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 :) )