Cutting Loose

Yes, I'm completely crackers. Disclosure: no hairs were harmed in the production of these photos.

When I was younger I never imagined life without my closest friends by my sides. I barely remember how those friendships began, they simply just always existed. We don't tend to foresee the breakdown of friendships, sometimes people simply drift apart and move towards other groups. These transitions often feel quite natural, but at times they can be devastating and have a long lasting affect upon our lives. Over the years I've had to intentionally break off friendships. In my teenage years I drifted through various friendship groups, this was fairly pain free as I wasn't alone in those transitions. There were times when I had to break away from people as I realised some 'friends' no longer shared the same values as me. At one point someone attempted to bully me into remaining loyal to them despite them behaving in ways I didn't agree with. Those actions were the reasons I was distancing myself from them in the first place.

Sometimes bullies can be halfhearted, they strike out, the result of their own insecurities. Fortunately I was able to brush them off when I first encountered bullying. My second encounter with a bully was very different. They were manipulative, strategic and vicious. I'm often told that I ought to pity bullies, supposedly they must have some deep issues or problems at home, they seek control through bullying in their domain. At the time I didn't realise it was a form of bullying. Yes, it was verbal abuse which I associated with bullying. However, I'd never experienced or heard of psychological bullying, something which would affect me for the entirety of my young adult life. I don't hold onto any angry feelings towards those involved. Mostly I just want to know why it happened, how they could do such a thing and whether there really was something going on with them to cause the attack on me. It was a hard time for me, I isolated myself and walked away from long-standing friendships to avoid causing a 'choosing of sides'. Reflecting back upon that time, I realised that sides wouldn't have been chosen. They were all under the thumb and believed the rumours spread about me. These 'friends' ought to have known those rumours were completely out of character and could never be true. I'm not one to give myself compliments or to 'talk myself up', but I will say that I'm loyal and I care for those I know and love. We don't always anticipate change, we don't expect having to walk away from friendships.

In a way, this post is a letter to my 16 year old self, and advice to anyone experiencing similar problems currently or still allowing problems in the past to weigh upon them today. There isn't much about my 'depression story' that I'd change. However, I would have walked away sooner. You never need to change yourself for anyone. I attempted to change and adapt to please others. I used to stay out longer than I ought to at the weekend to avoid 'missing out' on the laughs, the stories and inside jokes that would be re-iterated for the next week at school. None of it made me happy. True friends don't seek to make you feel uncomfortable, they don't intentionally exclude you and if they love you for who you really are they won't try to change you. The genuine friends will stick with you throughout good and bad times. Long distances and lengthy periods spent apart won't break the bond. My true friends have emerged since I started being honest about my life, the struggles and the conditions I live with.

This post came to mind in anticipation of an upcoming trip to Durham (where I attended university). I'm aware that my friends from uni read my blog and that they're supportive of it. I'm glad that they now know how hard it was for me whilst I was there, and why I wasn't around as much in the second year when I was really struggling. I have reached out to a few of them, but its difficult to maintain contact when we have little to talk about, reaching out sometimes feels artificial. I've missed them more that they know, I cherish memories of my better days with them and value their friendships. I haven't seem most of them for well over a year, a fair amount of fear comes with that amount of time apart. Despite that, I know that the true friends will be there to catch me if I start to wobble.

Your Words Cut Deep

 Image from https://instagram.com/colourpopcosmetics/

 Image from https://instagram.com/colourpopcosmetics/

 I saw the images from Colour Pop Cosmetics a few weeks ago. Perhaps it's just my mind and vision that made me see something different. Usually make-up swatches are done on the back of the hand to show how the colours look against skin tones. Perhaps I was in some bad head space but it reminded me of something different. This isn't a bad thing I think if that's the intention (as mine was) and as a creator you are looking to produce a strong image, you've got it right there. I am sorry if this causes offence or provokes negative thoughts for anyone. I will now warn you that the following post is on the subject of self harm. I have been working on this post for months. I've created numerous drafts but was never entirely satisfied with the outcome. Unfortunately it took a relapse (last Saturday) for me to be able to create a balanced piece of writing on the subject; I have been both the outsider seeing the scars of self harmers and the participant. I have looked for too long and also been looked at by others. It is my hope that I've discussed the subject sensitively and hopefully it won't trigger any negative thoughts for those who have self harmed in the past or currently still do so. I know how damaging it can be to come across pieces of writing composed in the wrong way about self harm. I have refrained from going into detail on my experiences of self harm to avoid producing triggers or relapses. I hope that people can benefit from reading this. If you are concerned that you could be triggered, I'm sorry, but please try to scroll to the bottom of the post and find the 10 bullet points that I hope will be motivational and inspire happy thoughts.

Self harm isn't an easy topic to talk about, it's a complex thing to experience and to fathom. Some people may believe that self harm is limited to a certain group of people, wrong. These people may also believe there is only one method of self harm, also wrong. It was something that was associated as being "emo" whilst I was in high school (six years ago), the words "depression" "depressed and "depressing" were used colloquially; used casually and didn't mean that those people were genuinely depressed. When I was 16/17 years old I wasn't entirely sure what it meant to be depressed, I knew that I was sad, alone and feeling empty. Somehow I manage to walk around and muddle through life at that time, but at the time I felt like an empty shell, I allowed people to talk to me in ways that aren't acceptable, I was treated badly and I just took it. I didn't process what was happening, the damage had already been done prior to this, they'd beaten me into submission with their words, shunning and not allowing me to pass by without acknowledging them in some way. The damage was done, they'd hit a home run but weren't satisfied with that, they continued to swing away and the balls just bounced off my empty shell.

After a while, I became desperate to feel something. I had felt a lot of pain before, but now it couldn't touch me. I was invincible or indestructible, I was scared that I didn't feel human any more and just didn't feel anything. The Internet is a fantastic resource for many things, in an emergency we can look up how to put a spare tyre on our cars when one is flat, we can search for how to remove certain stains when our parents aren't available to help us with their wealth of knowledge. It's a fantastic resource, but in the hands of someone feeling depressed and desperate to feel some kind of emotion it can become a dangerous tool. I went searching for answers about what was happening to me, why did I feel like an empty shell? How could I feel something again? Type a question into Google or any other search engine and an enormous amount of information is churned out in front of you. I managed to find myself on a website that was essentially a wordy tutorial of ways to harm myself. If I couldn't feel anything why not inflict pain upon myself to feel?

I'll never provide exact details of what I did to myself, partly because I never want anyone to stumble across this blog and see it as a tutorial to harm themselves, I don't want to became part of that system I discovered. It's also a very private thing to go through, I do get asked questions about it and sometimes I will begrudgingly provide some answers to reassure people. Self harm can occur for a variety of reasons. People harm themselves because they desire to feel pain, some people enjoy the pain and crave it, others use it as a form of punishment for things they've done or failed to do. It's associated with a variety of health problems including (but not limited to) depression, anxiety and eating disorders. I self harmed for a combination of reasons, mostly because I longed to feel something, but also as a form of punishment. Strangely enough I punished myself for thinking certain things about myself, the depression was whispering in my ear and more often that not I believed the degrading things it churned out in my mind. Sometimes I felt the need to combat these negative thoughts by punishing the dark monster of depression, its words cut me deep. I inflicted pain upon myself and subsequently said 'monster', and it would go away for a time. I was temporarily slaying the beast.

When I am in that mind frame it's difficult to think good things about myself, I am the queen of put downs for myself. Not a title anyone should strive to achieve. I've struggled to believe that I deserve happiness, friends,  or a future. I struggle to accept compliments because of the hate and put downs I was pelted with by bullies. Perhaps the voice of the dreary dark monster is the bully or at least echoes the voices of those bullies. Do they now exist within me? As is struggle to be kind to myself I find it hard to follow my own advice. A very wise person told me to write down things I'd say to someone who had self harmed so I present you with those musings:

1. Don't listen to the people that say you're doing it for attention. 
2. I know you are hurting right now, but you are strong.
3. When you are ready to do so, make sure that you take care of your wounds, wash them, pop on a plaster if need be (a super awesome colourful one if you can) and carry on. 
4. If anyone asks about the plasters just say a) its an awesome plaster, why wouldn't I wear it? b) tell them the truth about whats its covering, c) say you scraped yourself on a tree branch or make up some badass war-wound story and be the legend you deserve to be known as!
5. They aren't really staring at you, your brain and the illness is making you a wee bit paranoid and wants you to hurt some more. DON'T allow it to!
6. Perhaps they are staring, or they've drifted off into a day dream and their gaze just so happened to rest upon your badass plasters. 
7. If they genuinely are staring and you feel confident enough give THEM the look up and down, "yeah, what you looking at punk?".
8. It's not a sign of weakness, you are not weak. Yes you harmed yourself and I'm sorry that you felt so badly and that this happened to you. I think you are strong, you may have been sad, angry, desperate but you didn't try the alternative. You were so determined to feel something, you are determined to live and to survive this. 
9. Cuts and bruises will fade, the biggest wound of all would be if we lost you. 
10. Wear your scars with pride, you survived, you've healed and you've defeated.

Jar of Hearts: "You're Gonna Catch a Cold From the Ice Inside Your Soul"

 Queen of Hearts? The blog title is a direct reference to the Ice Queen whom I'll be referring to in this post. 

So this is a story all about how my life got twist turned upside down, and I'd like to take a minute to just sit right here and tell you all about how I became the...well, not the prince of a town called Belair.   Damn. Not my original writing unfortunately! That just seemed like the perfect way to ease into this blog post. My life definitely got turned upside down, and most days I'm still hanging from the earth like a bat. I've written a fair bit about how it feels to be depressed, but I haven't written about when I first started experiencing symptoms of depression and what caused them.