2012: It’s time to stop pulling.

I think I’ve briefly alluded to the fact that I pull out my eyelashes and eyebrows in previous posts. I’ve been doing it now for about 10 years; the last 5 or so I’ve been trying to give up.

I’ve come a long way since the beginning; I remember getting bullied in class for having no eyelashes. Since then the puffy swelling around my eyes has become a thing of the past – for the last few years I’ve become very concerned about the fact that every time I do it, it might be one pull too far and the lashes won’t grow back at all so I haven’t been doing it as badly. But still doing it.

The main problem I have with doing it, is that I enjoy it. I enjoy the spike of pain, the sense of relief; it feels good. It’s a nice feeling and I enjoy it, but I need to give it up. It’s been going on too long. Like I already said, the supply of lashes isn’t endless and I don’t want to have to wear false eyelashes for the rest of my life. So this is it. It’s time to stop pulling.

I wanted to add some photos, but there are two problems: I am hideously unphotogenic right now and I couldn’t get the camera close enough. I will keep trying.

Good evening, dear reader

It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

I am here to give you a moan, since the only reason I ever update here is to moan.

Tonight, the topic is my weight.

I’ve been doing well. The gym didn’t send me off into a raging fitness freak desperate for the perfect body and wanting to restrict. What has, however, is my girlfriend (who is smaller and weighs less than me) telling me she’s fat and needs to lose weight. Well if she’s fat, what am I?! She spends so long in the gym and I hardly manage it – mainly due to time contraints or injury or just not being up to it. It’s horrible. I have a wee bit of a belly, but it’s not terrible. It does now feel terrible.

All negativity channelling through my head. Like how I am undeserving of love, of life, of others’ company. It’s a sure sign things are going downhill. I’m coping less. I’m more out of control; everything I react to is OTT. Who’d have thought there was such a difference between 20mg and 30mg of citalopram? Since reducing about a month ago, I’ve turned into an old bitch haggard. I wonder what the doctor who wanted me off the meds will say to that? When the girl who was bouncy a month ago re-appears subdued and red-eyed, will that serve her right for wanting me off? But do I even want to go back up to 30mg? Or rather, would it be irresponsible at this point in my degree to start messing around with the status quo? And if so, when will be the right time to work this out? It’s not all been bad, the entire time of reducing; but it’s getting worse. More ‘bad days’, fewer ‘good’.

Oh, and regarding my Dissertation tutor? We’re getting along well. I was beginning to trust him more and he was frequently asking about how I am doing mentally; it seems the department are really pushing welfare this year. You may have noticed, however, that I’m using the past tense. This is because he’s just announced he’s going on sabatical after Christmas – so in approx 1 month. Which is all great for him… but it means a swap in tutor to someone I don’t even know and have never even met me one to one, someone who is an influencial academic and someone I’m quite scared of. Funny, but scary. Bah, why do I bother?

But it’s all going to be fine.

I need a hug

As the title says.

Uni was going okay, but I’ve just found out who my dissertation supervisor is and I don’t think there’s any point in completing my degree course. I am royally screwed. I was going to try and live with it, try and be mature and put what happened behind me… but right now there is no way in hell I can do that, especially when it’s this important. I wanted to try and get on with him, because it’ll be good practise for later life. It’s going to take a lot of trying.

Le tired sigh

I woke at 3am and got back to sleep at 6.30, alarm went off at 6.50am. I’m now sitting in departures at Manchester Airport surrounded by an australian team of some sort and lots of business people trying to schedule in various meetings. Due to my mother’s love of being early, I was here 2 and a half hours early. Yay.

On Tuesday, I got a score of 3 on the PHQ depression test. Win? Well ever since I’ve felt a bit weird about it.  A bit unsettled. A bit like ‘is this as good as it gets?’ Because I’m alright, but I might just be numb, not well. But I don’t know because I don’t remember how well feels. Or, maybe it’s because getting nice care is addictive and the doctor was really nice. Or, maybe I’m unsettled because I’ve got used to no longer talking about my mental health and to start thinking about it again has tipped the boat. And if it is the latter, what do I do? I can’t get away with just being okay and not having to go into detail; doctors in the UK want details, they have tests, counsellors, psychologists and psychiatrists to get involved. The doctor wanted to do me a care plan (bless the junior doctors, they’re always so eager!). I don’t want a care plan. I want, and need, ‘tough love’ so I can get on with my life. Because when a Dr is nice, I want to see them. This is bad and keeps me in a cycle. I need to crawl back up and away from this.

I want to be fine again.

My decision was…

To come home. Purely for economic reasons. I could hack it, of course I could. Still feels like failure though. Good news is that I might be going back – if my plans work out, and even if they don’t I’ll probably go back in anticipation of not being cancelled on…

We find ourselves in August, 2011.

Time has passed, again. I don’t know where it goes.
I’m sat in a Youth Hostel in Tours, France after going for a wander and getting absolutely drenched. I was looking for a shop that’s open on a sunday, even one of those dodgy looking minimarkets that you always find near train stations. But not here; there aren’t any. I got the train from Paris yesterday afternoon and had the forethought to buy 2 nectarines and some tomatoes to go with the hummous I already had. (There’s hummous in France, you can’t get it in Germany!) I was going to wait until I had seen the kitchen situation at the Hostel before buying anything, but: I left it too late and by that time the minimarkets were all closed or the owners on holiday (welcome to france – a month’s holiday is a right here) and nothing will open until Tuesday, because Monday is a bank holiday. There was only one Boulanger open in the city, too. So I have a baguette, hummous, tomatoes, nectarines and some chocolate to last me until Tuesday. I’ve not found a cheapy restaurant yet, either but to be honest, I’m sick of packet/shit food after 2 weeks in a caravan. This trip is (evidently) not going as well as I’d hoped. Tomorrow I was meant to be going to volunteer on a farm, then another until the start of September, but due to these holidays the people haven’t replied. So I’m sitting here, wondering what to do. It feels so, so lonely and the room reminds me of halls at uni; in fact the whole building does. Tours is one of the partner Unis of my Uni, so I had the option of coming here to study last year… in a way I wish I had. But that’s not what’s bothering me.

What is bothering me is how my parents have managed to bring all my insecurities to the surface and I’m walking around making a list of how bad a person I am. They have this knack of making me feel totally inadequate. And that is how I feel. And I don’t want to, because for over a year, this hasn’t been a part of me. For the first week of the holiday, I was happy. It was my first ‘non depressed holiday’ in some years; the first one where I wasn’t always looking out for ways to top myself. But, but, but now I want to curl up in the tiniest ball and make all this go away; make whatever I’ve built go away. I wish I didn’t have a girlfriend so I could hurt myself, so it would make everything easier. But I can’t, because I can’t cut, I can’t burn, I just can’t. But I don’t know what I can do, instead. Apart from going to the communal area downstairs later and trying to strike up conversation with a few people to try and distract myself.

I can’t help but feel this was all a terrible mistake. Coming here, trying to improve my french, trying to ‘travel’. Truth is, I used to love it. But now I’d rather be at home, or somewhere I know, doing things I know. And more and more often I realise that I’m an anxious person. Not in the way of panic attacks, but being anxious about what if this happens, what if that happens and how I prefer to err on the side of caution and not do things. Turning into my mother. I haven’t slept properly for weeks in preparation of this trip. What if I don’t come back alive? Is there any point in me buying things for my future in case I do get killed, because then it’d be a waste of money; what if I get raped? I couldn’t deal with it. All these thoughts all going around my head and stopping me from sleeping. It’s wearing me down. I had tears in my eyes as my parents drove away from me in Paris yesterday. I just feel so scared, so unsure and so unhappy. People think I cherish the adventure, but it still shakes me up. I do it because I know I have to, and because I know I’ll have to do it in the future. At the company I did my Internship, to become even remotely high up, you had to have had foreign experience, and not just being English going to Germany; they mean China, Japan etc. This has never appealed to me. I know that here, in Tours, if I really, really had to, I could be home within a day and it wouldn’t be *too* costly. But if you go to the East, you’re stuck there… and that’s not a nice feeling.

I want my cat, but I don’t feel like I want to go home. Not in this state. I need to build myself back up.

Everything’s changing. Again

Last week of work. I’ll never see some of these people again. I’ll never go to these places again. Everyone’s loving the partying that’s coming with the end, but for me, the end scares me. Change scares me. And I don’t want it to. It feels so unnecessary.

On top of this, I’m trying to keep some control of my head. I feel so crazy. I see everything I’m doing it, can analyse it and it scares the hell out of me. That when someone upsets me I go on some form of binge. When I get let down, same happens. I’m trying to control my mood, to make it better by eating something something – normally something pops up and I HAVE to have it, if I don’t have it I won’t be happy. But it never works that way, afterwards I feel worse because I’ve given in and eaten whatever it is, however bad for me it is, and normally in large quantities. I don’t feel I can control it though. I don’t know what to do. I don’t want more input, more therapy whatever and chances are I wouldn’t get it. But I feel so messed up that I do this every time. That everytime I look at myself, I meet criteria for something, something I don’t want to have. Maybe I should just dose myself up and go back to sleep.

Black Hole Boom

Boom or change? Boom or change? To reincrease my meds and feel like a failure, or keep on this way?
To lose my energy and become numb vs. feeling bad and lacking lust for anything.
Keep on wondering how long I’ll have to keep taking these meds for.
Boom or change: because sometimes feeling nothing is better than feeling (bad).
I remember jokingly saying when I was about 12 ‘I’m having a midlife crisis’ when stressed about something; who’d have known there could well have been some truth in it: after all I had my first crisis way before 20.
I’m sorry this isn’t too upbeat, but I don’t think I can muster anything else right now.

Weekends

This weekend has, in some ways, been fabulous. I haven’t had to deal with people and I’ve got to do what I want (keys escapade aside). But the thing is, that tomorrow at work people will ask me what I did at the weekend, I will tell them and they will judge me for not having been out clubbing or having met up with anyone etc. But the thing is, that I haven’t really had the energy to, and only having to count on myself has meant I’ve been able to go about my business in a relaxed manner and am therefore feeling a little bit less exhaused (Expiry date tomorrow morning 6am – suddenly my energy will all have disappeared!). I wouldn’t want to be alone forever, indeed human contact is good. But the people I enjoy being with have all been away this weekend, so in a way it’s not like I had a choice to do things with people. Sometimes I need some down time, some alone time. And that’s what I’ve got. Apart from the fear of going out and people seeing me sitting in a café alone and laughing at me. That’s why I’ve avoided going sun bathing by the river – because another girl goes on her own and they all make comments behind her back. Some people here are really not nice, so that’s why I choose not to hang around with them; they are the people I was referencing in my last post. Of course, there are some very nice people here, but the ones I see day in day out are not so nice, which taint my view.

I’m feeling a bit better than I was on Friday night, I really am. I haven’t had this time for R&R in a while – people assume that because I went home I was relaxing – but in fact I spent every day I was home running around getting this sorted and seeing people. It was lovely, but not relaxing in the energy recuperation sense.

I’m sitting in my room, window open with a light breeze coming in, in near silence – I can hear some children screaming, some planes and some cars, but that is it. There is nothing else I would rather be doing right now. Especially not guzzling beer to make others happy.

On why I am a bad person

I have only been back 2 days, but these 2 days seem like a lifetime apart. Thank fuck it’s friday, thank fuck it’s friday. And now it’s friday and I have the weekend. Then I’ll have work, and I’ll still be as drained as I am now. This tiredness is not going away. I’ve had a sniffle and been exhausted for 6 weeks now. I started to feel a bit better at home, seemingly due to the difference it made instead of being here. But now I’m back, and the hole is closing back in. I’m struggling, physically. My body is absolutely exhausted. No matter of R&R at weekends, sleeping, relaxing, etc is solving this. Nothing is getting rid of what is plaguing me, and has been plaguing me for what feels like an eternity. I’m fighting to keep my head above the surface; these last 2 days at work have been a catalogue of people realising I’ve made some epic fuck ups, none of them I meant to make, but at the same time all needing sorting, apologies and correcting. I didn’t mean to, but they still happened.

And my big mouth. Just my big flipping mouth. I spent ages trying to get to sleep last night, but the scene kept playing over and over in my head. Just burning with embarrassment. But I have seen the people today, and they weren’t untowardly off with me; I’m hoping that they got away as throwaway comments that they don’t think about but I spent the following 12 hours beating myself up over and unable to sleep because of it. Because when I say something slightly harsh, it gets to me. I don’t mean to be mean, but at the time it made sense, it was correct in context. But then I lift it out of context and bang: I have a week’s worth of ammunition. It tends to happen once, and I learn my lesson for a while, but then it slips again. Like most things do.

And how I used to wash my face twice daily, but now I just haul myself off to bed instead. Nothing ever kept me from not before, but now I just can’t be bothered.

Ditto the huge piles of clothes on my sofa: I get home from work, throw off the clothes onto the sofa and leave them there. So slovenly. So bad. Yet nothing’s changed.

I must be bad, because no-one invites me out. I have to try and wangle an invite, and I don’t want to because I’m scared of being rejected by them. These people are not my people, I know this, but I still feel like I should make an effort. But meeting new people is so difficult. I don’t bother talking. I’m so anti-social. I honestly do not care right now.

Which brings me onto my next point: I think I am a psychopath. I cannot empathise with people, I just feel coldness towards everyone. Nothing human. Just a ‘grr, humanity’ kind of thing. And I cannot be interested in other peoples’ lives. Take the Royal Wedding. No interest – I don’t know them. It didn’t bring a tear to my eye, make me feel all warm and fuzzy: I actually couldn’t bring myself to give a fudge bar about it. And this is bad. No-one makes friends by not showing an interest in others. I don’t see the point in chit-chat when I don’t care. And this, I know, is bad and going to leave me destined to be alone, but alas.

The final point is an apology: for writing this. For not commenting enough on others’ blogs, yet being more than willing to take comments here. I’m sorry. I know it’s give and take and I’m all taking, I’m really sorry.

I’m sorry.