Oh, hello!

Long time no speak.

I figured we were long overdue another little trip into the inner workings of my brain. Hold on tight, kids.

I'm not sure how well this whole 'being on anti depressants' thing is working out for me. I feel, oddly, like I've lost part of, if not my entire, identity. For the longest time I lived every day with those thoughts and feelings, so long that they became normal, part of me. Now that they're predominantly gone, or at least somewhat muffled, I find my brain disconcertingly unoccupied. There's a hole where something used to be. It's frightening.

Take this for example, I read a post on tumblr saying that one of the people I follow had overdosed on sleeping pills and was in a secure adolescent mental health unit. To most people, their first though would be "Oh god, poor girl. She must really be going though a tough time" or words to that effect. My first thought was "I wish that had been me". What an odd thing to think. It's not that I am suicidal or anything, even when I tried I couldn't even conjure up those feelings. It's more that I feel i should have been me. That was me. That was my identity. I was the one who was supposed to end up sectioned or on a psych ward.

I am constantly torn between wanting to be happy and wanting to know who I am.

Bizarrely, I am actually finding myself wanting to be depressed again, which is mental.

As stopping my medication is not really a viable option, I am trying to carve out a new identity for myself.

This is proving very very difficult.

The phrase "Lost at sea" springs to mind.

Food for thought.

Oh, hello. Did you miss me? No? Fuck you.

Today, I have decided to tackle the issue that has tormented me most of my life.

My weight.

I don't think I've ever really been comfortable in my own skin. I still distinctly remember the first time I realised I was fatter than everyone else. It was year 3 and we were doing something in science about body weight and a few of us were asked to come up and be weighed. I was the heaviest, by a long way. Since then I have been painfully conscious of my size.

At my heaviest I was about 14 stone (roughly 200 lbs). At the time, all I could think was that if only I was thin everything would be perfect. People would like me, someone would love me and I'd be happy. I was completely wrong.

After I moved to London I lost about 4 Stone. I always told myself that if I got to a size 12 I'd be happy and all my problems would be solved. WRONG. Even when I was a size 10 I was miserable and lonely.

Recently I put on about 7lbs, and it's making me really really fucking miserable. I'm so angry at myself for allowing it to happen. Even though being thin didn't make me happy, I still feel the need to maintain it.

"I thought being thin was the answer. It wasn't, and now I'm trapped."

Oh dear.

My last post, with hindsight, was a little melodramatic.

I guess that's the nature of this illness. One minute everything is black and hopeless, the next you're buying flowers and making marinades (both of which I did today).

I like this new, happier me.

The new me buys flowers, cooks, cleans, makes "to do" lists and actually does the things on them.

The new me makes plans. I'm looking at Universities on Australia to do a post-grad course. I want to learn more before I go into the big wide world. There's things I want to see and do before I tie myself down to a job and actually start my adult life.

I'm excited for my future.

For now.

"I want" doesn't get.

I want to scream.

I want to scream until I cry.

I want to scream until my lungs give out.

I want to scream until I throw up.

I want to cut my self wide open and let all the blackness bleed out of me.

I want someone to wake me when it's over.

Long time no see.

I fear I have neglected this blog of late. Suffice to say that I haven't exactly been in the right frame of mind to be writing anything coherent, or to be doing anything coherent for that matter. I've been a crying, screaming, shouting, swearing mess for two weeks. But I am hopeful that things look like they are on the up.

Having said that, I am a strong believer that there is nothing more dangerous than hope. I was watching a show on tv about terminal cancer patients (and if that doesn't go some way to summing up my current mental position, I don't know what will), and there was one particular lady who was choosing euthanasia. She was talking about her decision and said that there comes a point when death stops being scary, and what becomes more terrifying is hope - hope that the next course of treatment might work, hope that they might find a cure, hope that you might still live to see your lifetime. This got me thinking about the place of hope in my disease. I'm fully aware that cancer is a million miles away from what I'm facing, but an illness is an illness. I realised that hope is an absolutely terrifying prospect. Take this weekend for example, I'd had a whole week where I was absolutely fine, no bad days at all. Then Saturday night I had the worst night I've had in a long time. I'd forgotten to take my pill the day before and, consequently, I fell apart 24 hours later. All I kept screaming was "Why can't they fix me?". It was only later that I realised that it was almost certainly hope that put me in that place. I'd let myself hope that maybe, just maybe things were going to be okay now. I could make it through a day without wanting to die, I could go to sleep without all those nasty little thoughts creeping into my skull like maggots and eating away at all that was left of me, leaving me a crying, hysterical mess disgusted at the person I'd let myself become. I'd let myself hope that I was fixed, and when I was presented with cold hard evidence that I was almost certainly not, it hurt like hell.

Hope hurts like no physical pain can.

So I shall become the eternal pessimist. If I meet a boy I think likes me and maybe something could happen, I will not allow myself to hope that he likes me or hope that something will happen so that it hurts less when it turns out he's not interested or when he turns out to be like every other boy in this city - they'll fuck you and leave without even pretending that they'll call.

If I think I've handed in a good piece of work or done well in an exam, I will hold back and crush any hope of a good grade so that it hurts less when I haven't done as well as I thought.

Lastly, and most importantly, I will stop hoping that people actually care. It is not a given in this life that you will be surrounded by people who actually give a shit about you. Chances are half the people around you don't want to hear about your shit. People have their own shit to deal with without having to listen to yours. People don't want to hear about it because they don't care. If I allow myself to hope that they do, I will only be disappointed.

If you don't dare hope, you can't be disappointed.

"Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torment of man" Friedrich Nitzsche

Obsessions.

Why am I not better yet?
(Surely I should be okay by now?)

Why do I feel worse?
(It always gets worse before it gets better.)

How have I got this far?
(and how long do I have left?)

So many questions and no one to answer them.
(Do they even have answers?)

I'm lost.

"You're ill. It's not your fault"
I'm not convinced.

Ouch.

"I’m not brave anymore darling. I’m all broken. They’ve broken me."

A Farewell To Arms, Ernest Hemingway