Good God, I've actually done two posts in a row?! I'm determined to return to doing what I love most, one of those things being writing. As most of you will know writing has become a form of therapy for me. Although I did start seeing a new counsellor at the beginning of 2016, after a few months I decided that I needed a break. I'm fully aware that talking therapies aren't easy, it takes time to heal and talk through (in my case) almost 8 years of damaging thoughts and behaviours. I decided to take a break because the conversations started going in bad places, touching upon subjects and people that I hadn't intended discussing. After most sessions I'd sit in the car for a few minutes and simply feel shit. I felt worse than before I arrived for the appointment. I believe that counselling is very benefical for some people, particularly for those whom have never discussed life changing events in their lives or long term concerns of theirs. After concealing my illness for 5 years I was suddenly talking about everything very openly and then I started writing as a way of helping myself process years worth of thoughts and feelings on bullying, anxiety, depression, self harm and eating disorders. I've had a lot of time to process everything and perhaps my silence over the years caused more damage, but now I'm really dealing with everything and have found a great deal of clarity on matters that were once very confusing.
In the previous post I touched upon how hard the past few months have been for me. I had a HUGE operation which although it has been life changing for the better, it also caused a massive shift in my day-to-day life. Prior to the operation I had been eating healthily, attempting and succeeding to film videos, I was doing a lot of writing for my book and I was exercising 6 days a week. I was preparing my body for what was to come. I've had operations in the past which have left me feeling incredibly weak and as a result were the perfect conditions for depression to manifest in. This time around I wanted to give my body as much strength as possible. I succeeded in that. Of course any operation will knock you for six as your body has been pumped full of anasthetic and drugs. I was fully prepared for how long it would take to heal, I knew that I would experience discomfort as I tried to sleep each night and I certainly wouldn't be able to exercise for a couple of months.
I was, and still am very happy with the results. It's given me a lot more confidence but I know that I still have deep rooted self esteem and body confidence issues. Most of those issues come from being bullied, over-eating as a coping mechanism at that time and subsequently yo-yoing between diets and various eating disorders for years. All of that caused a lot of damage to my body and my mind. The combination of not being able to exercise, coming back from a tropical holiday to the grey skies of England and daylight saving all contributed towards a severe period of depression. The feelings of being useless, worthless and incredibly unattractive all came back. My anxiety reached all-time highs as I found myself hiding behind doors as the house was full of people, I'd be trembling with anxiety and silently crying until everyone left and I quietly whispered through the crack in the door to reveal my whereabouts to Robbie. There has been a massive contrast between those moments and me managing to drive to Southampton or Winchester to visit family and friends. It can be confusing for others to hear that I'm really struggling when they witness times when I seem to be on top form. It's true that some aspects of life have become easier, but those have been replaced by new fears and concerns. My lowest points have become dangerously low as I sink into a deep depression which may only last an hour or so, but those minutes are incredibly damaging to me. I sink into a short, sharp depression in which I could easily make some drastic and permanent decisions only for me to lift out of it an hour later.
After a second consecutive night of sobbing in bed about not being able to live like this, I asked Robbie what he thought I should do. It's usually directed at me, what I think I should do and frankly if I knew...well I'd be sharing that revelation to everyone else like me. We talked it through and determined that there were some things that had been making a difference prior to my operation, that was the last consistently stable period I had. Since then I've been exercising a lot less and my anxiety has been so severe that I've been unable to attend appointments for accupuncture which had been significantly helping my insomnia and mood in general. It took me a long time to realise that accupuncture had such a significant impact for me. There were weeks when I had really bad insomnia after having a good sleeping pattern for a while. It suddenly hit me, I hadn't been for an accupucnture session for over a month due to not being able to afford it. That was the only thing that had changed in my daily life.
So...along with my plans of writing, filming and keeping on top of my household chores, I'm going to be slotting exercise and accupuncture back into my schedule. Ideally I'd like to get back into blogging, perhaps on a fortnightly basis to alleviate some of the pressure I started feeling from weekly blogging. I put a lot of pressure on myself to create 'perfect' content in a limited time frame. Some bloggers manage to post more than once a week and sometimes daily! Unfortunately that's just not realistic for me as I'm attempting to juggle my mental health issues and attempting to find happiness in some of the things I do each day. For now my idea for the blog, 'Cheerful Chelsea 2.0' if you will, is to create updates on how my mood, anxiety levels and self confidence levels have been for two week intervals. I'll also be trying out various work-out plans and making a note of how much I enjoy them, whether they have an affect on my mood and any results I may achieve from them. I'm not becoming a fitness blogger I swear! I just want to help myself and others with mental illness by narrowing down some realistic, affordable and achieveable exercise plans. I know the struggle of watching late night/nocturnal hours of television when hour long product adverts come on teleshopping long after the usual channel has stopped airing. I get sucked in and become transfixed on them and a few days later I have some INSANE workout plan or fitness gizmo which ultimately gathers dust as I pile on weight, have super low energy levels and quietly sob over my desire to change but lack of means to do so. This idea for the blog might not be embraced by many, bet hey ho I'm giving it a go. Perhaps it will keep me on track with things and make me stick to an exercise plan. I simply can't live the way I have been for any longer, I just can't be a 24 year old that is this ashamed of her body. I'm young, I shouldn't be worrying about these things and I shouldn't have caused this much damage to my body and self esteem by dieting since I was 16 years old. I hope you will check back in a couple of weeks time to see what I have to say! If this idea goes well I will also be posting some time lapse videos of the exercises I've been doing to show how I'm progressing and also so I can see how much fitter or flexible I become over time. Remember, all of this takes time, that SUPER amazing body transformation video you watched took TIME. Healing takes TIME.
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