My story so far (part 2)

 I began drinking and going to parties when I was 15, a little later than my peers but in the grand scheme of things it really doesn’t matter. I found alcohol was an amazing release from me; I lost all inhibitions and didn’t care what anyone thought of me which was an unbelievable relief. However, it was in no way permanent. I think it’s quite funny writing it now because it sounds so angsty but I was using alcohol to cover pain of being me (because my life was/is so hard...). After time alcohol stopped being a fun outlet but I began to get extremely emotional every time I drank and I would let all my thoughts and feelings out.  I also would have days where I would need to let my emotions out so I would go home lock myself in my room and put on loud music and just cry and scream because I would feel so pathetic and inconsequential… I think that’s the right word. When I would have these outbursts of emotion I started to cut myself because the emotional pain seemed to numb everything and I just wanted to feel something other than hate for myself. 

Drunkenness enabled me to put myself out there in the way that I wasn’t shy around boys or scared of rejection so I basically started making out with boys to try and make myself feel better about myself which has worked so well for so many people… (again with the sarcasm). Anyway there was a boy who I actually really liked and who I believe liked me because he wanted to hang out with me after the night we hooked up. That went on for a bit but then he decided he didn’t want a girlfriend and broke my little heart, but then as soon as I was around again he wanted to still “hang out” with me as boys at that age do. So in my awesome logic I decided if I slept with him he would want to keep seeing me… yeah, not so much. So I was left feeling so hurt and regretted but with my little cherry popped that just meant I started sleeping around looking for something to make me feel better about myself and feeling like someone thought I was pretty for that night.  I needed some sort of external evidence that I wasn’t everything I thought I was but sadly teenage boys and girls are not the right people to give that to a person because everyone is so self-absorbed in their own lives at that age.

Anyway that continued on into Uni with the self-hate and self-abuse taking over my life, even though I did try to keep it hidden and never talked about it. I didn’t think anyone could help me it was just the way I was and there was no end. Those kinds of thoughts led to numerous suicidal thoughts and more cutting. I never tried to do it properly because I didn’t want to screw it up and be the girl that tried to commit suicide. And have to live with knowing that people pitied you or were always on suicide or watch or something. Granted I did tell Estelle numerous times in drunken emotional break downs. (I haven’t told you about Estelle, but she’s my beautiful cousin and best friend who didn’t live in the same town as me but who I would spend every summer holiday with and who I admired and put on such a pedestal in my teenage years because she is so beautiful and just seems to be loved by everyone and is happy).

After years of this something clicked (about 5 years ago) and I decided I had to start being happy. A boy did kick start this motivation when he literally told me I shouldn’t have come home with him one night when he called me for the ole’ booty call saying I need to start having more respect for myself and that if I keep saying yes people will keep using me. He didn’t say this in a mean way or anything but it was just something I needed to hear. I knew what I was doing for the wrong reasons but I just hadn’t really made a commitment to stop. My dad had always told me that being happy was a choice and that everything is a choice, but I had always kind of taken this as some sort of dad thing and never really thought about what he was saying until now. I decided that I was going to choose to be happy and that I was in charge of my life and I didn’t want to go with the motions any more. When I was 13 or 14 my dad had giving me a book called “Being Happy” and I had always kept it but never read it so I decided now was the time. I read it and it gave me some insights and ideas that I still use today. The main idea I remember from it is that are thoughts are like magnets and our beliefs are engrained in us incredibly deeply and it is and will be extremely difficult to change thought patterns and beliefs. However, this was definitely a step in the right direction. I was in no way fixed after reading this book but I was motivated and inspired to stop being a pessimist and negative. I realised that my inner thoughts of being pathetic and a fat slut were just self-fulfilling prophecies. I didn’t like being these things but if I kept telling myself that’s what I was then I would keep acting like that and I wasn’t doing anything to stop being like this. So I began my life long mission of bettering myself. 

Soon after I began this journey I met my current boyfriend of 5 years, Sam. Still to this day I believe I finally attracted a nice boy that wouldn’t necessarily use me because of all my positive vibes at that time in my life. Something clicked with us and we just spent so much time together. I had never experienced anything like this before, a boy wanting to hang out with me when we’re not drinking.  We didn’t really go on dates or anything or try to impress each other too much I just would hang out at his house and watch movies or something but just be together. I don’t even think either of us intended for it to get as serious as it did. I sure as hell wasn’t expecting it to last but I was in the mindset that I wasn’t doing it because of him. I was enjoying his company and wasn’t always trying to impress him I don’t remember really hiding anything from him at that point in my life.  It took us a good number of months to accept that yes we did actually really like each other and we weren’t going anywhere. In this in between time I was known as Sam’s “not-girlfriend” to his friends and my friends just knew Sam as this guy I was hanging out with.  We both found it really difficult to actually say we’re in a relationship. I can’t speak for him but I know my thoughts were around the fact that I had never had a boyfriend before and I was sure I was going to screw it up somehow. Even though I was throwing out this entire positive vibes I hadn’t fixed myself so I still had that negative thinking going on I just was trying to focus on being positive and ignoring those. I remember occasionally I would get too drunk for my own good and would let some of my negative thoughts out of the bag when Sam was around. I distinctly remember times when I would have these moments which I considered/consider to be moments of weakness where I would explode with emotion after bottling it up and Sam would try to make me feel better by saying nice things to me and about me and it would make me cry even harder because I would just be thinking that he doesn’t know everything about me yet and inevitably he will realise I’m pathetic and ugly. I could not help but assume everyone sees me the way I saw myself. There was no other reality in my view.

Around this time I had also changed Uni courses from engineering to accounting as I had taken 2 and a half years to realise engineering wasn’t for me and I really was just doing it because I was comparing myself to my brothers who are both engineers. I desperately wanted to be as “smart” as them but I had let this go and realised I have to do what’s right for me. I never wanted to do business because my brothers had always told me it was the slackers Uni course but after doing accounting 101, I realised that this was the kind of maths I liked and this course was the right thing for me.

Somewhere over the next year I stopped trying to better myself, I don’t know why but maybe I got comfortable with Sam and Uni and I slipped back into my old negative thinking ways. I’ve been trying to pinpoint when I started binging and overeating in the way that I was really using it to cover up emotions and hiding it from other people. I remember having pig out nights with friends and eating a shit load but I don’t remember hiding food and compulsively eating until about ¾ years ago. I remember days when I would be walking home from Uni and intentionally by-passing the Coles to pick up a bag of cookies which I would immediately want to start eating a soon as I walked out of Coles. I would of course open them as I was walking but now want anyone to see me so I would try to be sneaky about getting a cookie from the grocery bag, and not do it when I saw a car coming that might see me.  I didn’t realise how strange it was at the time but I just “knew” that if people saw me eating the cookies they were immediately think, “what a fatty scoffing down a whole packet of cookies.” I have later learned that I had begun to care so much what people were thinking that I had started assuming I knew what they were thinking and “mind-reading”. This just sent me into a massive negative spiral as if it wasn’t bad enough I was against me but now I had the whole world thinking I was weird and ugly. I was still with Sam at this time but I honestly could not understand why he was with me. I just thought he liked having someone around to screw and to watch TV with. I was easier than trying to find someone new. I couldn’t accept compliments or see anything positive about myself again. I had officially gone back to what I was before I met Sam except not sleeping around or drinking as much which I think led me to the food.  I would just get those cookies and eat whatever was remaining as I watched unrealistic TV shows about love and drama to entertain the part of me that was still craving to be a princess and to be swept off my feet. These obsessions kept me from being grateful for what I had/have which is an amazing boy who does love me even with all my faults.

I kept up the eating and the hiding of my binges from my cousin Estelle, who I had been living with since I moved to Brisbane and Sam for maybe a year. I had put on quite a bit of weight and was continually trying new diets but they would never work because I would always be cheating. But the more I said I wanted to lose weight and would “go on a diet” the sneakier I would have to be with cheating and the more I would eat on my binges. One day I just clicked that something was not right when I would come home from the gym with a cheesecake or 2 packets of tim tams (because it was on special) and quickly go upstairs to my room and have to eat the whole thing because I couldn’t waste it but neither could I put it in the fridge because then Estelle would see how much I had eaten. Then once I had finished the binge I would have to hide the rubbish and put it straight into the outside bins underneath other rubbish to ensure nobody saw it and realise I’d eaten the whole thing. I was so self-aware and self-conscious that I hated the thoughts that I “knew” Estelle or Sam would think if they knew, which were of course the harsh terrible thoughts that I already thought about myself. I knew I had to tell Sam if I wanted to change anything, I had to admit I had a problem and this was the way I was going to do it. I did tell Estelle and my mum about it but I don’t think they realised how much it was screwing me up. They had always said everything’s ok in moderation and they just thought this was coming from my depriving myself with diets and that sort of thing.

I decided I wanted to start seeing a psychologist because something in my head was not right. The way I thought about myself was in no way normal or healthy. I felt good about this because I was actually doing something about my issues and acknowledging my problems. It was this psychologist that pointed out that what I had been doing for all these years was called “mind reading” in psychology world. I was projecting my thoughts onto other people and I actually usually don’t have any evidence that people are actually thinking these thoughts. This was the beginning of my second attempt of self betterment (is that even a word? I like it :) )

Todays thoughts

So I hope people reading this are looking for someone or something to relate to in regards to depression, eating issues and life in general because I know that’s what I have started looking for. Even though I have been through many times when I feel like I’m the only person in the world who feels like this or who is like this I do understand that I’m not special in that way. I always smile when I hear that thought in my head because you would think that someone with low self-worth would be looking for something to make them special but in fact realising that we are just human and there is billions of us in the world humbles me. It makes me realise that even though I am just 1 person in such a huge world that firstly there is enough space for me and I deserve to be around just as much as every other human on this planet.

Certainly, this train of thought does not constantly run through my mind. Just tonight I became so self-absorbed with my negative thoughts that I was overwhelmed and couldn’t help but cry. It is a constant pattern I need to break when I start feeling good about myself and feeling like I’m makeing progress. I start by being ok with talking about what I’m eating an writing everything down even when I have foods that I usually don’t have that aren’t the best for me. Then I start having these foods more often and not telling Sam about it but still writing it down telling myself that I’m still recognising that I’m having these foods even if I’m not telling Sam and just avoiding the disappointment I think he is feeling. Then I stop writing it down and just keep eating what I want. Generally it’s something on top of the food that triggers me like a stressful day at work or in today’s case the disappointment I felt when I found out that I wouldn’t actually be able to see my Dad before he flew out of Brisbane. I think the sadness I felt was amplified because I had been lying to Sam and I couldn’t keep my feelings in check and Sam could tell something was wrong on top of me just telling him I was tired and sad because of my Dad. That boy is sometimes too perceptive; I can’t bloody hide anything from him for too long. Anyway all he needs to do is call me on my lying and eating and I start feeling so angry and defensive which then turns into sadness and tears. My first thoughts are around being spiteful towards Sam and trying to ask why he cares so much and I wish he would just leave me alone. I also get so angry because he is more focused on the lying where I’m more focused around the food. He says things like “if I can’t trust you to tell me what your eating that how can I trust that you won’t cheat on me?” To me, cheating on Sam is incomprehensible because I know how hurt he would be and I could never do that to him however what I eat I seem to take as only my business and isn’t the same as lying about sleeping with someone else. I can’t really pinpoint why I think like this and I get the fact that me lying to him about this is detrimental to me getting over my overeating issues however I don’t see it on the same level as lying about anything else. This is generally the point where I start crying because I just think about how much he must be hating me right now if he thinks I could cheat on him… and then I start going into the negative thoughts about how pathetic I must be to not be able to just talk about it. I can’t even say why I lied because there is no excuse. Everything say is just an excuse to feel better about eating something I shouldn’t have. The thing is, I’ve learned that there shouldn’t be any foods that I shouldn’t have. I should be able to tell Sam everything I ate because I have nothing to feel guilty about. I just have to recognise that if I’m going to eat crap constantly there is consequences. I’m not just saying that to make myself feel guilty it’s something that I need to be ok with and realise that eating crap every now and then probably won’t make me a big heffa it’s the every day habits that fuck you up.

Anyway the point of this story is that I’m still broken and that I want to fix myself and until I can accept the fact that I probably will never be completely fixed I will continue to go through these cycles of emotions and negative thoughts. I should never let myself become completely oblivious to food because that is a massive sign that I am making excuses to myself to feel better and not taking responsibility for what I’m doing. I’m glad that Sam is around to pull me back into reality but I always hate it how it takes him saying he doesn’t want to put up with my lying anymore to make me snap out of it. Yes, I initially get angry when he says these kinds of things because I think he is making ultimatums and then sad because I think that this is last time and he is going to leave me. I want to do this for us as well as myself but then I get sad if I think I’m doing it just for him. Ugh being in my head gets confusing…

Well I have many more a thought to write but that’s enough venting and word vomiting for tonight.

Have a nice night/day people.

I’m not even sure how to begin this as I have never been a writer or read a lot of blogs but I thought what the hell what’s the harm in giving this blogging thing a go. This I mainly for my mental health as I have become aware over the last few years that I have developed issues with overeating and binging. I haven’t gotten to the point of purging but the amount of times I have been in the bathroom and been so angry and frustrated that I couldn’t make myself vomit is too many to count. I have thought about how great life would be if I could eat and eat and never put on weight which inevitably leads to thoughts of purging to avoid this weight gain.

Anyway, I guess I should give some background to my story in case anyone can pick up things could help in my pursuit of happiness and self-love.

I do not have any life scaring stories or issues with my family which surprisingly has still been the  cause many moments of guilt and loathing a I would beat myself up about being so selfish that I hated my life when there was absolutely nothing wrong with it. I have a beautiful mother and father who have been nothing but supporting of all my decisions and who have provided so many opportunities and have taken me and my two brothers from Zimbabwe to Hawaii and finally settling in Australia. I have not had to endure any family tragedies or had to face any hardships which again lead me to despise my depression as I feel like I have no right to be depressed.  I also have two older brothers who I have loved and hated throughout my growing up period as most siblings experience but they have always been there to look after me. I didn’t realise how much they protected me and loved me until we grew up.

I remember living in Hawaii but we moved to Australia when I was 7 years old so my main memories started here. I don’t remember being that way in Hawaii but I was a shy quiet kid when we moved to Australia, I dunno whether it was because I was an American moving to this small town and was the centre attention which I baulked at completely. It’s strange because looking at videos of when I was young in Hawaii I was so carefree and wanted to dance and sing in front of people but then something happened and I became very self-aware of what I was doing and how that effected other people. It wasn’t so bad in primary school but I think over time it has grown and became quite debilitating at certain stages in my life.

Life went on I grew up in my world where looking back I was quite sheltered. My peers began to drink and smoke and dating boys before me because I thought I had decided that I didn’t want to follow the crowd however looking back, my early friends were very strong minded and opinionated and I just tended to do whatever they did because I didn’t  and don’t like making decisions. I think I have always just wanted to fit in but I have always been drawn to people that don’t quite fit in. In high school, I felt like I didn’t fit in with my primary school friends anymore or at least they didn’t think I fitted in. It seems so petty (well it probably was in hindsight) and I couldn’t actually tell you what happened because I have since learned that I have had pretty warped views on reality. All I know is I went back into hating myself and thinking nobody would notice if I was gone. Scarily I remember having these thoughts all through primary school as well which I’m still looking back and trying to figure out why I started thinking and feeling like that. I know I’m jumping all through my childhood but my mum has told me a story about when I was really young like 4 or 5 something happened and I threw a tantrum and went into my room and was crying and whenever I saw myself in the mirror I would cry even harder. When my family was telling me this story it was in jest at the fact that everyone thought it was quite funny because in some ways I can imagine I was practicing crying but I look back and I’m curious as to whether it was because I didn’t like myself.  Anyway fast forwarding a few years when we had moved to Australia and I was in primary school I think I was quiet at school and then a drama queen at home because deep down I wanted attention but I didn’t want it for being loud and outrageous I just wanted to be noticed and be loved just because. I think I had seen too many girl next door movies where the quiet nerdy person becomes beautiful and noticed naturally. I then began to be spiteful of other people when they didn’t notice me even though I didn’t do anything to be noticeable. I remember crying for hours and thinking about hurting myself by suffocating myself or going to sleep really close to the edge of my bed in hope that  would fall off and hit my head on the corner of  my bed side table so that people would finally notice me and realise what they’d been missing all those years. See quite a drama queen in my thoughts just to so much in the follow through. I would always stop because I was worried that people would realise that I was just doing it for attention and the thought of being known like that horrified me. Numerous times I also ran away and hid for an afternoon in hope that someone would look for me. I don’t know, I think I just really wanted some sort of fairy tale life.

When I got through the initial shock of losing primary school friends and feeling quite lost and alone in high school I started embracing this and getting into punk music because I was angry at the world for not noticing me and not liking me so I started thinking fuck everyone and everything. I also got into a lot of emo music probably because of my want of some story book life and a lot of the music was about heart break and I felt like I related completely. Again it sounds so childish getting into the teenage angst scene but its part of my life so I just have to suck it up rather than being embarrassed or regretful. It was my way of dealing with the feeling like nobody liked me; I turned around and was like, “No, you know what you don’t get to not like me; I don’t like you and I don’t care what you think about me.” My group of girl friends at the time were basically a group of very different people all that didn’t quite feel like they fitted in with the other groups or something. We all had someone to sit with at lunch even if they weren’t exactly the kind of group we wanted to be with. I became quite close with 2 of the girls just through us all growing to like punk, emo music whereas the other girls in the group didn’t like music as much as us. We kind of had 2 mini groups that all sat together which worked out fine. Anyway I became friends with Amy who is probably the most similar of the girls to me even though we came from very different backgrounds. We both were just quiet and had the same sick sense of humour and we just clicked however we were terrible because like me she wasn’t big on making decisions. I think because she reminded me of me except worse because she didn’t have a good family life I had to protect her. So I began to find it easy to make decisions when Amy was around because I knew she really didn’t mind what we did and I just hated the indecisiveness. We went through high school together practically sharing a brain. We weren’t big talkers at all about our feelings but we were just content being together. Which is beautiful looking back and I took her and probably still do take her for granted. My other close friend was the loud one that I loved because she would take the attention off me because in this stage of my life  I just wanted to be ignore I didn’t want people to think anything about me because I was convinced it would only be bad things. I don’t think I was using her completely but I just could relax around her because she does have this vibe where she really doesn’t care what anyone else is really doing, not in a selfish way but like she wouldn’t judge me. And then on top of that no matter what I did I could probably guarantee that Jen would be louder and more outrageous so she encouraged me to come out of my shell quite a bit. Now that I’ve started talking about high school friends I really have to tell you about the other two that I’m still friends with because they probably will find this one day. J But seriously, Brooke is my oldest friend. She was the only primary school friend I stayed good friends with. We are completely different in so many ways but I just know she has so much love to give I couldn’t ever not like her. Sure I’ve been annoyed with her so many times because she seems so oblivious to some things she does and how it affects people. I believe that this is just because I’m so self-aware (probably to a fault) and her being not self-aware just doesn’t sit well because I can’t be like that. Overall she is a beautiful lady with the best intention who I know I will always be able to catch up with even if we lose contact for a long period of time. Lastly, there is Dan. I was talking before how there were like mini groups in my group in high school. Well Dan was a bit of an outsider because she was always hanging out with people older than us but obviously they finished school first so Dan hung out with us. I didn’t really know her too well in high school. We had some fun times together but I didn’t really get to know what a beautiful gentle soul she was until we left school. I moved to Brisbane to do Uni and she moved down after the first year and we hung out a lot.  I still look back and she only lived in Brisbane for 6 months but we just became really close. She’s a person I can tell anything and she won’t judge me and has so much compassion and love.

Well back to my high school life, due to feeling so alone at the beginning of high school I was very self-conscious of myself and had an extremely low confidence and self-image. I was never obsessed with food in high school but I did not tend to eat very much in front of people but when I’d come home I’d eat quite a bit. But thankfully I had a really nice metabolism that meant once I had my growth spurt at puberty I stayed quite slim for the last few years of high school. If you had asked me at the time though I would have told you I was fat considering I was comparing myself to Amy who has always been tiny like size 6 and everyone else in the world who I considered to be prettier and better than me.  I look back at photos of me back then now and it just blows my mind how twisted myself image was back then. I still have quite a negative view on myself now but I recognise that I generally am judging myself harsher than anyone else and that what I see is not necessarily what everyone else sees. 

I guess that's the start of my life, fucks me why I'm posting this but I don't think it can hurt...  

I have a couple of more years between where this blog and where I'm at now but it's a start. I gotta finish this story so I can feel like I can write about my current point in my life, so I"ll try and get back to this sooner rather than later. 

Anywho, if you have read this, thanks for your time!