The Lemonade I've Made

  I began writing this blog from a nicely sized apartment in Seville around two and a half years ago, I’d just moved there and I was very much getting to grips with the cultural change and stresses and strains of my first full time, proper teaching job. At the time I was quite unbeknownst to myself really struggling and on the brink of a breakdown that would leave me exhausted for months to come. I remember posting an entry during that time about being unable to find love and acceptance and it made my mother feel very distressed. It really is no wonder that I struggled to find love and acceptance, I have come to believe that this is because I used to spend all of my time focussing on butterfly-feeling-invoking whirlwind romances that were great for a sum total of five minutes and would then end abruptly and leave me wondering what I had done wrong this time… there were many times. I recently described myself to a friend as ‘the worst fisherman ever’ when recounting my days spent at the side of murky waters hoping to catch an honest and reliable man. The truth is that I’m not really sure what I was looking for during those days of semi-permanent depression and loneliness. I watched my sister get married and begin her new life whilst I just ate saturated fat from Burger King and gained weight, I saw a beautiful cousin turn 18 and get even more beautiful overnight while I went to the local shop for yet another tub of Ben & Jerry’s. I noted with grim pride that another cousin was turning 21 and appeared to have 2 cars and enough money for a mortgage deposit whilst I spent most of my cash on large gin and tonics and would only take up work which was abroad and therefore temporary and not to be relied upon. I was making some dastardly decisions.

  Whilst making dastardly decisions and subsequently making myself thoroughly miserable; one day the idea came to me that I should perhaps change things and make my life a bit more permanent and less chaotic. It was after being thrown to the side of the road in July 2015, by another of my whirlwind romances, that I decided enough was enough and it was time to start taking myself seriously and so it was on that day that I opted to give myself a fighting chance of lasting happiness. I came home from Seville and moved back in with my parents (joyous for all concerned for a few minutes) and started looking for teaching jobs in Liverpool and it was to my delight that I got one. I also went to stand by the side of the murky waters again and gazed back into the Plenty of Fish pond, but it must have been a different pond because it didn’t look so gloomy or hopeless this time – in actual fact it was clear and turned out to be a fruitful exercise. Exercise too, I started doing more of it and getting up earlier as well as going to bed earlier. I knocked the saturated fat on the head and stopped thinking of myself as ‘poor me’, who had no control over her own life, and started thinking of myself as capable and realised how willing I was to make changes.

 Next we come to the changes, the changes I made have changed my life. That’s right you heard me, ME, I, MY. I made the changes to MY outlook, I had a good look at MYSELF and decided not to be a disaster anymore and once I made these wonderful decisions everything changed. Firstly, I met a new man and after eight months he is still refreshing my days – I may not have gone for this man before because I didn’t make good decisions in the past. I made very bad decisions and I wouldn’t go for anyone unless it was clear that they would expect nothing from me, of course this meant that I could expect nothing from them, an unhappy set of circumstances. I got a new job from which I have gone from strength to strength within and feel positive about a future living alongside. I’ve cut down on alcohol to a huge extent and lost plenty of weight over a couple of months and anticipate to lose more of it in the months to come.

 In short, I wasn’t incapable of making changes as I had previously thought and as soon as I made the changes the control was handed back to me and happy outcomes were mine once more. Not everything in life can be solved by making changes, this I fully accept. However, many things can be solved by a change of mind set so if anything about my words rings true with you then I urge you to make the changes and ride the waves that come with them. Experience has taught me that making changes is the act of pressing lemons and the result is the sweetened, liquid gold that looks and tastes just like bubbly, refreshing lemonade.

Confident Happiness

  Anyone who has had a good scroll through my blog entries will know that they have been placed here on this website as a means of self therapy and also because I have always hoped that they will reach someone, anyone who needs to hear the words I have written and posted back out into the world. I have generally found myself to be at my most writey when I have been feeling low and needing to make sense of my emotions and thought processes; I have heard it said that artists do their best work when they're feeling tortured and very possibly hysterical and I agree with that. The more hard hitting pieces of my writings have generally been written when I haven't been feeling quite 'myself'. It has been hard to judge which bits of me are myself and which aren't over the last few years, as people we tend to say that we aren't 'ourselves' when we aren't feeling our best but I tend to wonder if this is the correct way to describe the self. I feel as though I have always been myself whether I've been feeling sad, alright or fabulous because there have been elements of my self in every phase of my recovery over the last ten years of ups and downs.

  So where am I now then? Well I'm feeling very stable these days and I have done for quite some time now. I consider it to be a little miracle that I am living in England again (amongst the blustery winds and dark winter, constantly be-speckled by never ending rain, which sometimes feels as though it might turn into a torrent, which could cascade from the above regions for ever and ever) and not feeling like I'm going to go nuts and jump on the next plane back to Sunny Spain. I have historically not done very well with filthy cold weather, it's pretty much always driven me out of my tree and into the concocting of a plan of action designed to remove me from the British meteorological conditions. Not this year though.

  This winter is progressing nicely. I had already decided that I would need to do things differently, perhaps I would bake my own bread to keep myself feeling cosy I thought; or perhaps I should engage in the doing of a tango class and whilst both are wonderful... it is neither of these things that is making the British winter more tolerable. I have found myself a different kind of sunshine and for once it isn't sunshine of my own making because I, yes I, after five and a half years since my last relationship ended have found myself a man and he more than makes up for the extended summer I haven't had. The interesting thing about my current state of happiness is that I can go on and on and on about how miserable I have felt and how relatable my emotions have been to Adele songs in the past but I very much struggle to discuss it when I am just genuinely delighted with someone else's affection gracing my days. I can only imagine that this is because I have become almost totally dependent on myself and it's true that I don't want to lose me after it took so long to learn to like me.

  The years leading up to this one have been tumultuous, enriching, difficult, meandering, depressing, magical and generally lively with plenty of happenings in occurrence and have given me much to do and to think about. I have lived in one of the most beautiful places that I believe I will ever visit and in doing somade a dream come true, become the person I always hoped to be and I have also been able to share my experiences via eBlogger. I have grown and developed as a person, I'm not the woman I was when I wrote the first entry two years ago. I was haunted by the past then and shortly afterwards my own demons found me and hunted me down until I learned to communicate with them and have a good old chat. We spent some time cohabiting in awareness eventually (like all of the best house-mates) they morphed from devils on my right shoulder to angels on the left; the remnants of a past life and an internal struggle, which is now largely settled. My Angelly-Demons give me encouragement now. They say things like 'well there's no reason for you not to proceed with this', they show me how delightful my new boyfriend is and they remind me that I am not a finished product because I will always have 'stuff', everybody has 'stuff' but my 'stuff' is far less heavy since it was dried out by the sun in Seville and is able to cloud my vision no more. I can see in front of me now and it looks just like home, with some significant alterations to the world it was before.

Live Like No One's Watching

I have made no secret of the fact that I found the years leading up to now to be both difficult, testing and all the while glowing in glorious technicolour. The time period before this one has played a central role in the development of the freer and much calmer person that I have become. Consecutive rainy days no longer see the onset of an inner turmoil, a relationship over before its time isn't cause for total devastation and my binge eating days in moments of stress don't occur anymore. Why has this happened?

This has happened because I fell down more times than I can count, but I got back up again. I allowed other people in and I listened to their words, I began to accept view points other than my own and by taking in advice that I perhaps would have otherwise ignored I was able to open my eyes much wider than they had been in a long time and by doing this I discovered that the answers were all around me. The answers lay in opening the back door and looking out at the blossoming garden while the kettle boiled for the first time at the start of each new day, in purchasing a yoga mat and giving myself 40 minutes to exercise my body and to allow my mind to run free, in accepting that bad things happen sometimes and Baz Lurhman was very right when he stated that the 'real worries in our life blind side us on some idle Tuesday', confidence is key to healthy social relationships, a healthy relationship with food relies on a healthy relationship with ourselves and all of these things together will allow strength of mind and physicality. The most important thing I learned is that we are responsible for ourselves and the actions of other person are beside the point, I'll talk more about this later.

It has taken me at least five years to really get my head together on all of this and two of them were spent in self imposed isolation in Spain, I think that these two years were perhaps the most vigorous in terms of my personal journey of self development. I learned how to do something useful for myself, like going to get the weekly shop, when I didn't want to and I would have preferred to put it off until tomorrow. It dawned on me at some point that doing things when we don't want to do them are the actions which lead to greater pride in ourselves and we're more likely to stop putting things off and as a result of this new thought process we're more capable of breaking other habits - along the lines of binge eating and drinking. I was quite the binge drinker in my day and it was something that stopped with the aid of a very effective Cognitive Behavioural Therapist. My CBT lady helped me to see the benefits of making long term goals and using mantras to stay within the limits I needed to set myself to achieve those goals. Learning that it's absolutely fine to get things wrong sometimes was a wondrous day as well, learning not to give myself a really hard time over it was similarly fantastic.

I've been thinking a lot about my own 'journey', - how I loathe the newly coined usage for the word 'journey', whilst watching snippets of the 2015 Celebrity Big Brother. I try to avoid CBB as much as possible but it can be really rather difficult when your mother is permanently fascinated by the antics of the housemates. The snippets of CBB I've seen seem to focus heavily on the musings of the individuals' involved feelings about themselves. They regularly talk about their 'journey' and all of the 'mother f***ing s**t' they've been through and then happily use their own personal experiences to justify the rather disgusting way in which they choose to interact with other people. I want to reach through the TV and tell them to just walk out of the house, forget about their fee and make friends with their personal demons away from the manipulative machine that is CBB. I cannot abide this kind of TV and I struggle to abide the people who make their way through the door in order to use their own personal selves as entertainment. The whole thing appears to be mass manipulation to me, the housemates try to manipulate the public by presenting a reality TV friendly persona, Big Brother manipulates the housemates by giving them various inane tasks and engineering situations which they know will cause trouble - all the while seeking to tickle the funny bone of the general public, Big Brother then manipulates the public by showing heavily edited hour long versions of each day and when it's all over one person walks out of a house alone, smiles, waves, shouts 'I Love You' and says it's all good and they had a great 'journey' whilst a large swell of people boo and shout very intelligent things like 'sl*t' at the person who is standing alone in the middle of it all. This person may have been irritating, they may have been mean and they probably displayed some disgraceful behaviour in order to be on the receiving end of such an unpleasant reception, but I think it would be very decent if the audience were to practise what they preach about being 'nice' and not adopt the woolpack mentality that seems to have become acceptably mainstream in modern day media. Aside from that rant, I want to make a point about accepting responsibility for ourselves, focussing on healthy attitudes and forging a mind set which can allow other people room for getting things wrong, lowering our judgementalometre and ultimately saying 'well this is what they are doing, I don't agree with it but they aren't living by my set of standards, they are living by their own standards and we don't agree about this, so I will dust myself off, put out the fire raging in my head about it and do something calming and relaxing.'

I decided some time ago to give myself a moral code which I would use to live by, but I had to accept that other people would live by a different one and sometimes I would feel like I was being taken for granted or under appreciated. I came to the conclusion that it didn't matter because feeling calm, listening without interrupting (never saying 'let me stop you there'), allowing someone else to have the last word and living my life with a river of integrity and acceptance running through it was far superfluous to getting one over on someone else by doing something sneaky or holding a grudge. I'm sure you've heard it said before but life really isn’t a rehearsal it is the big performance and it's more priceless than anything we could ever own or look at it in a shop window and it needs to be nourished to survive so give your life every colour of the rainbow, embrace every moment as a learning opportunity and don't waste your time on grudges. People will come and they will go, each one is special, each one will show you one or two of their many faces, each one will get something wrong at some point - it might be on your watch, it mightn't be, but try not to get too caught up in it. You'll wake up with yourself each morning regardless of how other people behave, so what will you do to ensure you get out of bed with a spring in your step and something to look forward to?  

Are You Ready To Listen?

  Somewhere out there today, someone is making strong statements about something, maybe that person is you. Are you the one who's walking down the street getting all worked up about very small things? Is it you who's waking up every day and wondering why in the world you're making all of this effort when everything feels so thankless? Could it be you who wants to change everything around you and hope that in some way the changes in scenery will seep inside your brain and your bones and change the way you feel? Well, if you're hearing YES bells ringing out inside your head at this present moment I suggest you continue reading because this particular blog post is for you. I want to help you, but first you must agree to help yourself or we will continue walking around in circles for all eternity and no one really wants to spend their one precious life in such a conundrum do they? (However, if you're not ready to help yourself yet then I think you should leave this entry for another day. DO remember that it's here though and I invite you to come back to it.)

  So I see it like this. I used to be you. I was you ten years ago when I was eighteen and my first boyfriend announced he wanted to tour around the world with his band and I didn't really fit in with his plans. Same boyfriend went precisely nowhere… but I sure as hell did. I announced to my mother that I was going to go backpacking around the world on Father's Day 2005 as we were driving home from a visit to my maternal grandparents in St Helens. I remember the inner turmoil well, I needed something to focus on, something to aim for but more than anything something to drown out the upset that was raging inside me. I'd seen round-the-world -trips broadcast on the TV so naturally I was all up for the braided hair, walk along the shoreline, eat rice in Goa experience. My mother wasn't so keen and she pretty much said no to that idea but she did say that if I did want to have a gap year she'd accept proposals which were well thought out and researched, so I went to New Zealand a year later and worked at a high school and its boarding house facility. I found sleeping difficult in New Zealand and I was often homesick and sad. A few years after that another relationship ended and I took myself to the delights of Smithdown Road because a) Smithdown Road is closer to the city centre than my family's Crosby home, and the city centre is where I was working and studying at the time and b) I didn't want to run into my now ex boyfriend in our domiciliary hometown, nor did I want to regularly see 'our' places. I went off to Smithdown Road and promptly broke down after a few months. During this particular breakdown I announced to my mother during a car journey home from The Trafford Centre in Manchester that I was going to go and work at a café in Australia just as soon as my degree was finished with. She just issued a flat out no this time and it was at this point that she delivered some well thought out words of wisdom, this is what she said, "Helen you can't just keep running away when things don't feel good. You have to look at yourself from within and examine why this keeps happening to you." Or words to similar effect, I was in the middle of a breakdown you see so I can't remember her exact words; I just wanted to go to my terraced sanctuary on Smithdown Road, eat fried eggs and plan my next great escape. Things went from bad to worse and my father found himself in the GPs office with me hunting down some Prozac. Good times. Years went by and I got a little stronger and then I fell down and guess what I did when I fell down? You've got it! I went to Greece. Now that was a pretty good experience. I couldn't communicate with anyone in Greece very well and I didn't get along with my boss who spoke the best English so you can see how that worked out for me, but I did exercise a lot, I ate well and I lost a lot of weight. I got back to England in a good place on that occasion but I'd only taped over the damage, I hadn't actually confronted it so when unexpected things showed up I didn't cope well but generally speaking I was alright. A few months went by and I decided I'd go to live in Spain, I wasn't fed up, I wasn't depressed. I was fine; I just wanted to teach English as a foreign language again. I arrived and all was good for a few weeks but then the rot started to set in and I went well and truly off my trolley at Christmas time. I decided that enough was enough and I was going to address the matter. I visited my GP and she prescribed me with some anti depressants, I found an online cogitative behavioural therapy course and I don't mind telling you that it was the best money I've ever spent. It's been a tough old eighteen months life wise after the CBT. I lost a close relative and had a little go at grief, I met a man who had some interesting ideas about the best way to treat a woman and I had a rough time of it at work. Read on, the positive bit is coming up.

  BUT, I'm still here. I came back to Seville for a second year running when I really wanted to go and live on the beach, I returned to the same school and I came back to the same flat despite the fact it's outside of the city centre and a little bit on the pricey side. I wanted everything to stay exactly the same because I wanted to prove to myself that I could properly cope with life and all of things it throws at us without living in a constant state of change and I'm mighty glad I did because I believe that I've learned some valuable lessons in the art of Life Livement. Nah, things don't always go my way but I'm here and I'm living and breathing and I'm enjoying myself and I'm making sensible decisions. I'm not papering over the cracks anymore and choosing to  focus on a new horizon in the hope that it will solve any current problems I'm experiencing. I'm doing yoga instead, I've been doing CBT for weight loss for 6 weeks or so, I'm writing in a diary, I'm planning my days and my nights and I'm using anti anxiety techniques when I find myself getting unnecessarily worked up and tempted to reach for the Hagen Daz. I've lost 9lbs, but what's more important than that is that I'm stronger now in both mind and body than I have ever been before. How did I get here? I made peace with myself and I decided to allow the world in rather than just live in all four corners of it. I take each day one at a time and I relish the fabulous moments when they come my way. I don't make rash decisions, I don't allow myself to get in the driving seat and drive to unpleasant and frightening places and I don’t blame Spain and the cultural differences I've encountered here for any inner turmoil I might be experiencing. It's not Spain's fault that it does things differently to England, it is Spain's fault that customer service in banks is a disgrace but it's not Spain's fault that I struggled to cope with myself once upon a time. That was on me and it was on me to fix it.

  So if any of this does resonate with you and you do think you might need a little help but you're too proud to take it (maybe you've had help before and you think it's like taking a step back, I assure you - ignoring the problem is the step back. What did you learn last time? Is ignoring these things a good idea?) or too nervous to take the first step then you should remember that I personally think about people just like you each day and although you can't see me I'm still here, quietly celebrating each step you take towards being a happier and healthier you. But I'm not into papering over the cracks, using others as an emotional crutch or ignoring the real problem, what I'm very into and I very much respect are those people who take responsibility for their own mental health and keep working on it each day until they wake up again and think, 'my oh my. It's raining, my washing machine is broken, I can't get access to a cash machine because the one nearest me is out of order and someone nicked my bike again butttttt…. never mind, I'm going to make myself a lovely coffee and take a little walk to the next available cash machine and maybe I'll stop buying bikes.' Life doesn't need to feel so tricky, it's simply simple once you get the hang of it, and like I said, one day at a time. Make small decisions, encourage small changes, address and work through the actual problems and you'll feel the foundations underneath you strengthen and you also might notice light returning to your eyes and a smile starting to broaden again across your heart. Who knows, maybe you'll even be able to see the fantastic person other people see you as through your own eyes and believe the genuine things they say to you with your own ears. I think that would be very nice, don't you?

Hey Sister

N   I have written extensively about my own history but I haven't really commented on the history I have shared with others. I have a large extended family on both my maternal and paternal side and a small immediate family. I come from your standard mum, dad and two kids affair. I'm older than my sister by two years and she's called Our Lucy, but is often known as Luce.

 

   We all came out in celebration of Lucy a few months ago when she got wed to her now husband Jake and finally flew the nest lovingly crafted and maintained by our parents Ange and Gegsy. I don't have any other intimate examples of what it means to have a sibling other than the one set for me by Lucy and I think she's set a high standard of love and care over the 26 years we've been together, often separated by land and sea but always, always a pair. To me having a sister is all about the easy friendship you simply can't duplicate with anyone else other than a very, very close friend or cousin. Lucy and I are the only sisters in a family where everyone else has a brother and I've seen that the brother/sister relationships of my cousins are also strong and precious. I think a very large part of the reason for this closeness between siblings is because we come from a family of which all of our parents are one of seven - meaning that family is important and it has a stronghold within our identities, we were taught to look after each other and on occasion I've felt just as protected by my cousins as I have always felt by Lucy. I remember when a not so comradey comrade gave me a hard time on an idle Tuesday at high school and one of my female cousins, also in the same school and older than me by a year, took much umbridge at this treatment of me and proceeded to put the not so comradey comrade into a position of interrogation and saw to it that the uncomradey one didn't pull a stroke like that again. The cousin in question continues to be a close friend to this day and someone I've put into something resembling a 'big sister' column in my mind.

 

   I don't wish to represent my sister Lucy as being a little saint. A little saint she is not and our dad took great delight in revealing her past misdemeanours in the speech he gave with excellent delivery and aplomb at her wedding. It was of course all said in jest but everything that escaped his vocal box was the truth. We know so much about our sisters; we know why they're a little bit defensive, we know when they started paying a lot of attention to their hair and makeup. We know when they took off from us emotionally to 'find themselves' and we remember when they came back with a greater impression in their mind's eye of who they had become. A sister who is close in age is likely to have been our first friend, competition for parental attention, a yard stick to measure ourselves against and in my case someone who is always, always there, ready to take me in, dust off the day and say something which is unique to her, highly likely to make me laugh and cause me to feel grateful for the 30th April 1989, which is the day three became four and Little Luce began to make her first impressions on the world.

 I have a great deal of respect for and interest in the sanctity of sisterhood. My sister used to be a mucky little thing in the garden who was forever consuming mud pies and leaves, she still knows where they tastiest leaves are… she used to have tasting sessions during her morning constitution as she headed towards school and then inevitably diverted her route and went somewhere else instead. Lucy isn't a mucky little thing or truant anymore, she's just little now and I'm so glad that I've seen and been part of her journey from mummy and daddy's tiny baby to toddler, to my friend, to school, to high school, to A LOT of college courses, (one of which resulted in expulsion) and now to marriage. I'm expecting her with our mum and dad in three and a half weeks time for a week long visit… at the end of which we'll put on our red shoes, click three times and go back to our little town just outside of Liverpool city centre. As Dorothy always says, there's no place like home and it's all the better when you've got a full memory bank waiting to be woken up when you get back. You can stroll along the beach there with your sister who always walks a pace ahead and talks nineteen to the dozen but continually looks back to check you're still there as she mosies with her back straight, senses tuned in and serves to dazzle the world around.

Heart Healthy

 

 

It dawned on me yesterday that we're all living on the same planet but experiencing it completely differently. I was thinking about this and relating it specifically to languages, my flatmate and I have very different ideas about who the Friends characters are. How is this relevant?

  It starts with the fact that my flatmate and I are of different nationalities. I'm English and he's Spanish. I walked into the living room the other day to find myself looking at David Schwimmer's face, now I recognised his physical portrayal of the loveable oaf Ross Geller but I didn't identify with the voice coming out of his mouth at all. What have they done with my Ross? Is what I was thinking. I almost said, 'this is a lot more enjoyable in English yanno,' to my ensconced in his own version of Friends flatmate but then I stopped myself just in time. I stopped because I remembered a conversation I had with a different individual of Spain about how Friends only feels like Friends to him when he watches the American actors running about on the screen with their mouths open and closing but with their real voices hidden behind a Latino voice over actor. If you’re a Friends fan then you'll know that the six principal characters feel as familiar to you as your own friends do and the language you know them in is who they are to you. It seemed a bit mean to tell my flatmate that he was having a second rate Friends experience, he was having a nice time.

  My point here is that we're all watching the same things but from varying angles. I step onto my yoga mat and look forward to thirty minutes of peace and calm, someone else steps onto a yoga mat and looks forward to thirty minutes of boring poses. We then meet in the pub and have a heated discussion which results in someone being called 'snotty.' I feel that as groups of populations we have become very aware of what we think and how we feel but are not very aware of the person sitting next to us at work, we're all on the same planet, we're in the same office but they're in their universe and I'm in mine and we won't meet in the middle until we accept that we must travel to a middle ground and talk things out. It is of my entirely insignificant mind that we often forget to communicate and to empathise, we forget to do the right thing because we're so focussed on what's happening in our individual universes and more often than not in today's cut and thrust world we're forgetting to live, we're also forgetting that other people are capable of enhancing our lives, not everyone is out to hinder things for us.  

 

  I sometimes find myself feeling tied to a career clock, must do this, must do that, mustn't swan off to another country, must start saving for a pension by the time I hit my 30th birthday. The only tick-tock-tick-tock I'm really tied to is the one beating inside my chest and that clock likes action, it likes movement. It likes to be understood and cared for too. My heart, like hearts everywhere in all of the billions of universes millennia wide has on occasion forgotten to empathise and to understand its heartly counterparts, but, but, but, but I am making a pledge to carry about an understanding and forgiving heart. This heart of mine will not screech out 'eeeeeeee ya snotty you' when it doesn't understand another heart beating all alone in another chestly confinement. My heart will opt to communicate instead and by doing so will allow its best friend and close neighbour, the brain, to release nice heart healthy doses of dopamine and serotonin whilst it's support network, the arms and legs, walk around showing the eyes all of the magical sights along the way as the ears take in tinkling, pretty music signalling a story that is just about to begin - with the most colourful and stunning set of lights guiding the way.

 

 

Conscience and Confidence

  My name is Helen Edwards (totally know that you already know what my name is but I'm about to make a declaration and I've heard that announcing oneself is the correct protocol in such situations) and since I learned how to think I've been having unhealthy relationships. I've experienced unhealthy relationships with food, alcohol, men, women, my body and also my mind. I shall outline them forthwith so hold onto your seatbelts…. white knuckle ride coming up.

  When I was a child I was afraid of the other children at my school, they were all a bit rough and ready and I was undoubtedly the studious type so I got rather used to my own company and I befriended a cat called Simba. Best friend a cat aged 11? Yes, I can hear the alarm bells ringing in your head. Primary School finished and on I moved to High School, well that was a joy, NOT. I cried every day for approximately three years of my high school schooling, the fact I didn't dry out altogether was a small miracle. I had pencil sharpenings tipped into my hair, I was always the last to be picked for anything, people would try nice and hard not to invite me to things but always be very careful of making sure that I knew all about the social activities of my peers and one very pleasant girl passed a note around the class with the question Who Hates Helen? written on it and asked all of the yes voters to sign accordingly. My crime? I was quiet, unassuming, unconfident and my face was as miserable looking then as it remains to be to this day when in a resting position. It was an unfortunate sequence of events and I was glad when I was 16 and could walk out without looking back.

  Should have all ended there shouldn't it? Theoretically, yes, and that would have been ideal, but theories don't always work in practice and this theory didn't work in my case. The rot had set in early, damage had been done, rusty nail was already well in place and it was contaminating everything around it. I would walk into a room and expect people not to like me, I had come to expect to fight  my corner before anyone had gotten to know me. I was defensive, I expected the worst of everything and I was incredibly negative. I developed anxiety, OCD (no I'm not a little bit OCD - how I loathe that phrase. I suffered with fully blown, crippling OCD for a rather long time), depressive episodes, I drank too much, I ate too much and I didn't believe there was a happy future out there for me. This up and down fiasco carried on for years and years and it plagued me. I gained weight and I didn't want to go out, I'd feel so uncomfortable when I was out that I'd get too drunk, then I'd feel uncomfortable about being so drunk when I was in the same company again but in a more sober condition. I'd lose weight, I'd gain weight, I'd feel good and then I'd feel bad. It's been the most sickening roller coaster you can possibly imagine but with the added effect of being not one bit imaginary and very, very real. So real that I can remember it because I've lived it.

  I've had some relationships, all of which have failed. I believe these failed relationships can be divided into two camps. My inability to function in a rational way when the chips were down and because I made some bad decisions regarding the other partners in the relationships. My weight has been a massive factor, I just haven't felt very confident for large parts of the last 10 years since my first relationship ended.

   This upping and downing has been ruling my confidence and consciousness for far too long and it is going to STOP. It is going to STOP once and for all. I've fought against the urge to swap newly learned healthy behaviours over the last few weeks, I've been keeping a diary and I make lists for myself about what I must do the next day, I've been practising yoga each day and I've become a vegetarian. I've lost 9lbs (yay me - weighed myself this evening) over the last while and I can feel something changing inside me. The lazy, lethargic, soft and comfy casing surrounding me is falling away and revealing someone with the drive and ambition to make things happen. The slim, bright eyed, confident young woman I was in my early 20s is on her way back and when she gets her foot firmly back in the door, she's back to stay. She'll fit her hourglass figure into a pair of size 10 jeans, let her blonde hair fall over her shoulders, pass her bloody driving test and then she'll buy another pair of size 10 jeans to celebrate.