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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until next time.

Starting with myself – from the outside in

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

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

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

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

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

Until next time.

Just a little lighter

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

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

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

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

Until next time.

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.