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

I am a rock.

Today I got my nose pierced and wore a dress.

I'd say that constitutes a good day.

Time to be selfish.

For what feels like the first time in my life I am going to put myself first.

I am ill. I won't get better unless I give myself a break, cut myself some slack and let myself off the hook for once.

This isn't me using my illness as an excuse, or opting out of things because I can't be bothered. This is me making a serious decision about my future. The way I look at it I have two options:

1) Keep going as I am, keep myself sick and end up making myself worse in the long run.

2) Take some time out, do things for myself and prevent things getting worse in the future.

I'm not superman. I can't do everything.

This is my body telling me that I can't cope. I've been ignoring it for far too long and it's time I listened.

So for once in my life, I am going to be an entirely selfish being. If I don't feel I can do something, I will tell someone I'm not up to it.

I am going to stop comparing myself to other people. Maybe I'm not as strong as everyone else, maybe I am wired differently. That's neither a good thing nor a bad thing. It just is. It's not my fault, it's out of my control. I must stop blaming myself.

I won't let this beat me.

(Who am I trying to convince? You or me?)

"I'm vulnerable, I'm vulnerable
I am not a robot
You're loveable, so loveable
but you're just troubled"

I am not a robot.

"You've been acting awful tough lately,
Smoking a lot of cigarettes lately,
but inside you're just a little baby."

Breakthrough.

I can't work out of this is a good thing or not. I don't want to use it as an excuse and I'm determined to everything I did before. I just can't shake the feeling that this is a sign to slow the fuck down.

Something has got to give.

But what?

also

I take it back. I feel completely defined by the last three weeks. I think that's who I am.

I'm scared.

Hello square one.

I'm not sure about today. It was good in terms of people, no awkwardness, no issues. Now I'm home I feel horrible and I don't know why. I have (almost) everything I thought I was lacking, and yet I still feel terrible.

When I said "I'm getting there", I lied. I'm nowhere near "there" - wherever the bloody hell that is. I wish someone knew.

Maybe nothing will shift this.

That scares me.

There are no beautiful suicides...

just cold corpses with shit in their pants
and the end of the gifts.

Today was a good day.

Today the sun was shining. I wish more days were like today.

A comforting find.

"Everybody here is living life in fear of falling out of line
Tearing lives apart and breaking lots of hearts just to pass the time
And the eyes get red in the back of your head, this place will make you blind
Put it all behind me and I'll be just fine"

I stumbled upon these lyrics from a song called Back Home by Yellowcard. The entire song is pretty apt, but this particular section really grabbed me. The song itself was written about an East Coast boy living living in California, but it seems to perfectly sum up how I feel about London. This got me thinking that maybe it's not just London. There are people in almost every city in the world who feel this way. It's a comforting thought.

Overhaul.

Time for change, I think. I refuse to let the last few weeks define me. The fact that I felt nothing short of sheer terror on my return to London makes me think that there's a distinct possibility that things are not entirely well with on planet me. Therefore, I have decided to change. Things I will no longer do:

> Wear all black. This is never a good look. Colour is my friend and it's time I embraced it.

> Spend all day in bed. This never fails to make me feel like a complete waste of human life. Therefore, I will find something to do with every day from now on. There's a whole city outside my front door and instead of hating it, it's time I embraced it.

>Drink to excess. This is a big one. Lately, I have gotten to a point where I cannot go out of a night without having drunk at least a bottle of wine before, and then continuing to drink at wherever I am. This leads to embarrassing levels of drunkenness, followed by public displays of stupidity and terrible decisions that lead to spending the next day in a relatively depressed and all round sorry state while I attempt to piece together exactly where the night went wrong. It's like that film The Hangover, only not funny. Not even one bit. And, to my knowledge, I've never married a stripper.

> Panic about the fact that I'm single. I say this now, but give it a few hours and I'll, once again, be convinced that I am horrible and will die alone. Still, I like to think intention goes some way to achieving the desired result.

Things I will do:

> New look. Sort of. I will endeavour to at least make a small effort to make myself look nice every day. I find that, and this is probably universal, if I look good then I feel good and my day tends to go a little better - or at least starts well.

> I will go to museums, read books and generally become less ignorant of the world I live in.

> I will concentrate on the things and people that are important to me and worth my time. Priorities include: University, Family, Friends (with certain exceptions).

> I will become better and sorting those worth my time from those who are not. It's terrible cliche, but I shall no longer waste time on people who would not waste time on me. It sounds harsh, but necessary.

"If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude." - Maya Angelou

Back to London

I'm terrified.

Experience?

"If you have made mistakes, there is always another chance for you. You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call 'failure' is not the falling down, but the staying down." - Mary Pickford

In recent times I have found myself making more than my fair share of mistakes. It would be easy to blame these mistakes on however much alcohol was in my blood stream at the time, but, in reality, I always believe that alcohol only allows you to do things you'd never have the balls to do sober. To save this from being a long, self-deprecating ramble, suffice to say that I hurt some people that mean a lot to me, people I would have normally gone out of my way to make happy. I can't shake the feeling that the person in the mirror is a girl I don't know and I find myself longing for the days when I was a simple, small town girl with small town aspirations, ignorant of the world outside and how ugly a place it can be. Ignorance, so it would seem, is complete and utter bliss.

I've tried to rationalise these mistakes, or at least give them some level of justification by telling myself that I've learnt from them and that they are all invaluable life experiences, after all a life in which you make mistakes is vastly more interesting that a life spent at home too scared to go out your own front door and make some bad decisions. Even so, it's very difficult to not be a little disappointed in myself.

I'd like to blame these mistakes on anything but myself - alcohol, coercion, loneliness - or that I'm just a single girl in a big city trying to enjoy my life, but the unfortunate truth is that my attempts at making myself happy have left me more miserable that ever and at a complete loss as to where to turn next. Naturally, I did the logical thing and went back to my mums, immersing myself in who I was when I was a care free sixteen year old listening to Taking Back Sunday like they were the only thing that mattered.

Turns out you can't run from your problems. The place you call home, the bed you sleep in at night, the people you call your friends - all these things can change but unless you do too, your problems will stay the same. You can't run from yourself.