how do you measure a year?

As we say goodbye to 2014, I want to share some of the moments from this year that have stuck with me. I want to remember the hurt, the pain, the weird, the wonderful because it all meant something. I want to spend this last day of the year reflecting and remembering what I can of what 2014 gave me. It's been the worst but the best year of my life and throughout the year, I had a note open on my phone where whenever I remembered, I wrote down something that happened.  Now I am going to share these for the first time ever...

January 2014. It's the 2nd day of this new year and I am sat on a train, audibly sobbing to a train of people pretending they can't hear me. My destination is a private London hospital where I have been admitted to and I am feeling a fear I could never have comprehended before this moment. I'm scared of how alone I feel. I'm scared of what is waiting for me. I'm scared of getting better. I'm scared of the fact I know I will be leaving a substantial amount heavier than I am right now. I'm scared of what the other patients will think of me. I'm scared of how worthless I feel.

July 2014. London is having the most insane thunder storms, there's 3 different ones in 3 different directions, I go outside and put my arms out, stare up at the sky and feel incredible.

April 2014. It's the early hours of the morning. I don't know what day it is. I don't care anymore. I've never felt so scared and alone in my entire life. I feel like a failure. I've lost everything. I've given up on myself. I spent hours prior having incredibly vivid hallucinations about throwing myself in front of a tube, a car, a bus, anything that could wipe out my existence in one step. I've taken too many pills. I'm dragging a kitchen knife along the centre of my veins as though it's a game of operation, I hit the edges and I'm out. The blood smells like burning metal and feels somewhere between relief and giving up.

November 2014. She tells me she's in love with me and I realise that every moment of the pain was worthwhile.

June 2014.  My best friend and I are stood at the front of a sold out Islington Assembly Hall seeing Sara Bareilles live for the third time together. Her arms are around my shoulders and I'm wiping tears from my face as she plays the opening chords of "December" and I'm really, really fucking glad that I'm alive.

January 2014. It's my first night in hospital and I can't sleep. All I can hear is the girl in the room next to me screaming and shouting. She says she wants to kill everybody. She is a Persian Princess and is biting, kicking, screaming and spitting at everybody who comes into her room. I pull the covers over my head and cry wondering what I am doing in a place like this. It takes 3 hours for her sedation to work. The next morning when we pass outside our floor's kitchen at 9am, she hugs me and gives me a cornetto ice cream, I take it off her and she watches as I open it and take a lick. Her eyes are like a child giving someone a present, holding a breath, hoping that they'll like it. I say thank you, head back to my room, throw it in the bin and spend the next hour purging. I don't feel anything.

February 2014. Oh my god, Taylor Swift was metres away from me performing my favourite song of hers "All Too Well" I'm so overwhelmed I think I'm going to pass out.

May 2014. I'm walking out of the apartment I'm staying at and a dead pigeon falls out of the sky at my feet. I trip over it and spend the next 45 minutes wondering if having a dead bird fall at your feet is sign of good luck. I never did find out.

June 2014. Two of my friends have come over to the apartment I'm staying at for an impromptu Tony Awards viewing party. Jessie Mueller and Carole King are performing together and I can't stop crying because it's so amazing.

October 2014. She takes 3 buses across London at 4am just to come and be with me whilst I'm hurting. I can't describe this feeling.

August 2014.  Two months ago I started watching the TV show "Pretty Little Liars" and I've just finished binge watching five seasons, because why the hell not!

September 2014. I'm hanging out at my friend Becka's friend pub in Soho with her, our friend Kerison and my cat who is on a leash fast asleep on a lap. We're drinking gin and it dawns upon me that I am sat in a pub, with my cat on a lead and somehow this doesn't even make the top twenty of most ridiculous things to happen to me.

May 2014. It's a Sunday afternoon and I'm lay in the bathtub of my hospital room's en-suite listening to Joni Mitchell's album "Blue" at full blast, the sun is shining and I realise that not everything has to hurt.

July 2014. I'm sat in my new favourite writing spot in Soho, I'm writing about him, and then a song comes on that just makes me know that he is with me. All the time. He lives in my heart.

December 2014. It's early in the morning and for some reason I'm the first of us both to be awake. This is rare. I'm lying listening to the rain with the love of my life nestled into my side with her arms wrapped protectively around me. Life is so beautiful.

June 2014. The Red Arrows are going to be flying over Buckingham Palace. I don't usually care about things like this but I'm staying around the corner of Buckingham Palace and as soon as I hear the helicopters in the distance, I'm filled with this childlike excitement and grab the keys and race up onto the roof of the apartment in just a towel with soaking wet hair and watch them fly past with a trail of red, white and blue smoke. Wow, I suddenly realise that I'm LIVING in London and this is just a casual day for me.

September 2014. I'm wrapped up in a throw, roasting marshmallows over a bonfire in my friend Victoria's garden and drinking gin. Life is good. Little do I know what is waiting for me around the corner. It's only going to get better.

October 2014. Lindsay Lohan tells me my outfit is cute.

April 2014. I want to change everything about myself. I hate myself and I hate the traces of who has been left on me. Hair. Hair. It has to start with the hair right? I go and get inches upon inches cut off my hair had my hair and am now fashioning a shoulder length bob. I feel free. This is liberating.

July 2014. I accidentally get a kitten.

May 2014. It's a terrible night. I'm exhausted and my head is screaming at me. I've gained a huge amount of weight because of the medication that I'm on and I've just had enough of it. I spend the day in bed refusing to leave or eat anything. Nurses have been trying to coax me out of bed or to eat something all day and evening. One of my doctors enters my room for the third time that day and I just lose it, I start screaming and I'm howling with sobs. I can't breathe, I can't feel anything. I wake up 13 hours later to find that I had been sedated.

December 2014. I'm at the Harry Potter Studio Tour with the love of my life. Could life get any better than this?

April 2014. I'm back in hospital, after a gruelling group therapy session which I have stormed out of, I'm sat crying, when a very famous musician sits down beside me, puts his arm around me and just sits there in silence with his arm around me whilst I cry. People are really special.

October 2014. It's Halloween. We're hand in hand walking around London's Southbank. My heart is so content. I can't remember a time before she existed. I didn't know it yet, but I'd found her.

June 2014. I tell myself I'm enough, and I almost believe it. This is progress.

September 2014. I start a new job and gain a new family.

June 2014. An entire outdoor weekend of free theatre proves to be just what the doctor ordered.

November 2014. For the first time in a very long time, I pick up a razor and don't see it as a weapon to hurt myself with.

July 2014. I'm at an event photographing Keira Knightley. My love for portrait photography has flooded back to me.

October 2014. I have my own flat. My very own place to call mine, finally.

September 2014. I'm browsing Etsy and I never realised how much I needed a taxidermy rat dressed as Captain America until right this very moment.

21st October 2014. My life is changed forever. For the better.

November 2014. For the first time ever, somebody has the ability to bring me out of a panic attack. She holds my hand, strokes my face and looks into my eyes and suddenly I can breathe again.

December 2014. I'm seeing Taylor Swift with my favourite person on the planet.

23rd November 2014. Love, just love.

December 2014. The most romantic night of my life. I'm so in love. I'm the luckiest person in this universe and my life is incredible. What difference a year makes.

love is louder than all your pain.

I've been trying to set aside time to write about everything in my life right now, but I have had no desire to write because I've just been so happy. To me, happiness and writing do not go together, I've always written from such depths of sadness that it's very hard for me to write about joy. But the fact is, I'm experiencing levels of happiness that I couldn't even fathom and I want to share that happiness and attempt to put into words the beautiful twist that my life has taken. A very wise blogger, Ava, encouraged me to write from a place of happiness and that's exactly what I'm going to do from now on; write from that happy place, take that love and translate it into words. 

Anybody who reads this blog will know that I have been in some terrible places of darkness, I've had the hardest year of my entire life. I had to fight to find the part of me that wants to be alive, I had to find a way out of the thoughts that told me that the world didn't need my existence. And I fought, I fought hard and it was the hardest thing I've ever done but I am so thankful that I did, because fighting that hard gave me the most beautiful reward. 

Falling in love was most definitely something I had ruled off the cards for myself for a long time, especially this year. I didn't even think about it, it wasn't on my radar, yet somehow it found me. When people in treatment talked about love and happiness, I couldn't even comprehend it, I couldn't grasp the notion that anybody could ever fall in love with me.

As cheesy as it sounds, love really is a force that transcends everything and anything. It's not something that you can mould or shape into what you want it to be, and oh boy had I tried. When it comes along, when it truly hits you, it may not be shaped how you expect or packaged quite how you had anticipated and envisioned. It certainly wasn't how I had anticipated it. 

Loving someone really is simple. There is no rhyme or reason, there is nothing to "make sense" of, love is love. Love is a reflex, it's what we do. You don't need to analyse or scrutinise or even criticise, when there is apparent love and from that love stems an abundance of happiness, then so be it. Maybe you have a different idea of what love is, everybody does, but strip it down and loving somebody isn't a chore, or a hardship, it brings you comfort and happiness, and it makes you feel like you can climb mountains and conquer anything that comes your way.

You can't ignore such a powerful connection and draw to another person, no matter how hard you try. From the moment I got to know her, we connected in a way that I can't even explain. We were like magnets, drawn to each other and as time passed, she made me feel safe, and I haven't felt safe for as long as I can remember. She lit up the darkness inside of me. I had fallen in love and I wasn't even aware, I just absolutely adored the girl that had come into my life and made me feel a joy that I had never felt before. Whilst she held my hands and looked into my eyes and took me effortlessly out of panic attacks, whilst she held my hand as we walked, as we sat, as we held each other for hours, both of us were oblivious to what was right in front of us. Our friends joked that we were together and even then it just didn't quite click.

Until we kissed. And something in my brain just exploded and everything made sense to both of us. It was beautiful and crazy and so uniquely us. What was weird was that it wasn't weird. Nothing about this was weird or 'wrong' or anything to not want to scream from the rooftops that we are in love. 

I have found joy, happiness, and emotions that were unknown to me. I've found reasons to live and each and everyday. But I've found someone. The best someone. I feel beyond any emotion I have ever felt before. The love I have for her is so strong that it has completely overwhelmed me. It's a force that has taken me over and turned my life around.

She is everything. She is love. She is everything good in this world. She makes me feel like I'm worth the world. I love her, it's that simple. I want to give her everything. I want her to be happy. She makes me feel a way I have never, ever felt before. For the first time in my life I feel like I have purpose and strength and a reason to be alive. She reached in and coaxed life and love out of me. 

I am feeling levels of indescribable happiness and joy and it's so overwhelming. I wish I could go back in time and tell the sick me to hold on and to know that the pain and the hurt was worth it, because it taught me how to fully understand and appreciate what happiness is. It taught me how to give love and make other people happy. It taught me how to make the person I love the most happy, and for that, those years of pain and suffering were worth every moment. 

circles and cycles and seasons.

After living out of suitcase for the last however many months, I am finally posting this from my own bed, in my own apartment, in the beautiful North London location that I am now calling home.

Home. It's a funny word. I haven't felt like I've belonged anywhere for so long. Months and months. My house that I lived in before I went into hospital, that's been my home for the last twenty years of my life felt alien to me. I couldn't settle, I couldn't breathe. The city I used to live in felt impossible to live with. Fragments of the ill version of me are scattered everywhere, I was stumbling over ghosts and heartache and loneliness. So I made the decision to stay in London where my treatment was and set myself up from pretty much rock bottom.

Eleven months and one day ago, I tried to take my own life. Eleven months and one day later and I thank every fibre of the universe that I wasn't successful.

It's been a year of learning, of making mistakes, of piecing parts of myself back together, of loss, but also of tremendous gain.

I have gained a small amount of wisdom, a huge amount of weight. I became a healthy weight with the help of the hospital, and then I made the brave/stupid (it depends which day you ask me) decision to 'sacrifice' my idea of the 'perfect' weight and to disappear into skin and bone, to go onto a large number of different medications that would cause weight gain, but stabilise the mood swings, the dark moods, the suicidal thoughts. Today is a day where I think it was brave.

Last night, I didn't. I punished myself for it. I stumbled, and I gave in to the self harm thoughts for the first time in so many months, and it felt so good. But then it felt everything it should have felt; unnatural, wrong, and something I absolutely should not be doing. I could see that there was a way through it all, without having to hurt myself. I felt that tiny ounce of self esteem that has been growing inside of me, come through and start to help me fight for what is important, me.

I've become more and more at ease as the last few months have gone on. I have been introduced to the most incredible people who have become my family, and who make each day that little bit easier. It's a cliche, but I have got the most amazing people in my life right now. People whom I adore, and who make me feel like I am worth something, who make me feel loved and accepted. People who are seeing me at my highest weight and who still love me and go out of their way to make sure I'm okay and happy.

I've never felt part of a family (with one very special exception) or that I was someone who actually mattered amongst a group of friends, and now, I feel like I've found my place amongst some truly wonderful, big hearted, beautiful people, and I'm lucky enough to call them my friends.

There is still so much to learn and to gain, I don't feel so alone in life anymore, and that makes this whole recovery thing a lot more manageable. Small steps eventually get you somewhere, and I'm getting there, slowly. As for what I lost, nothing is lost forever, even the pieces that I treasured the most are slowly making their way back into my orbit.

an invisible disaster.

I can feel it everywhere. All over me, weighing me down and pinning me to the ground.

I'm drowning in it, the enormity of the mass of fat that is holding me to this earth is so intense that I can't breathe. I'm enormous, I'm disgusting, I'm huge and I sicken myself.

I want to eat purely so I can purge it all and feel some form of control. I want to not eat so I can remind myself that I have the power to shrink myself back down to thin.

Every thought is food, every thought is fat. Food is the enemy. Enemies can be conquered. Do I simply starve myself, or do I restrict so much that I can feel the relief in every ounce of fat on me that I did it, I succeeded in preventing this poison from entering my body. Do I talk to someone? Do I just do this? Do I even publish this post?

Do I let it take me down again? Do I open the very loose gates that are being opened bit by bit every single second, and let anorexia flood back into my life? Is it worth it? Is it the only way to survive? Is it the only way to feel again? Is it the only way to feel accomplished again? I don't feel worthy. I feel like a failure of human being, I feel like an enormous mass of obesity.

I can't look in the mirror, I can't catch my reflection, I'm hiding from myself and from my mind's perception of me.

The medication that caused so much weight gain has officially stopped, I'm free of it. The control is now down to me. The reigns are in my hands. I can shrink myself back down to nothing again, I have that power, I want that power. Nothing else matters. I just want to be thin. When I was thin I could visibly see love even though I couldn't feel it. Maybe that's the answer. Maybe that's it. I'm huge and unloveable. I'm starting to think the smaller I am, the more invisible I can be, the more unnoticeable I am, the less shameful I will be. The less all of my wrong doings will seem to matter because I am just this small mass of nothingness.

The bigger I am the more enormous my disastrous nature is, it's more obvious. The drama that orbits me is more profound because there is more of me to orbit. If I can disappear into nothingness then surely everything that comes with it will disappear into nothingness too?

I just want to vanish. I want to break myself down to thin and bones. I want to lose all of this fat, I want to shed it and shed everything I've done wrong with it. I want a rebirth. I want to cleanse myself of this enormous layer that has enveloped me and start over, with my very shell exposed and ready to start again.

shadow won't let it in.

"Please, don't worry so much. Because in the end, none of us have very long on this earth. Life is fleeting. And if you're ever distressed, cast your eyes to the summer sky when the stars are strung across the velvety night."


Suicide. Depression. It has been all over the news for over a week now. We lost a legend, he took his own life and the world is undoubtedly less of a place without him. Whilst I was incredibly sad to see the actor that I grew up watching had taken his life, I was equally as upset by the comments people were making in regards to his actions, most of them I wont even waste the energy to type, but so much of what I saw on the internet was that people perceived his actions as selfish.

I am not naive enough to assume that everybody is educated on mental illness. I am not naive enough to assume that there is a universal opinion opinion on depression and other mental illnesses. I understand that to a lot of people, the concept that somebody who had a family that loved them and seemingly everything to live for could take their own life is incomprehensible, I understand that, I do. It is only through educating and discussion that the understanding of what could lead a person to take their own life, despite having external factors that, on paper, should be adding to their life. The last ten days have been incredibly triggering for me, I have been having some incredibly dark thoughts about my own failed suicide attempts, and I feel like discussing it a little more may help my mind let go some of what has been consuming me so fiercely.

I am not supporting suicide at all. I have myself seen people I have cared about take their own lives. The feeling that you are left with is indescribable. To think you could have picked up on a sign or even said something differently, you replay every single conversation that you had with them and with a fine tooth comb, search for something, anything, that could have signalled it; a misplaced sigh, a tone of voice, anything. The people who are left behind, if any, are as much a victim as the person who has gone, and I do not at all discount their pain or suffering.

Depression is a horrible, horrible disease. It creeps into your mind and steals the very essence of you. It obliterates the parts of you that feel joy, that is able to comprehend any emotion or reality outside of what you are currently feeling. It is as though someone has turned the brightness down on the world; everything is bleak, feeling becomes a thing of the past, and if you have moments where you can feel; it's extreme sadness and the pure and utter self loathing and hatred. You are noting. You are worthless. You are a waste of space. You do not deserve to be breathing in the air that you are breathing in. You are redundant. You are a disgrace to humanity.

Love unfortunately is not enough. It doesn't matter if there are people who love you, and it doesn't matter if you have 'things to live for' there is a disease inside your brain that is distorting your reality and causing an inherent lack of rational understanding or decision making. Your mind could be telling you that the sky is green, and when you glance at the sky to check; it's blue, but that doesn't matter, because the more your mind tells you that it's green, the more it becomes green when you look at it.

The mind is a weapon of destruction. Depression is cruel, and callous and takes no prisoners. It doesn't care how much money you have or how many people love you, if it wants you, it will get you. For some it's relatively minor and for some it is crippling and soul destroying.

When you are floating in oblivion, robbed of all of your senses, all of the parts that make you who you were, numbed of anything but insurmountable pain, it is hard to lift your head off your pillow each morning. There are silent warriors amongst us, who despite all of that, can put one foot in front of the other and function enough to get through a day. Some are able to fight it, some are able to reach out and ask for help, some are lucky enough to have people that are able to see their suffering and get help.

But for some people, in one moment, taking their life is an option that is put on the table in front of them, and it only takes that one moment that that option crosses their mind for them to take it.

For myself, I was in an extreme amount of pain and I couldn't take it anymore, I was flicking between pain and numbness and both of them felt too hard for me to be able to endure any longer, and my mind told me over and over again that there was a way for me to relieve myself of all of that and to be unburdened, and I tried. Twice. Thankfully for me, I failed and have been in treatment since, but some people aren't given the help that I was lucky enough to receive and still be receiving now. 

So please, the next time that you call someone selfish for taking their own life, just remember that depression is all consuming, it takes you from the inside out, there is very little that the mind is able to grasp outside of the internal suffering. It's a very selfish illness in terms of the fact that it focuses on the person and only that person, it's not a choice. It tells you how much you have failed as human being, how much you deserve to be suffering, how awful you are... With every single second of the day, there is very little time when a person isn't suffering, whether it is with feelings of nothingness, or feelings of despair. There is no future; just now, just what you are feeling. You are in a bubble whilst life carries on around you and without you. 

Being loved and loving other people doesn't make you immune from it. It doesn't make you a failure as parent/child/spouse/friend/whatever, you can be so loved, yet so deeply aching inside. Just because the person has children, doesn't mean that the love they have for their kids isn't there, absolutely not. 

Depression extinguishes the human spirit, but it can be overcome. There is help available out there, and there are people who want to listen and help you. Even if it's just me, through my blog posts, I care that you are alive. 

I recently watched a video made by Matt Ganley (which actually inspired this post) in which he says that we are in an era where by we are able to have the insight for compassion, and be concerned with human flourishing and human well being, understanding and empathy. And he is so right, our generation is a lot more willing to try to understand others. We can use technology to say whatever we want, and people are becoming more in tune to mental illness and we can use social media to help talk about it and eradicate the stigmas and misconceptions that generations before us created. All it takes is one conversation with one other person, it may make all the difference in the world for another human being. 

(US) National Suicide Prevention Lifeline - 1–800–273-TALK (8255)

• (UK)  Samaritans - 08457 90 90 90 
• International Association for Suicide Prevention

To Write Love On Her Arms

Love is Louder

Half of Us

beat (for eating disorders)

Matt Ganley's video that inspired this post is here at  http://youtu.be/ySg6nnxZdqE 

all my resistance will never be distance enough

bod·y im·age

noun

1.     the subjective picture or mental image of one's own body.

Two words that put the fear of god into me. I will do anything within my power to avoid any kind of question or discussion of any kind about body image. It fills me with fear, anxiety, and overwhelming sadness.

What has prompted this post, was a small breakdown in a changing room. I stood looking at my body and the fluorescent lighting was illuminating every single flaw of mine, like miniature spotlights drawing attention to what I don't like, presenting my body to me as though I was in some morphed fun house mirror. But no, it was just me. 

I am fat. I am ugly. I am disgusting. I am an embarrassment. I'm hideous. I make myself feel sick.

This is a monologue that goes around my head for pretty much the entire day, when it's quiet in my head, that's when it becomes the loudest. It joins forces with the "drill sergeant" voice of the anorexia in my head that berates me for what I eat and how much weight I have put on. It punishes me for taking medication that caused such weight gain. It tells me that being thin is more important than being emotionally stable. It tells me I'm wrong for fighting. 

There are moments. like earlier, when I was stood staring at this enormous, disgusting image in the mirror, that I want to just listen to that voice and believe it is right. 

Fighting it every single day is so, so exhausting. I honestly don't think people understand just how hard people in recovery are fighting every single day.

Today I'm questioning that fight. 

It would be so easy to just submit to the drill sergeant inside my head. But what would it gain? At my lowest weight, I couldn't see how dangerously underweight I was, I saw myself as the size I was now. I wasn't happy. I wasn't gaining anything from starving myself to death. I wasn't achieving anything substantial. I was damaging my organs and I was killing myself.

I wish I could be thin and happy, but I don't think that I can be both. This is my dilemma. 

I set impossible standards for myself and I am so judgemental of everything that I do. I do not judge other people, and I do not care about the shape or size of others, yet the last ten years of my life have been defined by my size. So why do I do this to myself when it's not something I judge others for? 

I want people to know that anorexia and bulimia doesn't mean that you judge other people, just yourself, constantly. I compare myself to every other woman, it doesn't matter what size you are, I will find ways that I am bigger than you. It used to happen every single time I encountered another woman, causing me to isolate myself constantly. However, now it's fleeting. It still happens every day, it just isn't as overwhelming and consuming. 

After an entire day of making myself sick on Saturday, to the point of vomiting blood and collapsing, I'm trying to keep the end goal in sight; to learn to be happy and to love myself. I am enough, and I have to keep repeating that over and over again; I am enough. You are enough. 

an empty space to fill in

Today has been an incredibly hard day.

Self loathing set in the moment I woke up. My mind was just dark and foggy and  numb. My head was too heavy to lift off the pillows, so I just pulled the covers over my head and lay still. Alternating between eyes open and eyes closed, when they were open I was fixated at a spot on the wall; time was passing and I was just this heavy weight, unable to escape whatever it was that had consumed me.

I wanted to punish myself, I had overwhelming urges to hurt myself for things that were out of my control, things people had said to me. I needed to punish myself. But I was too tired to hurt. Numb was comfortable, numb was manageable. Pain was a place on the spectrum I wasn't willing to expose myself too. So I purged.

I kept going, hours passed and I sat comfortably waiting for a reasonable amount of time to pass between each purge.

Until finally I stopped. I let the pain in, I let myself feel it, I let it wash over me and then I let it leave me. 

I made the distinction that these actions were a result of my illness. This is not me. I have to fight. Bad days will come and go, but I have to try and be safe and look after myself in a way I was unable to before.

A friend called me and talked to me for over three hours, making me talk about anything and everything and it gave me a small escape route of relief. It was temporary but it helped. 

I had a shower and I accidentally cut my thumb on a razor and a rush of adrenaline threw my body at the sensation, remember what it was like to force those blades inside yourself? The self loathing that has been driving my mind all day screamed at me, reminding me that I was worthless and this was a tool for me to punish myself for being so inadequate and worthless.

But I managed to not listen to those feelings and I didn't hurt myself and I feel stronger and I feel proud of myself. It's something so small but I'm proud of myself. 

I'm not worthless. I don't deserve to be punished. That is my depression talking, it's not the truth. But when it's talking to you and driving you from within, it's so hard to make the distinction. 

I'm so tired, my head hurts and my whole body just aches. 

my mind is somewhere hazy

There are some days, like today, where I actually wish that I was ill again. It was so exhausting and lonely and killed my spirit. But fighting it?  This is equally as exhausting and lonely.

It's so hard to fight against every single thought you have. I put up such a bright and bubbly front all the time, but underneath it all, I'm not this "recovered" person. I have to fight against almost every single thought that comes into my head, my automatic thought processes tell me to self destruct, that I'm not worthy of simply existing, and I have to fight that every second of every day, and it drains me.

Today my brain actually aches because of everything that has gone on. It's hard to fight the thoughts when your brain is completely drained of any kind of energy or motivation.

In a bizarre series of events, the song "Days" by Kirsty McColl just came on in the restaurant that I am in, a song that I associate with the loss of the greatest light in my life, my heart and soul. It's been seven long years without him, and my grief got tangled up amongst eating disorders and depression and self loathing.

Grief poured out of me disguised as blood.  It was grief trying to get out. It's still trying to get out. It buried itself so deep within me that it became a part of me. There are shrapnels of him inside of me.

How do you allow yourself to move on? To grieve seven years worth of mourning. The more the issues that were tangled together with the grief get dealt with, the more the grief has to come out of hiding.

I can feel his hand in mine as he slipped away, it's so real, all the time.

I think it's a sign, I really do. I think it's a sign to deal with it and to fight. Maybe once I've began to tackle this, the feelings of wishing I was ill again will go away. Maybe.

Today has been a bad day, those days that you know will happen but dread it and fear will set back your entire recovery process. I thought it was important to just have some kind of record that I am here in a bad day, but I am okay.

I am okay.

I am okay and I am enough.

What I am doing is good, I'm conquering a lot of things, but I'm also recognising the falls and the mistakes. I've made many, but we can only keep moving forward can't we? I need to keep telling myself, forward is the only way, well, as the song by Yazz says; "the only way is up"

I wish I could find some sort of peace with myself. It's becoming such an effort to try to hold back all of my devastation and anger with myself every time that I see my reflection and see how hideously huge that I am.

I know I'm supposed to be reminding myself over and over again that I am worth more than this, but right now I just don't care. I am so uncomfortable with the huge amount of weight that all of these drugs have made me put on, I feel like beached whale, I have never been this big in my entire life.

I feel like a failure to my eating disorder. I let it take so many years of my life and now here I am, helpless and huge. Was it all for nothing?

I just want to not see this grotesque, hideous creature whenever I catch a glimpse of myself. There isn't one good thing I like about any part of me, I wish I could be attractive, I wish I could change every part of myself. I hate what I look like. It's just completely disgusting, I'm an incredibly ugly person, if I could accept it, I'm sure my life would be a lot easier, but instead all I'm doing is crying because of it.

My meds have totally screwed my body over and it's in complete revolt, the weight gain, the severe bloating, the temperature increase, the nausea... There's so much that is making this body pretty impossible to live in right now, but I have to slowly be weaned off the extremely high levels of medication that I'm on now, and then have everything replaced and have a fresh start of new meds and new side effects.

Is any of this worth it?  It's just bad thing after bad thing, and then things start to look better and then just plummet again.

I am exhausted mentally and physically, and I just want to alter every single physical piece of myself because I'm so unhappy with how disgusting I look. 

raise your hopeful voice.

Every once in a while, the universe conspires to bring something into your life that will evidently alter your very state of being.

You are in the right place at the right time, with the right combination of people and something just happens that suddenly loosens the pain in your chest and gives your soul a moment of pure relief and release. You can feel it replenish the broken parts of you.

To put it simply, theatre nourishes my soul. Throughout my entire life; as an audience member and as an actor, theatre has sparked a flame inside of me that has never burnt out, and has been one part of my identity that was not erased by depression or anorexia. 

Sometimes, the right combination of cast and creatives come along and do not just create a piece of theatre, they create magic. 

At the lowest moment of my relapse, on one terrible night, I knew that I had to do something to quiet the darkness that was consuming me, so I purchased a ticket to see a show that I had seen before and very much enjoyed. What I wasn't anticipating, however, was a combination of incredible talent and energy that penetrated through every destructive layer of my mind and made me feel for the first time in months.

It was a catalyst for a myriad of inspirational and positive forces into my life. 

Since that night, I have been making weekly trips to see that same show and having exactly the same visceral reaction to what stoked something within me on that absolutely horrendous "rock bottom" night before I was readmitted back into hospital. 

Excessive? Yes. I have an extremely addictive personality, a trait that played a great part in anorexia gaining full control over my entire existence. I was addicted to losing weight. I was addicted to destroying myself. My addictive personality was instrumental in the self destruction that caused me to attempt to take my own life. However, it is also my addictive personality that drives my determination towards recovery. If I can find something that invokes such strong feelings within me that aren't destructive, be it theatre, art, books, music... I will indulge myself, I will allow myself to be exposed to something hopeful and positive time and time again, because I know of what the alternatives to not feeling them are. 

For me right now, a musical is one of many, many things that are aiding my recovery and allowing me to rediscover parts of myself that have remained buried under years of depression and self loathing.

I have never underestimated the ability a text, a piece of music, or a group of people, can have on helping people rebuild themselves. Art has the ability to transcend whatever boundaries or walls we build within ourselves, and connect our souls to something.

I have been introduced to not just some incredibly talented, but also some incredibly kind people through this particular piece of theatre. People who have given me hope that there is a "light at the end of the tunnel" and also that there are some remarkable acts of compassion out there, and also people who emit a tremendous amount of kindness into the world. Acts of which I was certain didn't exist in my world and that I had no hope for and no belief that I deserved them. 

I didn't ask or search for the adjustments to my core beliefs that have occurred over the last few months, but they came along at the perfect time and helped get me through something that I didn't ever see there being a way out of. 

We can just stumble across fortunate accidents, little serendipitous acts can come from nowhere, change the course of our lives and irrevocably alter us for the better.

I need to keep remembering that I can allow myself to hope. I can allow myself to believe that things can and will get better, because they can, and they will. 

some kind of wonderful .

“The obliterated place is equal parts destruction and creation. The obliterated place is pitch black and bright light. It is water and parched earth. It is mud and it is manna. The real work of deep grief is making a home there.”

Rebuilding yourself is hard. When you have been living with your self destruct button firmly switched on for the last decade of your life, there comes a point where it switches off and the dust around you settles for a few moments and allows you to take in a new reality. You stand around in a hazy mist of stillness and realise that, amongst all of these ruins of negative thoughts and rules that have controlled you for so long, there is a person in the midst of it all. A person who was taken over and manipulated by a disease to become merely a shadow of who they really once were. Once the depression becomes manageable, and the negative thoughts begin to slowly become less automatic, a space begins to clear up inside of your mind where the real you has been suppressed. 

It's terrifying. My reality has completely been altered. For so long, I was plagued with thoughts of self loathing, I lived by core beliefs and values that were all my illness, not me. I wasn't a person, I was an illness. 

My sense of identity was lost entirely. I didn't value myself at all, I hated myself. I had no self worth and measured it entirely by how much I weighed, or my ability to restrict my food intake. I could talk about the "reality" that my illness created both for me, and inside of me, but that isn't where I am now. I am in a state of repair, and healing, and I want to write about that. 

A very wise person told me "It takes so much courage to confront our challenges and insecurities and you are proving that we never have to let these take over our lives." I realised she was right. It does take courage to confront those. An enormous amount of courage, that nobody in recovery (in my experience) ever seems to give themselves credit for. I was so focussed on what I could or should be doing that I lost sight of what I was actually doing and that I wasn't actually letting this take over my life anymore. That in itself is a huge achievement, to pull yourself up from rock bottom, ask for help and give every single piece of yourself to getting better and building yourself into a healthy person again? I think that is possibly one of the bravest things that a person can do, and I did that. 

I am learning who I am and experiencing things without the illness, without a barrage of thoughts telling me that I am not worthy or good enough for anything in life. I am learning what interests me, what I can derive enjoyment and pleasure from and I can feel unadulterated joy without rhyme or reason. 

I am only in the "building the foundations" stage of recovery, letting the real me emerge out of the darkness and be free to think and feel as myself. There is so much work to do each and every day, but I have a small sense of self worth inside of me now. I am enough, and that is enough for now. 

this slope is treacherous.

Wow, it's been a while since I wrote on here. Everything got very dark and my depression spiralled to a very, very dark place. In November, I felt at such a loss with myself and with this illness that I couldn't see any way out other than to take my own life. Thankfully, I was taken into hospital and have begun a degree of trying to build myself back up. 

I saw this blog as a reflection of how ill I actually was. I had the "fake it until you make it" philosophy ingrained in me, so I felt the more I tried to show that I was okay, or making progress then the more progress I would actually make. But that isn't how life works. 

One lie of "I'm okay" created so many webs of lies about my recovery that all got entangled and meshed together. No I was not okay, no I was not making all of these epiphanies and discoveries, they were just small recognitions in my thoughts. I've felt like a fraud. Writing comes so naturally to me, I figured I could write myself out of my disorder. That in itself is a huge signal of how ill I was. I was sat at my computer, writing away under my middle name Bella, preaching about epiphanies I had had about my disorder, when my mind was still consumed with self loathing and hate. People who love me were reading my blog and not able to connect the words with the girl who wrote them. I was trying so hard to "fake it till I make it" that I was just faking it and making it less and less. 

My situation has changed dramatically since I was last here, I spent months as an inpatient after an overdose and I can, hand on heart, say that I have made some progress at least. At the moment, however, I'm really struggling,.

It's so hard to keep your head above the tide. It's so hard to not let the darkness consume us. It's a huge fight to not succumb to the bad thoughts and feelings, but doing so is an incredible feat. I am proud of myself for the days, even the moments, when I can keep my head above water, and laugh, and smile and feel something. Something that isn't pain. I have felt joy, I have felt joy and I am fighting to keep those moments alive. I want that joy in my life, I want it to stick. 

I am going to continue to keep writing under my middle name Bella, because that way, I can remain anonymous. I started to use that name because I didn't feel comfortable in my own skin at all, I hated every part of myself, down to the name, but now I'm learning to feel comfortable and it's so hard. I have been having bad day after bad day, but I've got a support network who are going through what I'm going through and know exactly what I'm feeling, and just having people there with that ability has made the most enormous change in me. 

I am under no illusions that this is going to be a quick process and that I will be "adjusted" any time soon. I'm just doing the best I can. Taking one day at a time is the only way you can do it really and even then, I feel like each day has so many different moments in that it is hard to class a day as a "good" or "bad" day really.

I guess I'll just have to take it as it comes, but I want to steer clear of writing about my feelings in a public forum, because I still try so hard to keep up this illusion that I'm okay and to commit myself to recovery, I have to be honest and open in every single aspect of my life. I will return to this when I feel I'm in a place where I don't have to hide parts of myself away and give an illusion that I am somebody I am not. 

Thank you all for your continued support and messages, I have seen that over 8,000 of you have been reading my little blog and I am sorry to anybody that I have let down who has believed in me. I just want to believe in myself and not see myself as never being good enough. 

the price of love is loss.

There is an enormous amount of love in the world. I think if we were to really look at humanity, look back at important events throughout history and the present, one thing that would stand out is love. It's out there, it's always been out there, but sometimes it can be really hard to find. We are a species that create war, who kill, who discriminate, who abuse, who hate. But we are also a species that has love in abundance. You look at tragic events in history, or even just in the news, and one thing that you won't hear about is a lack of love or the lack of an outpouring of help and community that derives from that. I've seen it over and over again first hand.

 Maybe that's why I am the way I am. I wouldn't quite classify a pessimist, I'm trying to bring myself out of that way of being (as hard as it is) I would like to be an optimistic person in everything. I'd like to say one day that I am an optimist, but I've had simply too many bad things happen to me again and again to have the mentality of an optimist instilled in me over a short amount of time But I am happy to say I am trying, and my god, I've seen some pretty amazing things.

For all the negative in my life, there is a positive that outweighs it. Control is outweighed by love. As simple as. I am at a place right this second where I'm perplexed and amazed at myself. Something has happened, and I'm too tired to go into it. But it's a negative force that has hit me many, many times. Now go back 6 months, and what has happened would have affected me so badly that I can guarantee you, I would have stopped eating because of it. I would have let the words stick with me, I'd have scrutinised every single meaning behind them and punished myself. Badly. I'd have been unable to see past them. I'd have replayed the words over and over again, getting more upset and agitated each time. I'd have let them get to me so badly that I would believe they were a truth, I'd believe that the mindset caused by them was "normal" and I'd have allowed my control and my self worth to slip. I would have believed I was a failure, I was this ridiculous, inane, pathetic excuse of a human and that would have been the tipping point for me. What was once a huge trigger, is no more. 

I need to attempt to keep reminding myself that I am a good person. I am a kind person. I am a worthy person. I'm fragile, I shouldn't be punished for simply stumbling as I move forwards.  I need to really believe that. 

There are people out there who choose to be my family. Who choose to love me. Who choose to be there for me. Who choose to pick me up when I fall, hold my hand whilst I stumble, and bask in the joy alongside me when I feel it. They are the people that count. They are the ones who mean the most, who have furthered me along in this incredible journey. It's down to them that I am here now. One of them sent me this beautiful poem in the week;

The sun will shine tomorrow

The rain will somehow end

This is not only a promise

It’s just the way it is

Bad times don’t last forever

The tough times they never stay

The heartache and the let down

Will soon go away

In times of deep sadness

The pain is all too real

And it’s hard to believe

That with time the hurt will heal

The dark clouds that hang above

Will eventually move on

And the storms that dance around

Will soon be gone

Stay strong and keep in mind

That again, the sun will shine

Isn't that beautiful? I am so grateful that there are people looking out for me and who think to send me beautiful things like that. 

My outlook changes each day, some days I feel like giving up, but today, I have felt so in control and so overwhelmed at the love for me that I am proud of myself. And others are proud of me too. People I love being proud of me for good reasons is incredible. 

one blow from caving in.

I wish there was a way to describe how it feels. How it seeps into every part of your brain and paralyses you. How you are just a puppet, helpless, pathetic, whilst it pulls the strings. A master puppeteer, that's what it is. It controls you. It controls every single part of you.

It shows you over and over again what you could be, what you should be striving for, but then it constantly reminds you that you're never going to get there. Your goal is unattainable because you are weak. You are pathetic. You are a failure. It's your fault. It laughs as you try again and again and again. It watches with satisfaction as you can't pass a reflective surface without breaking down in tears of shame and disgust because you hate the way you look.

There is never a moment where you can look at yourself with complete ease and clarity and say "Okay, I'm skinny enough, I'm thin now, I'll stop" the disease is a never ending spiral of discontent and dysmorphia. 

You measure your self worth in how much you weigh and what size in clothes you are. You don't choose that. You don't choose to be crying on your bedroom floor because your size 0 jeans are getting a bit more snug than previous. You don't choose to constantly be looking for flaws on every part of your body. Not that you have to look because there's a voice in your head pointing them all out and screaming at you to sort it out. 

This disease has stolen so many years of my life, yet I found myself today thinking that I am a fraud. I'm not skinny, I'm not thin. I don't care if people say that that's my body dysmorphia talking, but it's a truth. I don't know whether to be proud, or to breakdown.

It's a constant battle. I want to be better, but I want to be thin. I can't see any how you can become "recovered" and not be "fat" I wish I could learn to differentiate between the two.

I hate that it got it's control back today, but it was only temporary. I want to be better than I am. I want to keep bettering myself. I want to be healthy and happy and continue to embrace the love that surrounds me.

Ultimately, being happy is worth more than anything.

I will not be made to feel bad for being proud of the good days. It's taken me 8 years to even have good days. I haven't fought this for 1/3 of my life to not be proud of my small victories. Just because I am having good days doesn't mean they're all like that. They're not. But I'm not going to not celebrate and revel in the good days, the days when that's exactly what they are; good days. I had years worth of good days stolen from me, I'm not letting these ones just wash over me, I'm letting them sink into every pore of my body, I'm letting them in and I am celebrating in them. I will not apologise for that. 

Love is prevalent in recovery. Love for yourself and love for your body. Whilst I may not love my body, I'm beginning to try to learn to love myself.  We are all worth something. We are all worth more than numbers on a scale. We are all worth more than this disease. We all have our own special qualities to put out there and to give to others. No one person is worth more than another. There is beauty within each and every one of us. We all hold a unique and special place in this world, never forget that. We may have to fight to find our worth, to find our beauty, to find that we are more than numbers on scale. But I promise you, the fight is worth it. At the other end, there is an abundance of love and acceptance waiting for you. I'm hoping that I can realise that and get there soon. 

all at once my heart took flight.

Sometimes, I forget that my mind is constantly at war with itself. The white noise very quickly became a normality to me, and scrutinising every thought and every interaction, and the constant self criticism became a part of daily life. I fought, but I never won the battle, let alone the war. There was always some part of me that could not get out, no matter how hard I tried to swim, the current of fragmented, disordered thinking patterns and behaviour held me under. 

When I can have these tiny, fleeting moments of joy, the noise inside my mind stops. The self criticism and doubt, the black and white thinking, the pain... It all just temporary subsides and and something else is begins to filter through for a brief moment. It's taking a huge gasp of breath and breathing life into you. 

It's like the feeling of finally getting water after days in the desert, it's like being wrapped up in a warm blanket after getting soaked from the rain, it's like finally you're warm inside, your brain quietens down and your mind, body and soul are able to soak up positivity. Sometimes, it's just for a few seconds, but my god, those seconds are worth it. I revel in each and every second. I live those moments, I let them in, I let them in through every pore in my body, I live them with every fibre of my being. They are the moments that make this battle less treacherous.

Sometimes it is impossible to see beyond the sadness and the pain. When there is a voice constantly in your head telling you that you are nothing, nobody, that you are a burden to everybody around you, that you deserve the pain you feel, that you should be punishing yourself for simply existing, and that you would be better off dead, it's incredibly hard to block out. But just getting a few moments of relief from that, for muting the voice, and letting happiness in, creates a volume switch in your brain. You are able to turn the volume of the voice down slightly, even by a fraction. One good moment can set a series of doubts to what that voice is telling you. The more you get, the more you start to realise that the voice isn't telling you the truth. You are worthy. 

I can't feel love because of that voice. I can barely feel anything at all, and when I did feel, all I felt was sadness, pain, self loathing and shame. 

I have had the most incredible few days in the last week, where I have actually felt joy.  My intake of love is increasing by the day. 

it's cloud illusions I recall.

I always seem to accidentally  preempt bad days by talking about the good ones (though I'm not going to let that stop me) today was a bad day.

I had another slip up. When you wake up with low self esteem and feeling like the world is pretty much against you, it's almost impossible to change your outlook. No amount of CBT tricks can override that feeling for me. I just have to roll with it. So I did, I hauled myself out of bed, endured a panic attack, faced the struggle of doing my make up and hair with one hand (I had to take a trip to A&E yesterday due to an accident at work which has damaged the nerves in my little finger so it's strapped to another finger and pretty much immobile) and made my way to work.

I can sense when it's one of those days that won't really get better, unless a miracle comes along, so I try not to push anything too far. I did some meditation, I took my valium on the train, I listened to music, I didn't rush, I went at my own pace, and I thought about all of the positives in my life.

I had potential things to look forward to after work, if not the following day, and also on Tuesday. I thought if I focus on them if trying to "be present" didn't work as well as it could, then I'd be okay.

Over the few hours I was in work, my skin got thinner and thinner. My self loathing grew larger and larger. It was like I was a ticking time bomb waiting to go off, any second I was just going to erupt and the tears would come and wouldn't stop.

Thankfully, they held back until I'd at least finished work. Then, not long after, sure enough, I was walking through my town's city centre and I had never felt more alone. I felt unwanted. I felt like I was nobody.  I felt like I was some kind of monster for being so difficult and such hard work to love. I felt like everybody was staring at me, pitying me. I thought about how my illness has affected me, how my life is so different to other people my own age. What a failure I've been. How I wasn't even able to finish my A Levels because of my illnesses. How I am too sensitive and how I let myself upset over the most innate of things. 

I spent my entire bus journey quietly sobbing. Gaining even more unwanted attention. I just listened to "Glory and Gore" by Lorde and prayed to God that I would be home as quickly as possible.

Thankfully I was, but I was so angry at myself for being so self loathing and sensitive and just annoying. So I went and threw up. And it felt great. It felt like I finally had some kind of control over what I was feeling for the first time all day.

But then the guilt hit me. It hit me hard. I felt disgusted with myself. I felt so terrible that I'd allowed myself to "give in" I just cried even more and I could feel a vicious cycle coming on. So I just got into bed and I slept. 

I feel so much lighter now. So much clearer. The fog that I woke up with wrapped around my brain, has gone, and I feel like myself again. 

I got myself out of it as quick as I got myself into it. It's something I now have proof of, I can do it, however rapidly I'm spiralling, I can change my course. It is possible. When I'm bad, my mind keeps me in this illusion of an infinite dark sky where there's never any cracks for the sunlight to get in. But that isn't true, and once I'm able to show myself that is not true, and what I'm feeling is just an illusion my brain is playing on me, I can make my way through.