Let me introduce you to........

You know how people always say there's 2 sides to every story? Well, what if there's also 2 sides to people too?!
Imagine a tug of war, now imagine on one side of the rope is a logical, rational thinking individual. She is able to think about situations with a clear head, and rationalise her thoughts and feelings, she is aware of her surroundings, of the world around her and can make logical decisions based on this information. She is level headed, confident and friendly, she always has a smile and always looks for the good in the world.
Now, on the other end of the rope is a highly unstable individual, she is anxious about everything and finds it very hard not to panic or worry over even the simplest of things. She cannot think rationally about her worries, she is unable to judge situations or her surroundings accurately, and this in turn causes panic which instantly swells out of control, and affects every aspect of her life. She unable to think rationally or logically about her feelings and emotions so instead she holds them inside, feeling like they are something to be ashamed of.
These 2 individuals cling to either end of the same rope, constantly battling to regain control of it, always fighting to win, never ever loosing their grip on the rope as they fight with all their might to force the other out of the equation.
 Except, the tug of war is taking place inside my head, the two individuals are actually one person, and this entire battle is going on daily inside my mind. The logical me vs the irrational me, both sides of me constantly at odds with the other, always fighting for control over my mind, never relenting, never stopping.
Some days logical me wins, this means normal, rational decision making is possible, and I'm likely to feel confident and happy in myself. Other days, irrational me wins, and this makes me scared, anxious, panicky, irrational me makes me feel like I'll never be good enough and she makes me sad and angry all at once.
There isn't a day that goes by where I don't feel torn by the battle raging inside my head, it consumes me on a daily basis and it both scares and worries me whether this is even normal? I've spent hours researching personality disorders, and I cannot find a single one that seems close to what I'm experiencing, and the idea of telling a professional terrifies me, what if it isn't normal? What if I'm loosing my mind? What will happen then?

What changed?

What happens when you feel like you're trapped in a silent prison? Like, you have so much to say, you have so many racing thoughts, but your anxiety is forcing you to lock them all away. You can't find the right words to convey what you are feeling? You can't calm your racing heart long enough to make sense of what's going on in your brain. You can't slow the thoughts racing through your mind long enough to focus on any single one at a time. What do you do then?
I find myself scrolling through Facebook and twitter, refreshing the pages over and over and over, like, literally every few seconds, desperately searching for the answers, or waiting for someone to notice how completely stir crazy I am going. Only the answers aren't there, they never are, and no one notices either, because when they ask "Are you ok?" My mouth automatically kicks into a big smile and answers "yeah I'm great thanks" or the infamous "I'm fine". And the exchange is pretty much over before it even began. And so the cycle continues, and I continue, and "I'm fine" and I smile, and I get on with life, and I go through the motions every day, only, I'm not fine, and I wish I could stop lying and saying that I am and pretending that I'm the same person I was a year ago. You see, I had a taste of what it was like to feel 'normal' to feel confident, and happy, and to actually like myself, and I loved it.
So what changed? Was it me? How did I change? What changed me? And more importantly, how do I get that me back? Or is she a write off now? You know, like the 14 year old me, the one who had never been raped, the girl I spent 18 years trying to piece back together, constantly punishing myself for failing miserably at the task in hand before realising that it wasn't all about being the old me anymore, it was actually about loving, nurturing and creating a new me, one born out of the trauma in much the same way that a Phoenix rises out of the ashes. And I managed it too, I nurtured the new me, I cared for her and I learned how to love her and life was pretty amazing for quite a while.
Then it started to change, and I started to question my abilities, and I started to realise that I wasn't actually this fantastic inspirational person that people kept telling me I was. I was winging it, I didn't know how to be confident, or accept compliments, and the more the compliments came, the more they battered at my suddenly fragile confidence, eventually smashing through it completely. Maybe because I stopped trusting in my own abilities, maybe because I stopped believing in myself, maybe because being told I was looking fab, was suddenly just too overwhelmingly terrifying to me. The compliments that had built me up, were suddenly tearing me down, yet the only thing that had changed was me, because I was so scared of looking good, I was terrified of failing to live up to everyone's expectations, because I didn't realise that the only expectations of me were actually only my own. Because I felt under so much pressure to achieve that I crumbled under the pressure. Because a couple of people said and did things that made me feel like I was inadequate and I let myself believe that, that I wasn't good enough, I wasn't worthy, clearly I was a bad person. So my mind ran with these thoughts, it reinforced the feelings constantly, and bam, here I am, a mere shell again, trapped in the belief that I'll never be good enough, terrified of everything, and yet maintaining the sense of complete normalcy to the outside world. A world that doesn't see the hand that shakes as it types these words, that sees only a smile and chirpy attitude, a world that doesn't hear my heart pound when the phone rings, nor do they realise that my silence isn't ignorance, my lack of calls are not born of rudeness but simply an irrational drive to protect myself from accidentally letting the mask slip. The past few months for me, have been all about protection, protecting myself from getting hurt by people, be it physically or emotionally, but I'm beginning to feel like the one person I truly need protection from is actually myself, or I might just self combust.

My weight and me.

What happens when you believe that you're failing to live up to people's expectations of you? Is it really other peoples expectations that you're failing to meet or could it actually be your own?
About 18 months ago I joined slimming world and started to turn my life around. I'm not sure how or why I did this, I guess I just reached a point where I was so desperately unhappy with myself that I had to do something, and dealing with my weight first seemed to be the natural course of action. Actually joining slimming world was a mission in itself because it took me about 3 attempts just to get myself through the doors and into the group to even join. At first I didn't tell anyone I'd joined slimming world, I had several reasons for keeping this to myself. You see, when I was younger I had been raped, on more than one occasion, and my initial coping mechanism to deal with this was self harm. I blamed myself, my God did I blame myself, and the guilt of that was literally eating away at me. Somehow at that time, I managed to come to the conclusion that if I was fat then no man would look at me, so therefor I would be protecting myself from ever ending up raped or hurt again. It made sense in my traumatised mind, I mean, what man would ever want to rape a fat, disgusting woman? So the weight piled on, and my safety blanket grew, my protection bubble, my failsafe method of keeping myself protected.
Over the years I made many attempts at dealing with the trauma of being raped, I'd been left with PTSD as a result, and it took a long time to try to change my coping mechanisms and somehow rewire my traumatised mind into thinking a bit more logically. I finally realised that the guilt I was carrying was not mine to carry, and that I was worthy of love, I learned that it was not self conceited to love or even like myself and I was enough just as I was. This was when my slimming world journey began, because I finally felt ready to let go of the last coping mechanism I was holding onto, which was my weight.
In the past every time I'd decided to tackle my weight I had started out initially well, then as people began to notice the changes in my body, I would go into panic mode, if people could see a difference then it meant that I was no longer safe, loosing weight meant that I was putting myself at risk again, at least that's what my brain kept telling me. So over the years I would drop a bit of weight, then panic and regain it again. This time though, I knew had to be different, it was the final piece of a jigsaw I'd spent years carefully constructing, and I was determined that this time I would finally put my life back together.
As the weight started to drop away, my confidence and self esteem in turn grew. I was literally becoming a new person, what I believed to be a better person. People began telling me how amazing I was, how fab I looked, compliments came from all directions and at first I thrived from everyone's positive words, they gave me the courage to continue, to spur myself on. Hearing so many lovely things made me feel like I was worth something finally,  I felt good for the first time in forever, I felt like I was doing something right for once.
That didn't mean that the demons had gone completely though, they still popped in from time to time, taunting me, telling me I was wrong, doing their best to convince me how risky this weight loss thing was, how everything that had happened was my fault. Anxieties would grip me, and I would wobble, some weeks I fell completely, but I was strong enough to get back up, to push the anxieties aside and quiet the guilt that kept threatening to rear its ugly head again.
In my previous blog I talked about being betrayed by a close friend and how it shook me up, made me question everything in my life, all of a sudden I wasn't sure who I could trust, I wasn't even sure I could trust myself any more and that was when the guilt came crashing back into my life again. The thing with guilt is that it works it's way into every corner of your life, it consumes all of your thoughts about pretty much everything. Guilt is an emotion that once you allow it to affect one thought, it creeps across and taints every thought, it can be incredibly debilitating, at least it is for me, because once I've allowed guilt in, it consumes almost every thought I have. I end up feeling guilty for everything and anything, even things beyond my control suddenly become my fault somehow, and my brain makes it seem so logical to me.
So that's where I am right now, consumed with feeling guilty, because every week that I don't loose weight is a week when I feel like I'm letting everyone down, which I then feel guilty about, then I loose weight, and I panic, so I gain weight and I feel guilty, so I loose weight and I panic, it's a vicious circle.
 I feel like I'm under so much pressure to go back to the weight losses I know that I am capable of, but I think the only person putting pressure on me is actually me, I'm the one with such high expectations of myself, then when I fail to live up to them I feel so guilty. I wish I knew how to lay these demons to rest finally otherwise I'm going to go through the rest of my life overweight, in fear and constantly beating myself up over things beyond my control.