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.

Dead when your alive.

Does anyone get the feeling that they are already dead, just trapped in a working, breathing body, but lifeless in the heart and soul?

People must not believe me when I say that I feel like I am already dead. They see me walking, and talking, sometimes they will see me smiling and they think that because my body is completing those actions I am alive. But I don’t feel alive, I feel like I’m just existing. Like im wasting the air that I breathe and the body that I live in. I was thinking today about everyone that’s fighting a terminal illness right now and I just wish I could swap places with them. I wish I could give them my body to enjoy and I could take their loss of life.

People say it will get better, but it’s easy to feel like it’s already too late. I feel like the place that you go when you leave this world, it’s pulling me in. Day by Day that little bit closer. I try to think about my little boy, and that he needs me to be here to raise him and then I think about the little baby that I lost, there all alone, without a mummy or a daddy, without anyone that knows her or him because I was the closest person that they ever had. I have two babies and they are both in different worlds. I don’t want to leave either of them and I feel pained every single time I think about this. I am so very lost.

I have listened to this song since I was about 11, I always related it to what I went through even though it talks more about physical abuse. Each time I listen to I feel closer to becoming a concrete angel. https://youtu.be/KtNYA4pAGjI

Until next time.

My Dreams – Visualising my feelings.

I keep having these nightmares, every single time I close my eyes and sleep. Each time they are different but they mean the same thing.

Last night I had a dream that I was in London, my favourite place. I witnessed accident after accident, one straight after the other. People getting hurt, people dying. I was trying to get away, not to avoid helping them but because whatever the danger was causing the accidents was still there. But I couldn’t get away from it, and I too found myself in an accident. I lay there on the street, still breathing but in pain and my body completely bartered. I think the accidents before mine were a symbol of all the bad things I have seen before now. All of the pain that I have been through. The scene was chaotic, unorganized, too many things happening at once. Just like the thoughts in my head right now. I lay awaiting help but the ambulance never came. Those that did come didn’t get round to me, I was left there. Also a reflection of how I feel now, like I’ve been desperately running to get away from the things the bad but that they’ve caught up with me, they’ve got me and I have no way out. Help is coming but it’s not coming quick enough, there are not enough people to deal with the amount of casualties.

This afternoon I had a nap and I dreamt that I was flying somewhere. This time I was not alone but I had my boy with me. The pilot said that they had to fly very low due to an engine issue. By low I mean barely above house height. It was scary and I knew something was going to go wrong. The plane ended up crashing on to a building and it was just balancing there. It turns out it had been hijacked, as had every other flight, and every service. Evil people were taking over everything in the world and the rest of us were to be done with as they pleased. The woman wouldn’t let us off of the aircraft, not one single person. It was in a dangerous position, and should it drop half of the people on the plane would die. It had been split into two sections, and me and my boy had been separated. He was in the side that was in danger of death and I was in the side of people most likely to live. I was trying to do anything possible to swap sides with him but nothing was working. I was frustrated and upset, and I felt he was much more deserving of a chance at life than me. The plane crash symbolises my constant fear that bad things are going to happen, the world take over symbolises how I always believe that the whole world is against me. The separation with my boy, that symbolises the fact that I currently feel unable to give him the life that he deserves. That I fear I will never be healthy enough to be happy enough for him. That he is better off without me.

What will I dream about tonight 😔.

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.

You jump I jump – Well that was a lie…

I have spent a lot of time this week thinking about the relationship that I have just come out of. Maybe it’s not good to think back over everything but maybe it is, for I’m finally starting to see things that are helping me to stop blaming myself.

If you have read over my first few posts, and in particular Mystery Man you will see that I have praised my ex boyfriend for everything but not standing with me through this mental struggle. I have gone back to my roots and I have explained how my experiences as a child have left me with severe self-esteem issues, feeling worthless, like everyone else is better than me which of course causes trust issues in a relationship. I have neglected to mention all of the things that happened in the relationship leading up to the break up, that lowered my self-esteem even further, made my mood even lower and made me want to give up altogether. We watched titanic together about a week before he left me, and he said to me ‘ you jump I jump’ hence the title of this post. He claimed to have my back, he told me not to cry anymore, he said he had me and I can’t count how many times he told me I was precious and that he was going to show me my worth in the world. That he was going to be the one guy that proved to me that relationships, that men, aren’t all bad. However, he didn’t live up to his word. I was clouded by my low mood into thinking that he just didn’t jump with me, but I’m starting to see that he pushed me before he walked away to the easier life he wants.

Every relationship has its ups and downs and everyone makes mistakes here and there particularly at the beginning of a relationship when your still unsure if it’s what you really want or not. The things that I have been considering are the more recent things. Only about 6 weeks prior to the break up is where things really went downhill. I cannot deny that I too have not been perfect and that I have made mistakes that warrant him to be angry and upset. The difference with me is that I owned up to them, I didn’t need to have evidence put Infront of me, all he had to do was ask me if I had done something and I told him the truth in response to his question. I even told him things that he wasn’t asking about because I didn’t want to hide anything from him, I didn’t want to lie to the man that I loved. Even at this point when we had agreed to be honest about everything and wipe the slate clean he still protested his innocence throughout the whole relationship. He spent a week at least giving me a very hard time for the mistakes that I had made, and made me feel extremely worthless during that period. I have never before felt so undeserving of love and I really blamed myself thinking that I was the only one that had done wrong, that I had ruined my life and that I would just be better off dead because I had messed up.

Slowly day by day his lies began to expose themselves, and the amount of times that he lied to my face became way more than anything I had ever done to him. It even came out that during that week that he was giving me a hard time for not being completely honest about something that had happened when we weren’t together, he was going behind my back talking to other girls. Whilst giving me the low down, making me feel like I was the worst person in the world he was actually not practicing what he preached but doing worse!! I’ll tell you the reason why I felt so low when I arrived in Paris with him the day before the break up. Teo days before we were due to leave, I was using his iPad and I came across a folder full of nudes from other girls. He had told me, numerous times, and even that very week that he had deleted all of those pictures and had no need for them any longer. Yet again he was lying, perhaps it was an innocent mistake that he hadn’t deleted them from all locations but he had said that he had seen them the night before and couldn’t remember his code to get into the app but why wouldn’t you just delete the whole app? It makes no sense and he’s not a silly person, he’s got brains he just tries to act dumb when it suits him.

I am beginning to think that there are many many things that he lied to me about, and I believe that he was always up to things that he should not have been. Whether he actually loved me or not I will never know. I don’t think he would ever admit this but I think I know why he does not want to be with me now. He kept saying that he wanted to support me to get better, but that he didn’t want to be with me and I was confused by this. I couldn’t understand how he could care but not enough. He said that getting me better was the number one priority, and he kept repeating that the relationship wasn’t good for me that it wouldn’t help me get better, that I wasn’t in a good enough place for a relationship. But I’ve figured it out now. He knows that he wronged me, and only he knows to the full extent how much. He doesn’t want to be with me because he knows that although he has nothing to do with the underlying mental health issues, he has pushed me over the edge with the way he has treated me lately and he is too much of a coward to fix it.

Better off without him.

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.

Is love the answer?

The last few days have been hard, so very hard. How can I be so up and down? My mood has been low for the last 6 weeks at least, it’s rarely even made it to neutral. But why do I have fight in me some days and others I want to give up everything?

Recently a friend of mine wasn’t in a good place, she didn’t want to accept any help from me and I remember telling her that she didn’t have to suffer alone. I said that we were all put on this earth to aid eachother one way or another, if we werent then there would only be one person on earth surely? I said whatever storm she was trying to sail through on her own, I’d sail through it with her. I’d get in her little boat and I’d help her out the other side of it. I still to this day don’t know exactly what she was struggling with, but I didn’t need to know I just needed to be there for her, to never give up. To be something concrete, when everything inside her could not stand still. I hope now that I was there for her enough and that she never felt like I’d leave her in her time of need.

I think about all the things that I have been through that have made me feel the way that I do. People tell me that it’s not my fault, that I can’t let people that have done wrong ruin the rest of my life for me. I would be lying if I said that I don’t recognize that, because to some extent I do. When I’m having a stronger day, when I feel like my life should have value I want to choose to beat these feelings. I want to be happy and successful, I want to be able to be comfortable enough in my own life to be able to give those people the fingers and say haha, you tried to take me down but look at me now. Unfortunately that does not provide me with the motivation that I need, with the strength to actually get to that point, so I need to find another way to do so. I know that ultimately it is down to me to change the way that I view the world, to make myself better.

However, I can’t help but feel like I need someone there to help me through it. I feel as though it took people to break me, and it’s going to take people to make me again. If people can take away my ability to trust, my ability to see my self-worth, make my world a hostile place. Surely it’s only logical for it to balance, and for good people to help build my trust, help me see my worth, and help me my world as a happy friendly place. I didn’t take this all away on my own so why do I have to build it back on my own. Why is that fair? If anything it is adding to the way I feel. If nobody loves me enough to hold my hand every step of the way, to not give up on me then surely what I’m feeling is true? That is feeding it all. Everytime that someone says they will be there for me but they’re not, everytime someone promises me something and breaks it, everytime I feel like someone doesn’t believe in me. I only know love from my perspective of what I feel for those I love. Id never give up on any of them, I’d never put my needs first, I’d help them no matter what or how. Surely if I’m not getting the same in return then I am not loved? And I am not loved because I’m not worthy of being loved. What is the point in living if I am not loved, it’s okay to say that it’s only loving yourself that matters. It’s okay to say that I should only rely on myself for my happiness. But I am not alone in the world, why should I have to do everything on my own and become an outcast from society so that people don’t hurt me, because people won’t help to make me better. Why should I give love and care to others, to not receive it in return. Why should I live if I cannot give or receive love? That is all I want to do, that is all that I feel my purpose is. I don’t want to make money, I don’t want to step foot in every country, I don’t want to go to fancy balls. I just want to love and to be loved, and I see no point in life without that.

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.