I don’t believe anyone loves me, no wonder I always feel like I cant trust anyone, not boyfriend nor friend, and sometimes not even family. How can I possibly believe that anything will be good when I think this way?

Update with my progress- I have had my assessment and I have been put on to a wellbeing course with the opportunity to have some one-to-one counselling after I have completed it. Bad news is- there is a waiting list for the course, and its going to take a little while to complete it so I could still be a very long way from the help that I need. So in the meantime I am doing my best to self-help, I have brought a CBT book and I am just about to get to the practical part where I will learn things that I can put into practice and share them with you here. My goal for this week is to research and practice methods of raising my self-esteem, I think its a great place to start and will have a domino effect with both my anxiety and depression. Fingers crossed.

One very important thing that I have learnt this week is that to start feeling better, you need to take away the things that are having a negative impact on your health. As hard as it is to do that, you will only feed off of these things and they can very easily reverse any progress that you have made.

In my last post Is love the answer? I talked about wanting to have someone beside me through the journey, how people have caused me to feel this way and I feel like I need people to help me feel better. I do hope that there are currently people in my life, and that I will in the future meet people who will hold my hand through this struggle, but I have learnt that you are better off doing it alone than turning to someone who is unreliable, and causes your head more confusion. If they cant decide whether they want to be there for you or not, don’t accept their help at all. You need support that is concrete, people who you can turn to no matter what.

Until next time.

Failure is not an option.

So at this very moment it is my workplace causing me the most anxiety, yesterday I achieved my mission and I didn’t have another attack at work!

I need this job, I need the money, I can’t let any negative thoughts or feelings stop me from going to work, I’ll only end up in a worse situation when I can’t pay my bills. As I got ready for work this morning I listened to some motivational speeches, they are always so full of empowering words and today what stood out for me was the sentence “failure is not an option” . I’ve heard this before but only know has it actually clicked on my head. At present, my focus is just to get through each day, day by day, without feeling low, without having an attack. The goal is to have a good day, a happy day. This morning I realised that I have to take away failure as an option, if the option doesn’t exist it can’t happen. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the day is going to be easier, or that all of a sudden my days are just going to be great, but it does mean that I remove the option to give up. If I have a day where something happens that I didn’t want to happen, that I didn’t plan as part of my happy day, it doesn’t mean that I have failed, it means that I must try harder to find the positives in that day, and not go to bed at night feeling like it was a total write off.

I came into work this morning and the first thing I did was stick three photos of my beautiful little boy around my computer screen. This is to remind me of what good I do have, even in the toughest of moments. Every time I feel myself slipping back into that moment where I feel like the world is against me, like I’m not worthy of love, like I’m not worthy of anything, I can look at his cheeky smile. With that I am reminded that I created him, I have made him who he is today, that’s my achievement and it’s the greatest achievement I have ever had. And be reminded that I give and receive the greatest form of love every single day, it doesn’t matter who else wants me, he needs me, every single day.

Those pictures are there to help me find my motivation to keep on going. We all must find the one thing, that gives us the strength to push on through when we feel too much pain to go on anymore. We cannot give up on ourselves, we cannot fail on our own goals, failure is not an option. Success takes hard work, we must work hard, not for anyone else, but for ourselves. You have the power to do anything you set your mind to, and setting your mind is the key.

Until next time.

Why can’t I stop it?!

So yesterday at work I had another panick attack. It’s horrible, how many of these can I have in one month seriously?

I started off feeling really hot and sweaty, then I couldn’t breathe properly. Then my whole body started to tingle and shake, even my lips and my eyelids. My fingers just locked into a position and I couldn’t physically move them. It took me hours to calm down. It’s so embarrassing when your work colleagues start asking you if your okay and start presenting you with things and suggestions to help you. I just felt like such an idiot.

This time I wasn’t able to stop the thoughts in my head to stop myself feeling so low. It just takes hearing one little thing to set me off, why can’t I ignore these things. Why do they end up taking over my body.

I shook and I trembled as I came into work this morning but I am here and I am trying again. I can’t give up I have to try and try harder every single day. Today the goal is to not have another one. No matter what the day throws at me I need to be stronger than it. I have to try and remind myself that I’m living and breathing and I have a very positive future ahead of me but I just have to push myself to reach it!

Until next time.

Anxiety checklist – first success

I recently made myself a checklist to follow each day to fight my anxiety and try to live my days without suffering.

I just conquered two points in one scenario and I feel great!! I have touched on how I do not value myself and have no self confidence. This has caused me no end of insecurities in relationships, always feeling like other girls have way more to other than I do. There is a girl in my office that I have had an issue with for a long time. She was very jealous of my relationship with my ex and she made that very known to me. Instead of taking that in my stride and feeling good that I had what others wanted I let it eat me up inside, I hated her and everytime I saw her my anxiety flared up. Heart racing,hands shaking, blood boiling, day ruined.

Today I had an issue with one of my systems and had to use a manager’s computer to complete a task, right by her desk. At first thought of going over there to do it I started getting the sinking feeling in my tummy and I wanted to look for an excuse not to. But I didn’t. A daily goal is to face a fear, being anywhere near her was my fear and I did it. I walked over with my head held high and I did what I needed to do. I even had a conversation with someone and managed to smile, I didn’t hide away. I can do it, if I tell myself to, if I want it enough. How great is that?!

Which brings me to my second point, whilst there I could hear her conversation with her manager. They were laughing and joking about her being a ‘pikey’ and talking about Snapchat, oh I hate that app. Immediately I feared they were making indirect digs at me, joking about her stealing my boyfriend and talking about her sending him indecent things on Snapchat. Something I always suspected was going on. Maybe I was right, but hey maybe I was not and why should I choose to beat myself up and feel down about something that may or may not be true. Even if it was true, still I shouldn’t let it get to me, cause I deserve better than that and now I’m choosing to believe it. I fought a cognitive distortion, overthinking, jumping to conclusions. I stopped it, with my own brain, who knew I could do that?

I am so impressed and so happy with myself. 😊

If I can do it so can you!

Until next time.

My trust issues – In a nutshell

If you have already read some of my blog posts you will already know about the first part of my story, if you haven’t then you can read The first trigger for a more detailed explanation of that part of my life.

So at 8 years old I had my first sexual experience, abused by a teenager over a the period of 1-2 years. I never appreciated at the time how much this would affect my adult life and you will see references to this throughout my posts.

When I was 11 or 12 I started experimenting with boys my own age, in line with all of my friends. You know, the relationship in the school playground where a kiss was a big deal and it lasted a day or a week at most.

Then when I was 13 it happened again. I started having a relationship with a man 11 years older than myself, and I admit that at the time I consented. But as I have matured I have come to understand that a 13 year old does not truly know what they are consenting to and more so should never be put in the situation where they are given the option to consent. He then, was older than I am now and I do not look at 13 year olds and see anything other than an innocent child, a little annoying at times but that’s a stage of life. He tricked and manipulated me into believing it was love and that it was right. But oh how wrong it was. Not only that but he was mentally abusive and controlling. He used to sit at the top of my road and wait for me to come home, I barely went to school and spent most of my time with him for two years. I have spent alot of time blaming myself for this, asking myself how I let this happen to me, again. I have recently learnt that revictimisation is a thing and I will come on to that in another post.

After that relationship I started going out with another boy, much closer to my age. It started well and he had a great family that treated me well but he too was not a great person. He was a drug user and he didn’t work. I found myself having to pay for his habits. He treated me with nothing but disrespect and threatened me with violence on numerous occasions and pushed me about.

I remained single for a while after this, then I met the father of my child. This story is a long one and requires its own post. He abused me mentally throughout the relationship and physically whilst I was pregnant. Not to mention the lies and the cheating.

The next relationship I had after that is my last relationship,Mystery Man . He was nothing like any of these men, but I pushed him away because my head wouldn’t let me believe he was good. Every experience that I had with relationships had been bad, so why would this one be any different right?

I don’t blame myself for having trust issues, for not believing that there is good in the world and that if there is I’m not deserving of it. It is perfectly okay for me to feel that way with everything that I have been through. What is not okay, is letting those bad experiences stop me from having any good ones. Okay, so me and life did get off on the wrong foot. I didn’t have a great childhood, if you can even call it one at all. People often use the saying ‘ start as you mean to go on ‘. That’s how I have been living inside my mind, believing that my life will go on in the same way that my childhood did, that it will continue how it started. It doesn’t have to be that way, I don’t have to give up on myself, I can choose to have an adult life that is far from the life I experienced as a child. Some people will have no idea what I have been through in life, some people will know and hold my hand as I battle my mind for this change and others will give up on me.

It doesn’t really matter who or how many people fight with me, and how many desert, as long as I believe in myself, and I continue fighting for myself. I love the history of the Tudors and I feel kind of reminded of an uprising right now. Some of the men that would go to fight would originally form part of the kings army, but if they felt that he was more likely to loose they would switch sides so that the potential new king would favour them in future. The people that are truly loyal to me, that want to see me come out of this battle with my head alive, that love me enough to go through anything with me, they are the ones by my side. The ones that give up on me, or that half-heartedly offer to be beside me, those that will only choose their side as the side that’s winning. Your army is stronger without those people, those that may turn on their own.

As of now, I am putting my trust issues into flames and letting them burn away into ashes. From today I will choose to believe that I have had all of my negative experiences and that the next one will be a positive one. I will continue learning ways to control my own brain, to overcome self-doubt and most importantly to love myself. By the time I choose to allow myself a relationship, I will be the girl that I dream of being, and I will have confidence in believing that I am worth more than the experiences I have already had.

I WILL trust again.

I am so excited, to start choosing to be the girl of my dreams.

Until next time.

Anxiety – A daily checklist

This is my first constructive post that I hope may help people.

After reading lots of different blogs last night I realised that we often read about the things that we should be doing, agree to try them but then never actually put them in to practice. I have made myself a small checklist of 5 things to do every day to help me have a better day.

Compliment myself – Last night I listened to a guided meditation and this really stuck out for me the most. She said that no matter how much a person loves you, no matter how much they value you, you will automatically see that they value you the way that you value yourself. This is one of my biggest struggles, I do not value myself at all so I don’t see how anyone else could value me. So this is my first item on my checklist, It wont make me love myself overnight, but day by day I hope it will change the way I see myself. This may be as simple as complimenting myself for my hair or the outfit I have chosen that day, or complimenting myself for the way I handled a tricky situation at work.
Do a good deed – They always say that helping out another person will make you feel better. I am definitely one of these people, I feel great when I have made someone smile or just made their day a little easier. Whether its telling someone that they still have the label on their jacket or giving someone the extra change that they need to complete their purchase at the till point. This will not only remind me that there is good in the world, but It will help me to believe that people see my worth, because I am giving them a reason to.
Fight a cognitive distortion – This one is going to be tricky and I’m not quite sure yet how I am going to do it. I have a really bad case of ‘All or nothing thinking’ which is very common it seems in those that suffer with their mental health. I want to start by trying to have control over my mind at least once each day. To remind myself that I am in control, and when that panic takes over me, whether I am mind reading, or jumping to conclusions. I am going to try to stop in that moment and think the opposite to what I am thinking, no its not the end of the world, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing, maybe they are not thinking that. I will try to give you some examples of this one as I go along.
Face a fear – Similarly to number three above, I want to try every day to do something I am afraid of. By this I don’t mean tackling my biggest fears, just doing one small thing. One of those things that people always say your silly for being afraid of. For me this will most commonly be the fear of what other people think. I may pick an outfit out of my wardrobe in the morning and then put it back because I think others will judge me, or I might hold in my need for the toilet until those popular girls have moved so I don’t have to walk by them. When I do walk by them I tend to hang my head in shame, hide my face, avoid contact, for what reason? Now it is my mission to everyday face one of these fears. Maybe it will be just walking by someone I am afraid of and smiling at them.
Meditate – I think it is important to give your brain some me time, to just relax and really try to exhale all those negative thoughts and inhale all of the positives. It may not seem to benefit you much at the beginning. When you think about it, you are allowing yourself that time to address the negative thoughts, rather than them just building up and then exploding in an attack. I may even try to do this twice a day, once in the morning to clear my head of anything negative I have awoken with, and once at night to clear away all of the negative that has built up during the course of the day.

I don’t know how useful this will be to myself or any of you, but I hope this inspires you to do something if you aren’t already. We must actively try to battle this, every single day. The do nothing approach will not work for us, it wont just go away by itself and another person will not make it go away for us. The only person you can rely on for your happiness is you.

Good luck with whatever it is that you do each day to combat the bad, if you have any suggestions for me please do help!

Until next time.

Being the Victim

Victim, I’m not sure I like that word…

There is a phrase that has been repeating itself over and over in my head over the past few days. “You always act like the Victim”. I have had a lot of time to think this over and I had never really noticed it before but I guess it is something that I do, subconsciously. See who I am and who I want to be seem to be two very different people separated by a loss of control over my mind. I know who I want to be, how I want to act, and I have all the right intentions. These intentions seem to travel from my heart, into my head, and there they are manipulated into something so far from how they begun. Like a game of Chinese whispers. I always thought that I was a selfless person, that I put others above myself always and that I was a very caring and understanding person. Maybe I still am, but just not to everyone?

Let me give you an example, on mothers day this year I went out to town with a friend who was at the time with child. She was so distressed and upset because her partner hadn’t got her a card or gift from “the bump”. Some people may not believe in this practice, but as a mother I know that parenting begins the moment that you conceive, and I wanted her to feel some sort of recognition for all the sacrifices she has already made. I am a single mum myself, and I didn’t have a lot of money. But I raced around, I bought a card and flowers, and some cookies. I placed them on her doorstep, knocked and hid. I will never know how that made her feel, of course she thanked me a great deal and I think that she appreciated it, as would have I. That’s the me that I feel that I truly am in my heart, and the me that I wish I could be every minute of every day.

Let me give you another example, another very close friend of mine found herself in a similar struggle to that of my current struggle. I wont go into any details because that is not my story to tell. That girl is my life, family that I wasn’t born into, family that chose me. I had a feeling that if I didn’t pull her away from the situation very quickly she would loose herself, and maybe I would loose her forever. I couldn’t bare the thought of my friend suffering any worse than she already was. Without even asking her I booked her a ticket to travel to the country that I live in and I drove 3 hours to pick her up. I took her away from a bad situation, and I knew it wouldn’t fix her, but it would give her time to reflect before making any rash decisions. I barely had any money myself, and I certainly couldn’t afford to do what I did, but I did it anyway. That’s how important she is to me. I would do the same for anyone that is close enough to me.

So why is it that when it comes to men this side of me seems to disappear of the face of the earth? why is it that I feel like I am still being the same person that I want to be, that my friends can see, but to men that’s not how it comes across. I always thought I made compromises in the relationships I have had, but maybe I didn’t. Taking a step back and looking at it, my feelings have always been my number one concern in a relationship and for that reason I have neglected the feelings of the other party. I don’t agree with that, It goes against everything that I stand for. A relationship should work both ways, so why do I feel like only I can set the boundaries? I am starting to see that I don’t always play the Victim, I am always the Victim. Maybe not in reality, but I am in my head. My brain processes all of its thoughts with me as the Victim, always trying to protect me. My brain thinks its self defence, but really its self destruction. Every day in a relationship it is telling me I am the Victim, just like I was all those years ago and that I cannot trust any man. Its not just men, but women too. Anyone new that I meet faces the same barrier, I have no self confidence, no self worth and that affects me with everyone I come across in life.

What I need to do now is focus on building self esteem, building that confidence so that whether I’m walking into a new situation or a new situation arises within a longstanding relationship, I don’t instantly believe I am the victim. I want to be able to be in that moment with no preconceptions, no worries, no paranoia. I don’t want to walk into a room full of new people and think ” why would anyone want to talk to me, I’m not worthy of anyone’s time”. I want to have the confidence to walk into that room and think ” I am going to start a conversation with as many people as I can in this room, because I am a great person to talk to”. It seems so far away, but I know I will get there one day.

I found it very hard to fall asleep last night, thoughts were running wild. But I did come up with something that has given me some excitement in this dark time. I have set myself a goal for the year ahead, and something special to celebrate with when I reach my goal.

Until next time.