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.

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.

you lock me out and knock me down

I feel out of synch. Like my world is rotating on a different axis to usual. Everything is off balance and I feel I'm grasping for something solid to hold onto but I just get air. Empty. I feel empty. There is nothing left inside of me and I've got nothing else to give. Everything is moving too fast, it's all moving around me and I cannot hold onto any of it.

I'm trying to find some semblance of order to my thoughts. Rapid cycling moods are something I thought I'd gotten used to, and then they come along and sweep me off my feet, I can't catch my breath, I can't still myself enough to catch my breath.

Did you ever do that thing when you were a kid, where you put your arms out and just spun around in circles until you got dizzy and just fell to the floor? Then you'd giggle and get back up, and everything around you was swirling all over the place, but it gave you a high, so you'd put your arms back out and spin again, faster and faster. Bang. You'd hit the floor again. There was a dizzy adrenaline rush that made you feel so warm inside that anything felt possible. I could lie there for what felt like forever, dizzy, breathless, but I felt like I'd been flying, and my landing heightened every single one of my senses.

Now imagine that again, you're an adult, the setting has changed; instead of holding your arms out by your sides, they are rigid and stuck, you are moving, walking through a menial every day task. But then out of nowhere, you start spinning, that dizzy adrenaline rushing through your blood stream, everything is swirling around you and no matter how hard you try, you cannot find a point of stillness amongst all of the dizzy chaos. Everything is just moving and moving and you're going faster and faster, but there's no landing, there's no stopping. That is what rapid cycling moods feel like.

I cannot find a still point amongst the chaos. I can't slow down. I can't control anything, my moods are moving so quickly that I can't concentrate, I can't focus on anything, it's near enough impossible. It's like I'm on a carousel, but I can't get off. I want to, but I can't. That same adrenaline rush is sweeping through my system and I'm flying high, so high. I want everything to stop, I want to get off, I want to find a still point to focus on a slow it all down, to bring me down, but before I can even think about how much I want to find that still point, my mind is already bringing up a hundred other things.

Those are the highs. When you're flying so high, at some point, you have to land. The carousel eventually has to stop and you eventually have to get off. The lows are bleak, black, an infinite abyss. Emptiness overwhelms me. I feel the absence of everything I've lost in each and every one of my pores. Sadness seeps out of me, from every little crevice, every little part of me. It evaporates out of my skin, it pours out of me every time I exhale.

I try. I try so hard to battle it, I try so hard to fight it and not let it paralyse me. I try so hard. But I'm not tough, I'm not a warrior. So sometimes I fail. Sometimes I give into it. I let it consume me, inch by inch, muscle by muscle, thought by thought.

I cry. I cry until my head hurts and my eyes ache. Sometimes I just want those tears to drown me, to take me under and hold me underneath them until I'm lost completely in their power. I pick at my skin, at my lips, at any part of me that I can grasp onto. I pick at them to break myself apart. To strip pieces of me off, bit by bit. To break myself to my very core, so that I can start again. Self loathing doesn't come with a care manual, it doesn't tell you to stop, it doesn't tell you that you don't deserve to be broken apart; that you are already whole enough to live through a day, a minute, an hour without pain. I lose all sight of hope, I'm trapped in my own little purgatory of bleakness, I'm wading through misery and I can't see an end in sight. I'm drowning in it. I let it into my lungs, I breathe it into my system. It's filling me up from the inside out and nothing can stop it. I can see the sand of an hourglass moving slowly, as I try and scream and fight my way out of this glass case of despair that has trapped me inside myself.

People try and break me out, they tell me nice things, they give me pretty words of hope and promise and encouragement. But they don't reach their intended target, they never do. I absorb them as much as the despair allows me to, I try to inhale them deeply enough to reach my core, to reach the nucleus of the self loathing, to break it apart and shatter it into so many pieces that it will never be able to form itself again. But they can never reach deep enough.

Criticism, on the other hand, reaches right inside of the central nervous system of the misery and self loathing, and gives it life, it gives it energy and fuels it to carry on; to keep feasting on my spirit.

"At 24, I would have hoped you would have grown out of staying in bed all day"

Simple words of disgust, veiled with self righteousness, thrown my way, directing themselves at the very heart and soul of the depression, fuelling it with enough energy to consume me further and further.

You are a failure. You couldn't fight me today and she judged you for that. She thinks you are a failure because in that moment you weren't stronger than me. You were a failure, you are a failure. You're fat and you're pathetic and you're never going to be free of me.

Depression has been feasting on me, I can feel it taking me back under it's sweeping tide, swallowing me whole.

I hope I'm strong enough to fight it.

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. 

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"

people are better in the abstract

There is a certain amount of recklessness that comes with despair.

I show myself to people, I give them little glimpses, I show them little fragments of myself that I assume to be true pieces of me, who I am inside.

It takes so much out of me to be able to do that; to show myself to someone and allow myself to be judged, or worst, abandoned.

On paper, it seems like it should be easier to hold people at arms length, to choose not to show them the little pieces of who you are, because then you can't get attached and then they won't leave you.

If only life was that simple.

We gravitate towards different people, we merge, we collide... We can try to stop ourselves from letting people in, we can build our walls thick and high, we can turn ourselves into an insurmountable mass. But all we gain is loneliness and self destruction.

You turn inwards and when all your walls cave in on you, it's you that is left in the centre of it. You're the burnt out grenade canister, the wreckage is around you. So why not have other people there to help you sift through it all.

I've learned the hard way that people are just temporary. Some people come into our lives for a very short amount of time, and then they're gone again. It's as simple as that. We can't grasp onto people for dear life, people will come and people will go.

It's a really hard lesson to learn, I've lost my most favourite of all human beings, they've gone and I'm still grieving for those each and everyday. It dictates every connection I make, every piece of myself I show to others.

Recovery is teaching me to show myself to more people and be more open, I'm trying to harness all of what I've learned and am still learning but sometimes I get it wrong. I'm going to slip up and I'm going to make mistakes, I'm allowed to do that and I absolutely hate that I feel like I have to justify myself.

I don't even know what this post is, I just needed to write something and this is it, I hate it and will probably delete it, but for now, whilst I sob in a coffee shop, take this post.

This was the end of this entry, until:

Tonight, a combination of things happened and so many things just fell into place.

I have had an awful day, I've cried, I've screamed, I've cried some more... But then I didn't. Things felt better, things felt more manageable, things felt within reach.

I learnt some stuff about myself. I met up with a friend and at one point she had an anxiety attack, and I felt like Rogue from X-Men (she can gain the super powers of anybody she touches, for non nerd folk) and I just seemed to absorb all of her anxiety. It filled every single part of me, and it consumed me in a way I can only describe as a tidal wave, because after it had flooded every single part of me, as quickly as it appeared, it was gone.

I had a similar experience an hour later, where I met someone who is such a beautiful and happy spirit, and her happiness just consumed me.

What I said earlier about people colliding... We stumble upon people and sometime's their impact is profoundly important to us, maybe it's a sliding doors situation, if we hadn't had that one tiny interaction with them, everything might be different. It's so weird to think about.

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. 

everything that happens is from now on.

I've finally done it, I've started to put this blog "out there" so to say. Up until today, only four or five  people in my life knew it existed. The only people who knew the real me, what was going on with me. But today I decided it was time to start sharing it amongst people, and the truth be told, I'm terrified.

These are people who call me "constantly happy" "so bubbly" "a ball of energy" these are people who I have spent weeks, months, years fooling. People who think they know me are now going to find out they don't know me at all. I'm not the person they think I am. Are they going to think I'm weak? I'm a bad person for not letting them in? Are they suddenly going to pity me and not have fun with me any more? 

So, to all of you who are reading this and thinking "what?!?!" I'm sorry that I wasn't strong enough to tell you who I really am and share this with you. It doesn't mean I respect you or like you any less. It's just very hard for me to let my walls down, and take this "mask" off. 

I just want to make absolutely clear that I am not doing this for me, I'm doing it for other people out there who go through what I go through every day. I've already had messages from people who have thanked me for starting this because they can relate to it and it has caused them to take action and get help. And that is all I want. I'm not doing this for attention, I don't want people to feel like they are walking on eggshells around me now that you know. Just please understand that I have my good and my bad days, I'm not a complete and utter mess trying to pretend to be okay all the time. 

life is a beautiful mess.

"These words on a page, carry the pain, they don't free it."

Sometimes I wonder, is writing really a blessing? Or is it a curse? I've had people tell me that my writing is beautiful (I hate repeating compliments I receive, because 9/10 times I never believe them and hate repeating them because it makes me sound pretentious) but my writing isn't beautiful. I write my thoughts, I write my mind, and my mind isn't "beautiful" my mind is a mess. My mind is a maze of twisted complexity, I suffer from black and white thinking, I constantly question everything and search for hidden meanings, I overreact to everything, I can't process any of my emotions at a "normal" (god, I hate that word) rate, and I have negative thought after negative thought. 

So when I write, I'm really only writing my mind. A thought. A question. A moment. All of them are fleeting, in the grand scheme of my life, each and every piece that I write is a fleeting moment in time. Do I really want my thoughts, my messed up mind immortalised? 

Sometimes I think that when you write about something, it loses it's meaning. The original moment or thought you were writing about diminishes and it becomes quite literally words on a piece of paper, or through a blog, or through a screen. The thought is gone, the inner workings of my mind have changed, that no longer exists in the present now, it's gone. So is writing it down where it can never be forgotten something that is productive? 

I haven't suddenly decided to give up on my blog or my journalling or any of that. I'm just thinking through my writing, I guess. I think it's nice to chronicle your state of mind when you're going through recovery, or even anything really, to look back and see how things have progressed, how your mind has moved forward, how you have grown and flourished. 

But in reality, do you really need to be reminded of thoughts you had? Do you really need it there to see? Can't it just be lost along with the hundreds of thousand other memories that we create and forget? 

black and white begins to colour in.

"Lead me to the truth and I will follow you with my whole life." 

My mind is a maze. To me, if I'm not the perfect person, perfect at everything I do, then in my mind, I'm a bad person, I'm a failure and deserve to be punished. There's no in between for me. One mistake, no matter how trivial, means that I'm a terrible person and can't live with myself.

There is no in between with how I react to things. It's either a complete overreaction; sobbing, hysteria, shouting, screaming. Or nothing. There's no middle ground. I can't just take something on board, I have to run through every single "bad" scenario possible and then freak out over all of these imaginary scenarios. It's so unhealthy and it's something that I wasn't really aware of until today. I knew I overreacted a lot, but I never really looked at how or why. 

The last few days have hurt my heart a lot. But I think I'm better for it. I'm trying to tell myself that pretending that I'm okay brings a whole new series of problems, it affects every state of my being, it penetrates through to my relationships. It puts too much pressure on those who love me and it leaves them at a loss. Pretending I'm okay brings a whole new cycle of behaviours that have been brought to light to me that I didn't even know existed. When you're so busy putting up a mask, you don't think of the domino effect that it has on your behaviours and emotions. As long as you're pretending that you're okay, it doesn't matter. But it does.

I  have been told of the behaviours that I've been displaying, I know need to stop pretending that I'm okay and look at all of the issues that pretending that I'm okay causes for me and the people closest to me.

My behaviour has caused resentment and dislike towards me by people that I adore and who love me and all it makes me want to do is drop my "mask" and just focus on everything that comes about because I have that mask up. It's been so ingrained in me for so long because I've spent so long pretending I'm okay that I've never noticed or been shown the ramifications of what that does.

Mood altering medications do exactly what they say; they alter your moods, they can make you more low, they can bring you up, they can cause suicidal thoughts, they can do a lot of stuff. But I don't solely blame those, I blame the fact I've spent so long trying to keep this mask on - even to those closest to me who I tell virtually everything to, I keep some stuff hidden from them to not cause them worry or pain - that I've failed to see what that has done to me, my behaviour, my thinking and what it's done to those around me. And this isn't something new, this has been ongoing for years.

But how do you just stop pretending and and actually really face up to what you're going through 100% without breaking down and letting it win? I don't know. 

the inevitability of prolonged discomfort.

There comes a time when you are faced with a social situation that you have to attend. You are obliged to go to, and there is no excuse to get out of it, no matter how many scenarios you plan out in your head.

Ordinarily, I like getting dressed up, going out and having fun. Even if it's just for a few hours, it gives me a perfect distraction from the 96,000 thoughts going round my mind, and just allows me to pretend that I'm okay without having to maintain that "absolutely fine, positively happy" mask that I have to put on when I'm at work. Throughout my late teens and up until I was 21, I loved going out. My job meant that after work we'd go for drinks, off to clubs, and most nights for nearly three years straight ended in the early hours of the morning, arriving home in a taxi, often crossing my Mother on the doorstep on her way to work. I wasn't one of those girls who went out to get drunk, many nights I'd only have one or two drinks, it was simply the company and nightlife that I thrived off. It was the ideal scenario for my depression and my eating disorders; drinks at night, sleep all day - no time for eating or to stop and take note of where your mind was. In my little head, it was perfect. 

Anybody who has or currently works in theatre will know that it's a very antisocial job, you end up spending a lot of your time with the people you work with, often planning nights out after performances, simply being on the same work schedule and sleeping pattern made it very easy to be extremely social despite the antisocial hours. Despite having lots of people around me, I was still incredibly lonely. I brushed any negative feelings aside and simply lived for the moment. But I was struggling. 

Fast forward to a few years later. I look back at my old self and I almost envy her, being able to ignore the overwhelming feelings that consume my mind 24/7 is a luxury that I lost a long time ago. I get fleeting feelings of happiness, which I am so thankful for because without those, I don't know where I would be, but at some point, "it" always creeps back up on me. 

Social situations are something I now dread. The thought of being somewhere that I am not 100% sure that I want to be, or in the company of people that I trust implicitly absolutely terrifies me. When I am overwhelmed with thoughts of self loathing, or my mood drops, or I am triggered by something, it does not matter where I am or who I am with, it will simply become too much and I will completely flip; there are tears, followed by panic attacks, followed by what I call "Zombie mode" where I go into what can only be described as an almost catatonic state. The thought of that happening when I'm out, or with people who don't know what to do or say to me terrifies me. Maybe that's letting it win, maybe that's me being defeatist, because I have given in, I have let it control what I do and where I go. But I know my mind, and I know that these happen too regularly to risk it, for now, that is the best course of action for me. 

So on Saturday I was faced with an occasion that required my presence; an entire day in the company of my family and extended family, in all around 25-30 people. My family as a whole tend to only get together around 4/5 times a year, so it wasn't something I could skip out on, especially as it was one of the very younger members' (whom I adore) third birthday party. 

It was hard. I struggled. I suffered. I didn't show once how I was feeling, or if I did, it just wasn't mentioned. But I did it, I got through the day, and I am so proud of myself for doing so. 

What I am also proud of is the fact that straight after I got off the train home, I went to a work friends' hen party, where I was yet again in a crowd of about 14 people. I was terrified at the prospect of having to put on a facade for two situations, one after the other with no real pause for clarity, for almost 17 hours. One I can just about handle at a time, but two at once? I didn't think it was possible, but I did it. 

Small victories. It is those I am proudest of. 

I am paying for it now. I woke up just mentally and emotionally exhausted, with crippling anxiety and the inability to feel or think coherently. But that's okay, because I achieved a huge step yesterday, today I am simply "suffering the consequences"

Every action has a reaction. Every action we take has a consequence. If the action is something positive, hold onto that. My consequence is simply my mind coping with the strength that it had garnered for a prolonged period of time yesterday. I am not seeing today as a defeat, I am seeing yesterday as a step forward.