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.

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.

Thoughts like buzzing bumblebees.

I want to take a walk through my last relationship, from the very beginning, to the very end. ( Now reading this back it definitely does not come close to start to end, I’m going to have to write a book if I want to do that!) Not missing out anything, a true reflection of how I felt, and a true reflection of the things that I did.

So we were in the same team at work, that’s how we met, I had no interest in him sexually I just thought he was a funny guy, he made me laugh. I enjoyed a little bit of banter with him, he made me smile. What he doesn’t know, is that my mood was very low just weeks before we started talking. I think he believes that I was a happy person then, but let me tell you deep inside I was hurting. I was surprised that he didn’t see me just a few weeks before coming into work looking like I had been hit by a bus, a bit like I’ve been lately. Not eating, not sleeping, I still to this day wonder how he didn’t see me like that, and how it never put him off. I had a shit summer, I fucked up my a levels, I was still getting shit off the father of my child and to make it worse, I got played by a guy and I stupidly thought it would be good to play the game back. It didn’t turn out well for me, and I have regretted it every single day since. See I learnt a lesson at that time, that point scoring doesn’t win you an emotional game.

Okay so we started talking a little, okay maybe not a little, a lot. I don’t do early mornings but this guy kept me up silly late talking to him and I still managed to go to work with a smile on my face. Talking to him was great, I thought we shared similar values, I thought we were on the same page. I have to be comply honest, when I say that what had just happened with C wasnt out of my head yet. C had messed me around a lot, and C didn’t want me, I knew that. But if he was graded on his ability to confuse me I would give him an A*. He wanted me at his beck and call, but he didn’t want to be at mine. It was not healthy, but at the time, it was all I had. And I think we have established that up until now, I have always needed someone. Having someone on my life, makes my life more bearable. Being shown love and affection, makes me feel worthy of life. Anyway, back to the situation. My now ex, then blossoming new relationship, asked if I wanted to have a chat with him face to face after work one day. C just so conveniently happened to see this chat take place and my phone exploded. He told me he loved me, for the first time and we had been seeing eachother on and off for months and months, and I can’t tell you how much I wanted to hear those words from him. But I was so confused.

I decided that I needed to give my ex a fair shot, rather than being up against someone that I had a lot of chemistry for. So that’s what I did, o talked more, I went on dates, and I fell for him. But the whole time I was afraid. I didn’t feel ready, he was very honest about the person he was in the past and that made me very apprehensive about opening myself up to him, and I was umming and arring about what to do. I wanted to choose my heart, and I did, choose my heart but that doesn’t silence my head. He asked me, to be his girlfriend, and o wasn’t expecting it. I said yes without giving it any thought. My love for him grew, but my trust issues exploded. The more I loved, the more I was able to be hurt. I don’t know if I was always going to be hurt, or if I pushed him unit hurting me, or if I deserved for having doubts.

Surely everybody has doubts right? It was very new and I didn’t know if it was right for me or not. I didn’t use this as a justification for myself to go out and test any waters, believe it or not that really isn’t me. I never flirted with anyone, not even a cheeky smile, or a slightly over friendly text. I wanted it to be prefect, but there was only ever one thing I couldn’t defeat. C.

When I was feeling really down, I would turn to him. So stupid to do that. I might not have had him at my neck and call, but I knew I could count on him more than anyone else that I have here to be there for me. I could count on my hands the number of conversations that I had with him. It wasn’t like I was having a full on affair, I didn’t kiss the guy, I didn’t touch the guy, not once when I was with my ex. I know talking to him over text was wrong, and sometimes I may have said things about how I felt about him, which is also wrong, but it was true. Sometimes the truth hurts but I have no time for lies now. Point is, nothing physical ever happened whilst I was in a relationship.

There were certain things going on in my relationship that I had to adapt to. Things that I had never experienced before, didn’t know how to deal with. I’m not going to lie at first I questioned myself could I do it? Could I live with this change?… But do you know what, I gave myself a shot, I gave myself belief and in belief I succeeded. Many would have secretly found away to not have to change, or just gave up without giving change a chance but I never did. The love I was building in my heart became more important than anything else I have ever experienced.

Everyone is different, and I know that everyone is affected by things differently. Don’t get me wrong, nobody is okay with their partner talking to someone else behind their back, no matter how many times or who it is. I don’t mean to sound as though I am trying to justify a ring action here because I’m not, but in order to love with myself I have to forgive myself and to forgive I must give myself an explanation. I know that my wrongdoing was not out of spite, not out of hate, I wasn’t point scoring, or just being plain greedy. I turned to one person, for no other reason than that we had a connection. I turned to him at times that I was afraid and sad, because I wanted to feel like somebody cared. What I have learnt, is that the only way to fix something like that, is to actually sit down and talk to the person that’s making you feel that way, and explain to them why you feel that way. If your love is strong enough, you will find a way together, to work it out.

What’s brought this on tonight? I try not to wonder over it in my mind, but sometimes things trigger it and I can’t help myself. I know, hand on my heart, hope to die, that I only ever made one mistake – one person. I find myself asking the question how many girls really were there that he came close to, stood on, or crossed the line with? Would it be better if I knew, or am I better off never having the truth? I have suffered all my life facing the consequences of a person’s lie. The reality is that one persons lie, is enough to make me want to end my life. But I know that one is a lie, because I know the truth. There are many things I don’t know the truth about, would I rather it come out? Or is it better left in the closet? Who knows maybe if I never spoke up about my abuse it would affect me the way it does now? Maybe I wouldn’t feel like my words are worthless, maybe I wouldn’t feel let down by my friends and family. Maybe I wouldn’t feel like my feelings are not justified because if I explain them they are little more than an excuse to others.

Silly really, I was feeling a little lonely, and I was asking myself about tinder. Should I download it, why not I deserve to meet someone in the end right? But i couldn’t bare the thought of coming across him on there I know it would cause me more pain than I’d ever gain from the app. Then I thought maybe I could meet people another way, a different app that he won’t be on an then something hit me. I remember seeing a dating app on his iPad. And my thoughts began to wonder, I had always told myself that was just old and he no longer used it. But what if that wasn’t the case, what if he was using my logic, but when we were together. What if my boyfriend, the one who was playing father to my child, was also dating online. And here I am again, in floods of tears, wondering what someone up there would be able to see if they looked down at my life, the things that go on behind my back, the truths.

I need my guardian angel back, I can’t find her.

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.

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.

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.