isa-ly

[isa-ly]

KNOWING DOES NOT EQUAL WANTING

TW: eating disorders, anorexia, body image, weight, depression, anxiety, mental illness

Here she is, back at it again with another blog post. Apparently I feel the need to share a lot more frequently lately. I know, that’s a first for me too. Actually, no. I think I’ve always felt the need to share, I just taught myself to repress it until I got so good at mentally willing it away, that I forgot it was a normal thing to do.

Which brings us right to today’s topic, kind of. It’s already mentioned in the headline, but what I want to talk about today is the difference between knowing that you should want something and actually wanting it. Or optionally also: knowing you should feel and do something and actually feeling and doing it. 

Theory and practice. The age-old battle.

Alright, enough drama. (Just kidding, there’s no such thing as enough drama.)

Anyway. 

This is a topic that used to take up pretty much every single one of my many therapy sessions with Kerstin. Because for the longest time, it was the biggest thing holding my back in my recovery – both from my eating disorder and every other mental health issue and problem I was struggling with.

Without delving too deep into the many protection mechanisms I developed in my early childhood and teenage years, let’s just say that one of the things I had to do in order to remain safe and sane, was to push my impulses away and act neutral instead. Those impulses weren’t always the same things, of course, but overall, they were mostly feelings of anger, sadness, frustration and rebellion. I’ve talked about the reasons for that before, in my post about repression, but I basically just learned to take whatever oncoming feeling or impulse to “fight back” arose, and safely lock it away into a metaphorical box. Out of sight, out of mind.

At the time, I didn’t think much of it because, just like Kerstin explained to me and I realized too, it was what I needed to do in that situation in order to stay protected and loved. Again, it was a safety mechanism that held everything in place. Only now that I’m a lot older and don’t face the same “threats” anymore, this mechanism has actually warped into something that has caused me many issues when it comes to feeling my feelings and wanting my ... wants? That sounded better in my head. I hope you know what I mean.

I see it like this: Because it used to be unsafe for me to actually live and act on my impulses and feelings, especially the “negative” ones, I instead learned to rationally categorize them into small sections, that I would then tuck away somewhere, so they wouldn’t escalate the situation I was in. It was almost like factory work. An argument between me and my mum would start, I would feel the emotions welling up but not have the space to show them and while on her end they had free range, on my end I would go silent, swallow them down and remain calm and “unbothered”.

These emotions weren’t something that I considered a part of me, I saw them more as weeds that popped up and had to be plucked and thrown out. They were unproductive, unhealthy, irrational. And I was not. I would see how my mum would get so angry that I could barely recognize her anymore, and all I could think was: “That’s never going to be me. I am always gonna stay level-headed and calm because I would never want to act like this.”

Essentially, that created two very simple equations in my head: 

1. Emotions = irrational 2. Controlling emotions = rational

And those equations worked pretty well in the very specific situation of arguing with my mum. But, as you can probably guess, they didn’t really work anywhere else. Like, at all. Because, breaking news: You cannot rationalize away your emotions. That’s a fool’s mission and boy oh boy, was I Boo-Boo The Fool. I just didn’t really know it yet.

Because this pattern ended up influencing all I did in life and how I handled all my problems. If you had asked me, I would have never ever said that I thought emotions were an irrational or bad thing. Not at all. Just very specific ones, like for example anger. Ironically, however, anger is actually one of the very few emotions that is quite literally the definition of productive – because it goes from the inside to the outside. It’s explosive and hard-hitting and destructive, it moves and it bursts. But it can also be the necessary fuel to your engine when you want to get a move on and change something. Rage can amplify the strength you have by the tenfold. I saw it in my family life, but because I would often be at the end of that fiery fit of rage, I didn’t necessarily clock it as a good thing. I didn’t see that intense feelings and emotions, if handled right, could actually be very helpful and productive to life.

So, again, to me emotions worked better on paper because there they couldn’t hurt me or others. But as it just so happened, my brain wasn’t always too good at making a clear difference between the “no-no”-emotion and the “yes-good”-emotion. And especially when life got really ugly and hard, that categorization mechanism backfired. Violently.

They say repression causes depression and well: They’re right. I spent a long time actively teaching myself to never care and when the moment came where I really, really should have – I just didn’t know how. I would try to listen, really hear what was inside of me, and it would just be ... nothing. I saw what I was going through, I saw what my eating disorder was doing to me and how much I was suffering, but where there should have been anger, fear, frustration, discomfort and rage, there was just radio silence.

I didn’t care. 

In every sense of the phrase.

Or more correctly: I knew I should have cared, but I couldn’t. I knew I should have felt but I didn’t.

I remember sitting in therapy and being so fucking frustrated because I had it all laid out right in front of me. I knew why I thought the way I did, I knew what caused it, I knew what the solutions were to all my problems and yet I was stuck. I was still fucking stuck, because it was all just on paper. It was all just theory. 

No matter how hard I tried, how far I stretched out my arms, I could never seem to reach my real feelings and emotions. I knew they were there, obviously, because I knew I was a human being and human beings have emotions. But there’s a whole galaxy between having emotions and feeling them. And galaxies are really hard to cross, NASA will back me up on that one.

The more time passed, the more frustrated I got. Friends would ask me how therapy was going, how recovery was going and how I was doing and the answer, the real answer I rarely ever told anyone, was: It was standing still. Unmoving, unyielding. I felt like I was waiting in front of a wall in my own head, a whole landscape of emotions behind it with no way to ever climb over it to actually get there.

How would I ever get better if I didn’t care? How would I ever recover if I didn’t care? How would I ever move if there was no movement within me? I needed a spark to ignite the fire but instead, I was just looking at the rock and lint thinking: “Whatever.”

Whatever. 

The word that kept bouncing back and forth in my brain where fury and anger should have been bouncing instead. I was crawling out of my skin and at the same time, I couldn’t even find it within me to care about it. And I couldn’t help but chuckle at the absolute irony of it all. Of course, there was nothing funny about it. But I had spent all this time trying to master all my emotions and without realizing, I had gotten so “good” at it, that I forgot how to undo it again. How to stop not-feeling. Like that one poem by Goethe, “Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, where he writes: 

“The spirits that I summoned  my commands ignore.”

Wow, now I’m already quoting Goethe, so much for less drama.

Alright then, Isa, stop making obscure poetry references and tell us: What’s the verdict? How did you solve it? How did you start feeling again? What was the big turn around, the epiphany, the enlightenment? 

Hate to break it to you (and me) but: There was none. 

Not really, anyway. Because just like with any other healing process and recovery journey, unravelling years worth of mechanisms and trained patterns above all needs one thing: Time. Life isn’t an equation you can solve by x and then move on. And even if it was, I’d still probably fail because I suck at maths.

In all seriousness though: I’m still working on a lot of the things I talked about just now. However, there is one thing I realized that helped me a lot and has actually allowed me more access to my feelings and emotions again. And that is trusting the process. I know, could it be any more vague? Probably not. But well, that’s what life is most of the time. The grey zone between black and white. There’s no dramatic reveal, no prestige. Getting better mentally isn’t adding 1+1 and receiving an instant result. It’s wading through a sea of confusing trauma and emotional baggage and trying to somehow make sense of all of it. It’s literal blood, sweat and tears. And the sooner I came to terms with that, the more progress I made.

Due to my perfectionist and control-related tendencies, I had always been used to getting instant results. I would put in the work last second, max out on all my skills and then be finished and done. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. But mental illness doesn’t work like that. And for a long time, I didn’t want to accept that. I thought if I turned up to therapy like a student to class, with my homework ready and my pencils sharpened, I would get an A+, leave and never return. But again: that would be a fool’s mission. So, I had to change course.

Instead of spending every waking second trying to corner my own emotions, I started thinking about what I thought I was feeling in that moment, and then just moved on. Instead of hating myself because I was the road block on my own way to recovery, I accepted my brain for the way it was thinking and tried to gently implement other ways of processing feelings. If something happened that I knew would in theory have made me angry, sad or happy, I would write it down. I would tell someone, sometimes only myself. At the end of the day, I just tried to make a mental note every time I knew I was automatically repressing something, in hopes that by staying aware and alert, it would one day morph back into me actually feeling it again.

Sure, that meant and often still means that I feel empty and nonchalant towards things that should make me feel the exact opposite. But just like when you’re trying to untangle the headphones you’ve had in your back pocket, ripping and pulling at it frantically rarely every works. Instead, you have to find one end and slowly start unravelling it from there, knot by knot. It’s going to be frustrating and a lot of the time, you’re gonna want to just tear those god damn headphones to pieces and get new ones. And yeah, that might actually work with headphones. But it’s a bit more tricky, dare I say impossible, even, to just buy a new brain. 

The advice I tried to follow, which was given to me by both my therapist and myself, was to quite literally try and chill the fuck out. I was so keen on getting better as quickly and successfully as possible, that I never took the time to understand that with all the awful shit I went through, there was no way of truly fixing it by taking the fast lane. It would have been great to wake up one day and be feeling all my emotions again, eating all of my fear foods and calories without a single care and skipping into the sunset happily.

But just like I mentioned in my text about fears: Recovery isn’t linear. It’s peaks followed by drops, followed by crashes and slow inclines. It’s a shitty dirt road with a ton of potholes and bumps. You can’t simply step on the gas and hurl through, because you’ll either end up in an accident or with a broken car, more burned out than you were before. Instead, I had to learn how to navigate on that shitty dirt road and just keep pushing forward, even if I didn’t know where it would lead me.

And slowly, I started noticing little changes. I would write down all my theoretical emotions, day in and day out, and suddenly I noticed that while I was doing that, I actually felt happy. I felt sad and angry. And I clung onto that as more days passed. And soon enough, I didn’t just feel those things when writing or thinking about them, I actually started feeling them in the moment too. Almost like a functional human being. Wild, right?

And let me tell you, once that initial breach happened, once I managed to punch a small but noticeable crack into the dam that was holding back my emotional flood, I didn’t even have to do much more before eventually, that dam caved by itself. Now, suddenly being confronted with over ten years of repressed anger, sadness and guilt, in addition to the pain that my anorexia caused me, is a whole other can of worms that I’m gonna open another time. 

For now, all that matters is this: It might feel like you don’t give a single shit what happens to you and your life. Being empty, whether that’s mentally, physically or both, does that to you. And while the phrase “fake it ‘til you make it” is a bit of a cliché, it does kind of apply here. Because again, these things take time and energy. And I know that those two things are often hardest to give when you’ve already suffered so much. But I just told myself over and over to hang in there and just keep going because it was the only thing I knew would work, eventually.

Getting better mentally and recovering from my eating disorder has without a single doubt been the hardest, most exhausting, least rewarding and outright painful experience of my life. But I try to think of it this way: Staying sick and depressed would have been much worse. Even if my mental illnesses tried to tell me different things, I knew I was right. Because you cannot live a sustainable and happy life with things that cage you in. And if that means that I have to go to war with myself every other day, I’ll just have to do that. 

Because I deserve what’s at the end of that dirt road. And I won’t stop until I get there. Even if it’s with a broken bumper and a smoking engine. At least I’ll be the one behind the wheel.

[isa-ly]

I’M GETTING A DIVORCE

TW: eating disorders, body image, weight, mental illness, depression, anxiety

Yesterday evening was rough. Completely out of the blue, getting-hit-by-a-freight-train type of rough. Usually, when these evening or days occur, I just kind of tend to start fresh the next day and pretend they never happened. Because everyone has bad days, even if you’ve worked hard to restore your general mental health, and it’s okay to just let those days pass and work on being kinder to yourself once the sun rises again.

However, I also want to actively work on not simply ignoring them all together, because while it’s a good thing not to dwell on bad days for too long, it’s also a good thing to not just repress them. And as we all know, I’m quite guilty of doing the latter and labeling it as “fine” when, in fact, it is everything but fine. Keeping a positive spirit is admirable but shutting out everything that cracks the surface of your facade is just not gonna work in the long run. Every emotion is valid and if I can acknowledge feeling happy and comfortable, I can just as well acknowledge feeling sad and shitty.

So, I’m making a compromise. While I don’t really want to talk about how and why yesterday evening was rough, I am still going to talk about something else that sometimes feels equally as hard and difficult to me. As already mentioned in the trigger warnings, there’s going to be talk about eating disorders, specifically anorexia nervosa, as well as body image and weight again. So, if that is in any way harmful to you and you own journey, feel free to just drop this post like a hot potato. (I think this actually is a German proverb, but it sounds so funny in English, so I’m just going for it.)

Now, what I’m about to say might sound somewhat controversial or really, really fucked up but I’ve found that when it comes to eating disorders (and any other mental illness, really), the darkest parts are often the ones you have to really take a good look at, even if it hurts and sounds shocking. And calling them out, dragging them into the open to point at them with your finger, is the only thing that will make them palpable enough to get rid of them. Once again, the Harry-Potter-boggart analogy works quite well here.

Shame and fear fester comfortably in the darkest corners of your brain, like a disgusting mold that slowly takes over. And I don’t really want a moldy brain, so I once again want to use this blog openly talk about something that is nothing short of crappy and awful, in order to take some of its power away. And also just to be honest, with myself and everyone else who happens to read this.

There’s a lot of reasons why it’s incredibly hard to recover from an eating disorder. Of course nothing is impossible, least of all recovery, but I still struggle almost every single day to keep pushing forward. Sometimes that struggle is close to nothing, sometimes it’s manageable and sometimes it seems like the end of the world. And one of the many reasons why it can feel like that last one, is what I and many others who have suffered from this illness like to call “nostalgia for your eating disorder”.

I think we can all agree that regardless of whether you have one or not: Eating disorders are shit. They really suck ass, to no one’s surprise. If I had one wish and one wish only to make, I wouldn’t even have to hesitate a single second: It would be for my ED to vanish forever and never return. Easy. So, then why in the living hell would I feel nostalgic for it? Why would I be hesitant to call my ED out for the life-ruining piece of shit it is? Why do I sometimes catch myself wishing back the times where I would go to bed hungry, where I would feel so in control despite never really having it? Where I would lie and deceive and watch my life slowly fall apart? What idiot would miss something like that?

Well ... an idiot with an eating disorder. 

Alright, I’m not an idiot. And neither is anyone else who feels nostalgia towards this illness. Because even if it sounds ridiculous and outrageous: It’s in fact completely normal to have these thoughts and feelings.

I’ve mentioned before how, when I first crashed into the world of anorexia, it felt like I had completely lost myself and what I had considered to be my personality to this new, foreign entity that had taken over my life in a matter of days. Because actually, for a lot of people – myself included – that is exactly what eating disorders are: A filler for a gap that you don’t know how to close yourself. Like a plug to a tub that has been running out, or a bandaid to a wound that won’t stop bleeding. It’s an emergency solution to a problem that threatens to swallow you. And often times, emergency solutions can’t be analyzed or fact-checked for risk and danger because, well, it’s an emergency. And you’ll accept anything you can get to rescue yourself in that moment.

Back when I developed anorexia, I was completely lost in life. I didn’t know who I was or who I wanted to be and trying to answer that question overwhelmed me so much, that the only way to cope was to let someone, something else, fill the big black hole that was ripping itself through my chest. Coping comes in all shapes and forms. And mine had the form of a sneaky and cunning eating disorder. 

Often, that is why personality and eating disorders go hand in hand. Because it’s so much more than just an illness that fucks up the way you eat and live. It’s a whole new face you get to put on. It’s terrifying, but that terror is exciting and new because it’s an opportunity. It makes you miserable but at least it makes you something. It fills that void, that fear of being lost. It gives you purpose, and it gave me purpose too when I was at my very lowest. I didn’t know who I was or what to do and anorexia gave me a set of rules, a daily schedule and Do’s and Dont’s that I had to follow, as it watched over me like a hawk. 

Sometimes I see it almost like a parasite, like that weird alien from The Thing that takes on the form of a person to trick you into thinking it’s your friend. Anorexia is very, very skilled at that. And because it’s so skilled at it, it manages to completely convince you of the fact that it is now a crucial part of you that you will never, ever be able to let go again. It’s almost like a personality substitution and that’s exactly why it gets so hard to see it as something entirely foreign that you need to get rid of instead of clinging onto it.

And here’s the thing: As I started recovery and as I started fighting against everything anorexia told me to do, I realized that this fight also meant going back to my very old problem of not knowing who I was. In all the time of being sick and starving, I was at least “relieved” of the burden of having to question what I wanted from life. Not a very balanced deal, I know, but again: emergency solution. 

However, now that I was finally trying to get better and heal, that age old question came back again: What the fuck am I doing? And I could hear my eating disorder chuckling at the back of my mind:

That’s right. I might be ruining your life but who are you without me? No one. You have no idea what to do or where to go. You have no idea who you even are. That’s why I’m here. And besides: Nobody knows you like I do.

And that’s another part of the reason for nostalgia. Please forgive the poor comparison but the closest I can get to making an analogy to it, is to compare it to the principle of Stockholm Syndrom. Just so maybe the notion of it can be understood easier. Because anorexia is abusive and horrible, it literally made me starve myself, made me depressed and hate everything about life. It caged me in and held me captive to the point where I had no freedom, no choice, no joy or happiness left. It ruined everything. 

And all the while it caused me all of that horror, it’s also the only other thing, the only other “person”, voice, existence in my head that shares those memories with me. That knows exactly what I went through. Because we went through it together. It caused me all this pain and trauma – but it also shared it with me. I was never alone, not really, because even when I felt like there was no one or nothing left: Anorexia was always there. Every second of the day and every step of the way. I, it, both of us, know things that to this day, are unspeakable to me. That to this day, I haven’t told anyone because the fact that I was capable of doing such things, still scares me every time I think about them.

We share what are undoubtedly the worst and most painful memories of my entire life and as much as I fucking hate it, I cannot undo this connection. It’s a fucked up bond that I will always have with my eating disorder, even if it makes me angry and frustrated. It’s a connection I never asked for or wanted, but it’s still there and all I can do is learn how to process it in a way where it no longer holds me back and defines me.

Which is the reason for today’s blog title, by the way.

Actually, I got that analogy from a documentary about, you guessed it, eating disorders. In it, one of the counselors at an inpatient clinic compared recovery to the process of divorce. An eating disordered person might very well be aware that they’re in a bad, almost abusive relationship with themselves, or in this case: with their eating disorder. And they might very well be aware that the only way to get better is to let go and move on. But just like in so many divorce situations or break ups, this is way easier said than done. Because there is heaps of memories and emotions connected to this disorder that make you feel close to it, in a way. Feelings of accomplishment, of ambition, of thrill and yes, sometimes even feelings of happiness. False happiness, of course. But even the illusion of a false sense of joy is something that can be very powerful when you’re already beaten down. 

When you’re in such a dark place and your disorder takes over your life, it takes on almost human-like properties. It’s like a friend or a partner, it’s the only relationship you’re still able to have, the only one you are “true” to because everyone else you care about, you lie to. Anorexia isolates, just like any other mental illness tends to do, and it isolated me too. I tried my best to keep face but truthfully, when I was at my lowest, it felt like my eating disorder had managed to break into places of me that had never seen the light of day before. And it had built itself its own little nest there and gotten so comfortable and settled, that the thought of ever kicking it out, terrified my just as much as the thought of continuing to live with it.

I mentioned before that I sometimes avoid talking about anorexia like a separate entity that has its own mind, just so it doesn’t seem like it’s bigger than me. Clearly, I’m not doing that now. Because if I’m fully honest, to me, it’s kind of both and also neither. One one hand, I can feel it as something that sits at the back of my brain, at the back of my neck, at the back of my every thought. It’s something I can visualize, hear, feel with every move I make. And on the other hand, it’s not an actual person. Because it’s still just me, it’s how I think and do things, it’s an extension of my need for control. I can’t just separate it into its own realm of existence because we both live in my own brain. We share that space and sometimes anorexia and its opinions and leverage are bigger, sometimes they’re smaller – but for over a year now, they have always been there, one way or another.

So, letting go of it, bidding it goodbye and trying to claim back the space my anorexia has been taking up for so long now, is hard. Because it’s like letting go of a part of myself. A part that causes me pain and suffering, yes. But a part of me nevertheless. And anorexia is a very hot-headed tenant, let me tell you that much. It does not like to be evicted, at all. But it’s not about what my disorder wants, it’s about what I want. And what I need. And that is to live a life free of the boundaries of my eating disorder. Even if it means not fully knowing who I am.

In my last therapy session that I went to, I talked about all of this to Kerstin. About feeling nostalgic and catching myself dwelling in memories that others would probably gasp at in shock. Gladly, Kerstin didn’t gasp because, well, she’d be a crap therapist if she did. But she’s a good one, lucky me. Anyway, in that last session I had, I then tried to come to a conclusion to this whole nostalgia thing, that wasn’t as depressing as the notion of it all. And what I came to was this:

I will never be able to undo what I did. What me and my anorexia did and what it made me do will never be un-lived or forgotten. It is and always will be a part of me. So, actually, trying to “get rid” of it and “kicking it out”, is not really the solution here. Sure, I’d love to flick a switch and have it all be gone in a second. But that’s never going to happen.

What I can do, however, is learn how to live with it in a way where those memories still get their proper place – without defining me anymore. And without dictating my every move and day. I’ve compared my eating disorder to a stubborn child a few times, too. One that throws massive tantrums when you tell it “no”. Because that’s what it does, mostly. However, another thing that it has in common with a child, maybe even with the child inside of me, is that it’s so, so scared of being left behind. Of being abandoned and forgotten. In a way, it’s exactly that. My anorexia is pieced together by so many of my insecurities and just like me, it doesn’t want to be abandoned. In fact, it’s so scared of it, that it fights back with teeth and claws and with all its might, to stay safe and comfortable where it is. It throws tantrums and breaks out into screaming fits because it’s terrified that once it goes silent, it will be forgotten.

So, actually, instead of treating it like some sort of external force, like a gnarly stomach ulcer (good one, Isa) or like a parasite, I have actually started to treat it more like a scared kid or a wounded animal. With patience and gentle words. With understanding but also with a certain sternness. Literally like a parent that is trying to calm down their raging child. Reassuring it that I have no intentions of cutting it out or pushing it away, but actually to let it stay under the condition that it remains a quiet and passive part of me. Until eventually, it accepts the silence I ask of it and, indeed, fades into something that doesn’t take up most of my living hours anymore.

Don’t get me wrong, 90% of the time my anorexia and me are still in a silent screaming fight over whether or not I can have a chocolate bar. Theory and practice often lie very, very far apart from each other. But the other 10%, the ones where I actually manage to practice what I preach – those are the ones that, to me, matter the most.

Because those are the ones where I can almost feel me and my eating disorder staring each other down from across the room in silence. The ones where I can tell that both of us are scared. Both of us are hurting. Both of us are smart. Both of us are strong.

But only one of us is right.

#eating disorder #anorexia #anorexia nervose #body image #recovery #nostalgia #ed

[isa-ly]

FEAR

TW: eating disorders, body image, weight, mental illness

Today I wanted to share a text I wrote a while ago because it is still very dear to my heart and reflects very well on what it felt (and still feels like) to live with an eating disorder. I just wanted to preface it by saying that since I wrote this, a lot of things have changed for the better and I’ve made progress that, back then, I would have never dreamed of making.

I know I’m still not fully there yet – wherever “there” is, anyway. And I’m still afraid of a lot of the things mentioned below. But in the meantime, I have learned the important lesson that recovery is a long process and that I shouldn’t be too hard on myself for not just “being fine” again. 

It’s okay to be scared. Even if you think your fear is ridiculous and that you should know better. Because here’s the thing: Fears aren’t meant to be rational. They’re the complete opposite of that, they’re biological, situational, emotional and most importantly: they’re valid. And you don’t have to feel bad for not being able to simply switch them off and move on.

Change and recovery is never linear and neither is the fear that comes with it. It’s a squiggly line that stretches, bends, drops, races and crawls but the important thing is that it always, always moves forward. 

But enough with the pseudo-inspirational one-liners. Here’s what 22-year-old Isa had to say on the topic of fear:

Everyone is afraid of something. Sometimes fears change, intensify, lessen, switch, disappear. But everyone is afraid of at least one thing. The dark, monsters, ghosts, taxes, public transport, aliens, small spaces, big spaces, god, hell, thunderstorms, heartbreak, waterslides, rollercoasters, spiders, death. Millions of possibilities.

As a child, I was scared to the core of werewolves. I don't know why, but they traumatized me. I was also scared of my grandpa because he was always such a gruff guy. I was scared of the neighbour's rooster at our countryside house. I was scared of tall trees in the night time.

When I got older, I stopped caring about the werwolves, the rooster and the trees. My grandad is still intimidating, though. I was scared of other things, now that I was a teen. Scared of not fitting in, scared of the fights with my mum, scared of missing parties, scared of the darkness of my living room, scared of being followed home.

When I got even older, I didn't give too much thought to fitting in or missing out anymore. I stopped walking quickly through my dark living room. I still have my keys grasped between my fingers when I walk home, though. I was once again scared of other things. Scared of my future, scared of getting my heart broken again, scared of failing uni, scared of living by myself for six months.

I'm twenty-two years old now and I managed living by myself, I'll be finishing uni in less than four months and my heart is healed again.

I'm twenty-two years old now and I'm afraid of pasta. 

I'm afraid of rice and of bread, of tofu and of cheese, of sausages and of sandwiches, of burgers and wraps, fries and mashed potatoes. 

I'm afraid of pizza and lasagna, of pesto and oil, of juice and hot chocolate, of pancakes and cookies, of brownies and yoghurt. I'm afraid of granola and nuts, of chocolate and gummies, of crisps and snacks.

I'm afraid of weight gain. I'm afraid of disobeying the second voice in my brain. I'm afraid of calories. I'm afraid of stepping on the scale. I'm afraid of not being afraid to starve myself. I'm afraid of never being able to stop looking in the mirror. 

I'm afraid of who I was and I'm afraid of who I was able to become. I'm afraid of not feeling anything, afraid of always lying. To everyone.

I'm afraid that I didn't care whether I died or not.

I'm twenty two years old now, and I wish I'd still be afraid of werwolves and roosters, of dark living rooms and not fitting in, of my grandpa and of missing parties. 

I'm afraid that life will never be that easy again.

I don’t want this to fade out on such a heavy note because I realize it shows some of my pretty dark thoughts from back then. So, I’ll say again, that a lot of time has passed ever since I wrote this text and that in so many ways, I have learned to overcome most of these fears. 

Others still prevail but especially when it comes to the very last one, I can now confidently say that I know and fully believe, that life can indeed be that easy again. I’m not yet there and it’s surely never going to be the same as it was before. But that doesn’t mean life can’t still be happy, effortless, joyous and worth living again.

Fear can tackle you and pin you to the ground to the point where you feel like you can’t move, can’t breathe. It can crush your every bone and make you feel so small and stuck. So, start by wiggling a toe. Blink your eyes. Pout your lips. Shake your leg. Flex your butt. Oh, wow, that’s a great butt. Not bad. And would you look at that, you can move your head again. There go your arms and your core, damn right, work that shoulder roll. Hot diggity, I didn’t know you had moves like that, where’d that handstand come from? Phew.

I’m being silly, I know. But as we all learned from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: The best way to rid yourself of your fears is to ridicule them. That, and eating chocolate.

So, don’t be afraid of the chocolate.

#introspection #eating disorder #anorexia #fear

[isa-ly]

THE TRUTH UNTOLD

TW: mental illness, eating disorders, depression, anxiety

I know the title might be a fun little hint to a certain k-pop song (which is a reference about three people will understand) but despite that little quirky pun, this post I’m about to write and that you’re about to read, is not gonna be easy. Or witty, or funny like some of the previous posts were. It’s most definitely going to be the longest one, though.

Because, in all honesty, this is the one post I have been absolutely dreading to make. However, it’s also the post that I kind of started this blog for because, unlike my depression, anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia and quarter-life crisis, this is something only my closer circle and those who happened to ask, really know about. 

And, once again in all honesty, this is the actual reason I started therapy almost a year ago. Because in every way possible, shit had hit the fan so hard that there had been nothing left but to step on the emergency breaks. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself here. So, let’s try and start from the beginning.

I’ve talked about my more or less mental breakdown and burn out during my last year of university a few times now. Didn’t spare any details either. However, there is one thing that I’ve been mindfully avoiding that actually took up a pretty big part of that time of my life. The reason I avoided it, was because in my head, I kept running in circles on how I would phrase it and explain it in a way that would a) not sound too shocking and b) not make me look like a complete stranger to people who, until now, had no idea of what I’m about to say.

Eventually, though, I realized that I was doing the exact same thing I’ve always been doing. Which was searching for excuses to not talk about the biggest struggle in my life and make myself vulnerable. And I don’t want to make these excuses anymore because, really, all they ever did was harm me. So, here goes nothing.

Hello. My name is Isa. And for over a year now, I have been suffering from an eating disorder called anorexia nervosa.

The sheer act of just having typed this sentence out on virtual paper, threw me so hard that I spent a good 15 minutes simply staring at my laptop screen just now. I told you, this wasn’t going to be easy. 

Since the only place I’m really “promoting” this blog on is Instagram, I’m just going to try and somehow use that as a segue to this post. Over the last year, I’ve received quite a few messages from friends, family and sometimes also random acquaintances, whenever I posted a picture of myself on my story or feed. Some of them were jokey, some of them interested and a very select few were concerned, too. All of them were about my apparent change of appearance, however. Of course, I didn’t only receive those messages online. The people who know and see me in real life, the above mentioned inner circle, have known for a while and some of them, as much as I wish they hadn’t had to, saw all of it happen in real life.

I know I included it in the trigger warnings already, but I want to point it out one more time here because I know how incredibly triggering these things can be – especially to people who have struggled or are struggling with similar issues. So, if reading about body image, dieting, weight loss and eating disorders makes you uncomfortable or could trigger bad memories and behaviour, this post might not be the one for you. I don’t want to be patronizing, you know what’s best for you, just wanted to make sure to highlight it before I continued.

I also want to preface this by saying that I can and only will talk about my own experience here. I am in no way, shape or form an expert on mental health and eating disorders and what I’m going to say and talk about, is purely a narration of what happened in my own life. Eating disorders, just like any other mental illness, are very individual and I do not want to come off as blurting out generalizations about them. Just so that we’re clear here.

Therapy taught me that the psychological, biological and/or societal origin of eating disorders is still almost completely scientifically unknown. It is for that exact reason, that the various EDs are some of the most stereotyped and stigmatized mental illnesses there are – which is also why it took me so long to actually pluck up the courage and energy to talk about it. I imagined people reading about my anorexia and thinking: “Oh, I bet it’s because she was bullied for her weight when she was a kid”, or: “Well, just another one of those girls who wanted to be skinnier”. Possibly also: “I never would have thought that someone like her would end up with an eating disorder. She always seemed so confident!”

So, to combat the fear of coming off like a cliché or sob story, I knew simply had to tell my whole and honest story. Because even if I’m worried about being put in a box or labelled as something I’m not, it still happened. And it’s still my story. And to move on from it, or better, with it, I have to tell it. And I have to tell it right. 

So, here it goes.

Ever since I can remember, I have disliked my body. Growing up as a Human Person™ in this society, I realize that’s not really something that makes me stand out (which, if you think about it, is actually incredibly fucking sad). Apart from my own self, however, no one ever really shamed for the way that I looked and I was also never bullied or teased by others because of it. So, that’s a no for the “Oh, I bet it’s because she was bullied for her weight when she was a kid”-stereotype. It makes me want to gauge the patriarchal beauty standard’s eyes out, to think that never actively having been shamed for my body or weight, is something that I can consider a “privilege” in this world. I’m aware that a lot of kids and adults don’t have that twisted privilege, which, again, just makes me want to set the world of body ideals on fire, but I don’t want to diverge too much from the point of this post. 

Remember that society I was talking about? Yeah, with that around, having someone point out or shame you for how your body looks different from what’s considered the ideal, isn’t really something that’s necessary in order for you to still notice it and develop massive insecurities. So, even though I was “lucky” and “privileged” enough to have avoided being bullied for my body by real-life people, I still grew up not liking the way I looked, always noticing that my stomach, my thighs, my arms, my boobs, my butt, were different to those of the girls everyone called pretty. Which inevitably led to me harbouring a contained, yet undeniably significant amount of self-hatred for the way my body looked over time.

Now, I might have been one of many body-conscious teenagers, but, in quite stark contrast to that, I was also a seemingly self-confident one. Or at least I really, really wanted to be. It’s what everyone always told me I came across as. The loud, opinionated and self-assured girl, who didn’t care what people thought of her. Maybe that was to compensate for my own insecurities, maybe it was for protection, or maybe it was also because I just knew, or hoped, it was the right way to go. I believed and preached that how I looked, what I weighed and what I ate didn’t matter, both to myself and to all of my friends and family. I knew I was absolutely fine the way that I was, as long as I was physically and mentally healthy. I’ve always known that, and I fully believe in it too. And yet, here I am. About to tell you what both you and me are already suspecting: The story of how that knowledge didn’t end up protecting me as well as I thought it would.

Despite me always having believed in not giving a shit about beauty standards, ideal body types and the obsession with whatever the fuck “skinny”, “slim thick” and “lean” are supposed to be, it undeniably had an effect on me. Just like it has an effect on literally every other person, regardless of gender or age. It’s pretty much passed onto us the minute we’re born, like a part of our literal DNA. It makes me sick to my very core, but I always knew that this insecurity, no matter how much I knew it shouldn’t have ever been one and no matter how much I fought to stand above it, was woven into the very fabric of my being. The very minute we learn to interact with others and the world around us, the clear, limited and completely unrealistic image of how we’re supposed to look in order to meet societal expectations, is indoctrinated into our innocent brains – consciously, subconsciously and in literally every other way possible.

I don’t want to give a lecture on how society, media, and peers make us believe it’s necessary and right to chase bodies that, realistically, no one can ever outrun, but I felt like saying at least this much about it to set the base for what’s about to come. Certainly, this almost innate, underlying dislike for my body – or most parts of it – wasn’t the sole reason for developing an eating disorder in my early twenties. But it was most definitely a cruel predisposition that played a big part in how my anorexia unfolded and the leverage it had and still has on me.

I mentioned in the beginning how, despite it being one of the most common mental health disorders, there’s barely any scientific explanations as to how eating disorders really come to be. Which is why assuming that being unhappy with my body and the way it looked was the only reason I slipped into disordered eating, would simply be false. After all, I lived twenty-one years of my life being more or less fine with it. It was an insecurity, yes, but it didn’t dictate my every day life, it didn’t influence how I lived it. So, the “Well, just another one of those girls who wanted to be skinnier”-stereotype, doesn’t really prove to be fully true either.

Which leaves the last assumption: “I never would have thought that someone like her would end up with an eating disorder. She always seemed so confident!”

To which I can only say: Yeah, uh ... same? I mean, do you really think there’s anyone who found themselves developing an eating disorder only to think: “Oh, yeah, that makes sense, I always knew I’d end up like that!” Sorry, that was a bit dark. I know that this assumption is something that mostly I myself am worried about and that there’s no reason for me to actually get defensive. However, while most reactions to me talking about my eating disorder have been very comforting and caring, I’ve also had a few quite unpleasant experiences and well, those tend to have the harsher impact. So, please forgive my mildly cynical reasoning here.

Right, then. If I didn’t ever get bullied for my body or weight, didn’t just want to “be skinny” and really am that confident – how did this happen?

Well, I’ve already given part of the explanation just now, when I told you about my unfortunate predisposition of never really having fully loved or accepted my body. The other part of the explanation, lies in pretty much every other post I have written so far. Most of all the latest one: Control.

It was a real challenge to have written that last entry without ever mentioning my anorexia with even one word. Because really, for me personally, control is literally all it ever was and will be about. My therapist told me that it’s quite common in other eating disordered people too. But again, I’m not here to talk about anyone else, I’m here to talk about my own experience. And it starts just like I said in my last post: With losing control. And in many ways, the combination of always having disliked my body and suddenly having slithered into a massive life-crisis where I felt like I had lost all power and control over everything, was the very dangerous mixture that started it all. 

I don’t want to make it about that too much, but it’s still worth mentioning that after my semester abroad, which had ended in January of 2018, I had gained some weight. Weight that, having changed up my diet a few years prior, I had actually lost and that all of a sudden, was now back on again. It had just been a very wonderful yet also stressful time abroad and well, heaps of uni work, very little sleep and the general student lifestyle, just caused me to pile on a few kilos. The part of me that genuinely never gave a fuck about body standards, once again did genuinely not give a fuck about that. And yeah, when I came back, there were the occasional family remarks of “Look at you, gained quite a bit of weight there, didn’t you?” (which I know are made with no malicious intent, by the way, but, forgive me if I say this: just shut up) and I had also obviously started noticing that none of my old clothes fit anymore and I did indeed look a lot larger than in any of my older pictures. Was that a blow to my self-built confidence because we live in a society that rewards weight loss and punishes weight gain? Sure. Was that when I developed anorexia? Nope.

Because, if you’ve been following the timeline of my mental health issues that I have oh so passionately been crafting in the last few posts, it wasn’t until autumn of 2018 that I first started struggling with my back then still undiscovered control issues, which lead to my anxiety, depression, insomnia and – now that I’m telling my whole story – my eating disorder. Or, to be fully correct, disordered eating, back then. Because just like the rest of my mental health issues, this too, crept up on me slowly at first.

I remember the first time I had this very simple thought. At least, it felt simple. Simple, but so deeply wrong and dangerous. And yet once I had had it, it wouldn’t leave anymore. It should have rang all the alarm bells in my head. It really should have. But I understand now, that the reason I had this very simple, deeply wrong and dangerous thought, was because I was desperate to control something, anything at all. Regain power over just one part of my life, whatever that might be.

So, that thought kept coming back. Over and over again:

What if I just stopped eating?

I would snap out of it and tell myself: “What the fuck, Isa? That’s ridiculous. Also, what does that even mean, are you crazy? You love food, you love eating it and you need it to survive.” And I’d ignore it again. But it would come back. Every now and then, usually in the moments where I felt worst about myself, it would echo stronger in my own head and ignoring it would become harder and harder. It was a thought so insane and so ridiculous, I told nobody about it. My rational mind knew that it was totally stupid to even consider something like that, and so I felt stupid for doing it. Which is why talking about it was off the table for me, back then. It was my dirty, little, silly secret and I was going to keep it that way. 

I was smarter than that, I knew better than that. 

It didn’t change the fact that I felt so lost in university though, and even more lost in life, and so that shitty thought just wouldn’t leave me alone. Until eventually, I budged. And that’s the part where it really stops being witty and smart-assy. 

Because that’s the part where I made the decision to only eat once a day. And it was a decision that I fought for with an iron will. A decision that gave me control. Over all the wrong things.

I said I would tell my whole and honest story, but in case you were wondering: No, I’m not gonna give any numbers, not when it comes to weight and not when it comes to calories. Mainly because the only thing they do is create competition and shock value. Even to people who don’t struggle with eating disorders. And apart from that, they’re also triggering to me, even if it’s my own story. So, all I’ll say is that I limited myself to one meal a day. For an entire year. It didn’t always work, thank God for that in hindsight. But I tried to do it every day nonetheless, and even though it wasn’t a by-the-books eating disorder yet (which is a whole other rant I have but that’s not for now), it completely ruined my relationship with food, my body image and my own self-worth. 

Every time I ate, I would feel guilty, it made me feel like a failure. I had never experienced this kind of shame before, the idea of feeling accomplished whenever I managed to go without eating for almost an entire day. It was this sick sense of pride and, you guessed it: Control. And yet it wasn’t enough, because my body would obviously fight back, demanding food with every bit of power and rage it had over me. I felt awful. On top of university stress, panic attacks, anxiety, depression and insomnia, I was now also hungry almost all the time. And when I had my one meal a day, I wouldn’t enjoy it. I would simply gorge on it because I was so depleted and ravenous. And then I would feel guilty and hate myself for it.

This went on for many months. I hid it as best as I could and in most social situations, I would make exceptions so that people wouldn’t notice. Exceptions I would hate myself for, but they had to be made to keep this habit my aforementioned dirty, little secret. It was like an entire new personality was starting to form inside my own. A dark and hateful one that chipped away at all that confidence and rational I had built over the years. A few close friends suspected eventually that something was off, and some of them asked about it but I would immediately play it off as just not feeling well because of all my other mental struggles, the ones they already knew about. It was an excuse that made sense, so no one really dug any deeper. And I couldn’t really have given another explanation back then anyway. Because again, I didn’t know yet why any of this was happening. I didn’t know that not eating was a twisted and horrible coping mechanism, that I had developed to gain back some sense of control in my life.

At that point, I had started weighing myself too. Something that had given me a big, bad shock when I first saw the number on the scale. In my mind, it was big and bad too. I knew how much I had weighed pre-semester-abroad. And so I knew how much I must have gained and by now also lost again. And yet that number was still way too big. It crushed me. And sadly, only spurred me on more. I would try not to eat. I would “fail”. I would hate myself. Rinse and repeat.

And no one knew what was going on. Least of all me.

It got a little bit better over the summer of 2019, just like the rest of my mental health did. That was around the time I had finally made the decision to take a gap year and figure out all my issues. And that included the very bad eating habits I had developed over the last year. In a way, that decision was also a way of me gaining back control, which was presumably why all my other bad coping strategies, including the not eating, faded away a little. No more nightly panic attacks. No more insomnia. And a lot more breakfast, lunch and dinner. I still didn’t like my body, I was still scared of the number on the scale. But I was ready to turn my life around again, get therapy and fight that nasty, dangerous habit I had let myself fall into.

Unfortunately, as I already mentioned in previous posts, the therapy I was so clearly in desperate need of, didn’t work out as quickly as I had wished (again, thanks for that, health care system). I had gone to my first ever assessment where they had diagnosed me with anxiety and depression disorder. And, actually, the psychiatrist that I had had my first ever session with, had also decided to diagnose me with anorexia nervosa because according to her, while I hadn’t ticked all of the eating disorder boxes yet, I definitely did show signs of eating disordered and anorexic behaviour. To me, that had sounded quite ridiculous and harsh at the time. Anorexia? Pft, no way, I didn’t look like the girls from the shocking posters and depressing documentaries, it was no where as serious as that. (Tip of the hat to those stigmas and stereotypes I was talking about earlier)

But of course, she was right. However, they didn’t have a free spot for one on one therapy and group sessions weren’t really what I was looking for either. So, I went on a waiting list and never heard back from them again.

The cold season crept back in and the wonderful, warm and sunny-safe bubble I had lived in all summer, burst as quickly as it had been blown into existence. Everyone went back to work, back to uni, back to life. And I ... well, I went back to being lost. To not knowing what to do. To having to write my thesis I still couldn’t write for some reason. To having panic attacks. To having insomnia.

To not eating.

Only that after a year of being so miserable whenever I ate food and still feeling so awful in my own body, I decided I would have to change the way I was going about it. In my extremely mentally fragile mind, I thought I had to step it up if I really wanted results. And, as I like to say it, that’s when shit really hit the fan. In a way, it felt like I had spent an entire year sitting on a roller coaster ride that was slowly climbing up the incline, getting closer and closer to the inevitable drop. And just like on any actual roller coaster, when that drop came, it came fast.

It was no longer about just eating one and any meal a day. In the matter of a week or two, it became about numbers, calories, measurements, grams, milliliters. All of a sudden, I found myself meticulously writing down every single thing I ate and when I had eaten it. The food groups kept shrinking and so did my portions and the amount of calories I would consume in a day. I would set a new limit on Monday and decrease it again by Wednesday, pushing myself harder, restricting more and more with every week. All I could think about was food. And all I could do was not eat it. In what felt like a matter of seconds, a worry, a fear, a habit had turned into a full-fledged obsession. An addiction. And that’s when anorexia entered my life.

I’ve re-written this part over and over again because I’m desperately trying not to make it sound like a pseudo-romantic and tastelessly dramatic young adult novel. But I realize that’s just my fear of sounding like a cliché again. So, I’ll stop scratching and writing everything anew now, and just keep going.

In the first few days and weeks of crashing into this new, horrible world, I remember yet again thinking another very simple, yet dangerous and devastating thought. The one beside “What if I just stopped eating?”. And this thought, to me personally, was even scarier than the last one. 

It was the thought of: “What if I can never eat again?”

Because that’s exactly what anorexia felt like to me.

Many people describe it as a whole other person in their head. Almost like a foreign entity, taking over your life. And while I very strongly relate to these descriptions, I have learned that it’s best for me to not always manifest my eating disorder into a separate identity to my own, because in certain times, that gives it too much power and makes it seem undefeatable. Which it isn’t. So, I’m going to try and describe it in another way. The way I first described it to my therapist. With a metaphor, of course.

It felt like up until this point, I had been sitting in the car that was my own life, driving down the road of my present and future, looking in the rear view mirror at my past. I was the one with the foot on the gas and the breaks, I was the one that decided what turn or exit to take. Autumn of 2018 had felt like breaking down in that car, having to pull over and being lost in the middle of nowhere, without any signs to guide the way. My bad eating habits felt like someone stopping and pretending to help me, jump staring my car and having it tucker slowly again while following me at walking speed, with me still not really knowing where I was going. And finally, anorexia felt like that someone kicking me out of my car, buckling me into the passenger seat, taping my mouth shut and taking over the stirring wheel.

All of a sudden, it felt like I had no say in where I was heading, how fast I was driving or what road I was going down. For over a year, I had used this dangerous and awful habit of coping by not eating, to wield control and have power over something. And now, it had taken that power away again, like a pact with the god damn devil, and had started to use it over me instead. Which is exactly what eating disorders do, and what my anorexia did too. They give you a false sense of control because control is all you want, and yet all you can’t have. All you need to do is replace control with food. Because food is all you want, and yet all you can’t have. Anorexia gave me my own, fucked up metaphor for my control issues. 

I knew that what I was doing was more than just dangerous. It was no longer just trying to eat once a day, not managing to and then hating myself. This was barely eating anything at all, setting the bar lower each day and starving myself. And not in the figurative way. I lost weight so rapidly, I could barely keep track. The scale became my second home, the calories my worst enemy and food, or more trying to avoid it, the entire purpose of my life. Nothing else mattered anymore. 

Falling into anorexia has been the scariest and most horrible thing I have ever had to go through. It felt like I had lost myself. I was still there, in my own head, somewhere. Still strapped into the passenger seat. But I had no say in any of my actions. I just silently watched and witnessed, obeying everything my eating disorder told me to do. I know I said I usually avoid completely painting it as a separate person in my own head, but back then, back when I was still severely anorexic, that was just what it felt like. Like a literal parasite, that had latched onto me and was sucking me dry of any and every life force and fight I still had left.

All my days would consist of trying to navigate around food, doing my best to avoid it, lying to everyone, most of all myself. I would look up every single nutritional information of everything, every meal at a restaurant, every drink. I had lists where I wrote it all down, tracking my calorie intake and weight loss. Documents that contained all the calories from every single food and also non-food item imaginable. It would start with things like fruits, vegetables and condiments and end with things like tea, vitamins, chewing gum and toothpaste. I would google how many calories a panic attack burned. I would pace up and down my room at night to get my step count higher. I would walk around the city aimlessly for hours every single day to avoid eating, no matter the weather, no matter the time. I would work out at the gym like a maniac and almost pass out every single time afterwards. At family breakfast, I would hide food in my sleeves and socks to avoid eating it. It was more than just ridiculous. It was insanity. But it was an insanity I couldn’t let go of.

Anorexia was the most twisted and horrendous full-time commitment of my life. I had felt lost and without purpose for so long and in the most fucked up way, my eating disorder had given me a 9-to-5 – no, scratch that, a 24-god-damn-7 job to do. It had given me a new purpose and a painful illusion of the things I had craved for so long. Control, willpower, strength, endurance. Only that it was exactly that – just an illusion. Because at the end of the day, I would go to bed empty, both literally and figuratively, feeling nothing and hating everything. Because that’s what anorexia does. It strips you of everything you have in life. It takes away every joy, every pleasure, every interest, hobby, passion or relationship, and it isolates you. Completely. It worms its way into your life and fills out every single nook and crack until it’s the only thing that seems to be left. And therefore, the only thing you still care about. 

It felt like losing my complete identity.

Mentally, I was at the worst state I had ever been in my life. This was around December of 2019. I had barely been keeping all of this up for over a month, but I was eating so little that I had lost an alarmingly large amount of weight very fast, which came at a high cost. I was always cold, I couldn’t sleep, I had awful headaches, I kept forgetting conversations and talks I had had with friends, I felt dizzy and nauseous all the time and worst of all, I was so cripplingly depressed that I didn’t even care about any of that. Because when you deprive your brain of nutrients this much, it just shuts down. And that’s what I did, too. I just went into standby mode, as I kept losing more weight and becoming more miserable with each day that passed.

Both my body and mind were running on nothing but adrenaline and thin air and I lived life in this absolutely isolated and horrible auto-pilot, where I continued on as if nothing was happening, as more of me, both physically and mentally, disappeared and was replaced with complete emptiness. I still struggle to find the right words to describe how I felt back then. The only thing that comes close is just complete nothingness. Like a fucking black hole inside of me that had swallowed everything and created a complete vacuum.

Writing about this makes me want to just close my laptop and stop. In a way, it feels like giving my eating disorder and the hardest time of my life a spot light. Like giving it attention and a stage to perform on, to flaunt its dramatic tragedy. I can feel that the anorexia loves that, relishes every word I’m typing about it, every second of attention I’m giving to it. And hate that, I fucking despise it. Because it doesn’t deserve its own stage. It never did and it never will. So, let’s try and move on to the part where things changed.

Back then, I might have become a master of lying and avoiding most people’s questions about me never seeming to be hungry or wanting to eat. But thankfully, there were a few of my close friends that had started to notice. Not gonna name any names, but you know who you are. And I cannot even begin to say how incredibly thankful and lucky I am to have had you there. Because even when I had given up on myself, you didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine, oh no. I was still in a very, very bad place mentally, and my eating disorder was not planning on leaving any time soon.

But, with the help and intervention of said good friends and a few select, eye-opening experiences (that I won’t talk about because they really weren’t ideal but still ended up helping somehow), I finally realized the very obvious but up until then seemingly impossible thing: I had to start eating again. And I had to start now. 

And I did.

Looking back, I cannot even express how glad I am about that. Because it had started to become really critical. And I consider myself to be very lucky that it didn’t have to get even worse. That I was still able to make my own decisions and finally get help. Finding therapy was once again not easy but eventually, I did find an outpatient clinic that offered immediate consultation, as well as an appointment with a psychiatrist for medication and an internist for physical check-ups. And, to maybe bring back a slight sense of cheerfulness: It was also when I finally got to meet my therapist Kerstin.

Again, none of this was as easy and swift as it might sound like with me narrating it in those few sentences, but this post can only go on for so much longer before I get too drained and decide to just delete all of it again, so I will try and come to a close, for now. There’s still so much more to tell when it comes to my journey with my eating disorder and my mental health, because it’s nowhere near finished. And worry not, I will tell it – not so much for the sake of those of you who read it, but more so for my own. But for now, I want to finish by saying this much – mainly to myself again, but also to anyone else who might need to hear it: 

I know it might feel like you don’t care. 

About yourself, about what happens to you, about the future, about happiness. I know it might feel like you’re faking everything, lying to everyone and just pretending all the time. I know you might feel so horribly and painfully empty that all you want to do is sit still in the void of your own head and let the misery wash over you in dreadful peace. I know you might think that the only sense of comfort you can find, lies in the things that hurt you most. I know your pain seems like an old friend, one that will never leave you and therefore is worth staying close to. I know that continuing to fight on and struggling through life and all the hardships it throws at you, sometimes feels so impossible, that it seems easier to just give in and give up. 

The thing about that is, though: It’s fucking bullshit.

It’s nothing but a very mean and disgusting way of all your inner pain, trauma and warped coping mechanisms to try to pull you down to keep you “safe” from things that you can absolutely, completely and totally battle. And, yeah, it sure as shit ain’t easy. God, if I had a dollar for every time I had to pick myself back up after I stepped on a scale, after I ate something that scared me, after I looked in the mirror, after I relapsed, after I went back on track again, after I wished I could just melt into a formless blob and slowly whither away in peace– I would be a rich woman. But neither life nor capitalism work that way, unfortunately. So, why do I still bother? 

Well, because after going through hell and back, it’s the only thing I have left. It’s the only option there is.

You might not know who you are. You might not know what you’re doing, where you’re going, if you’re ever going to get better, if you’ll ever feel happy and at home in your own mind, body and life again. But what you can and should know, is that you can always try. Even if it seems pointless, even if it seems like you’re running in circles, wanting to bash your head against the wall because of how senseless it all feels. 

You can still try. 

And try, and try, and try again. It’s a choice and it is a hard one. Maybe the hardest one you will ever have to make. 

But I chose to make it, and I still continue to. Every day. With every morning I wake up, every therapy session I go to, every panic attack I breathe through, every depressive phase I crawl back out of, every meal I eat. I choose to do it, I choose to keep pushing because when it feels like all the bad and dark thoughts are more powerful than me and threaten to swallow me alive, making the choice to fight back as much as I can, is what proves that I am and always will be more powerful than them. 

Because this is my life. My body. My head. My brain. My mind. And I’d be a god damn fool to give them up to those inner demons that would never know how to treat them right, how to cherish them and keep them happy, healthy and alive. Because I think we can all agree that, at the end of the day, being happy is a hell of a lot better than being sad and empty. And so, at the end of the day, I realized that nothing and no one, not even my mental health disorders and past traumas, can take away what will always, exclusively and fully belong to me and me only: 

My choice, my happiness, my control – the right one, this time.

#mental illness #mental health #therapy #eating disorder #anorexia #depression #anxiety

[isa-ly]

PROJECT NO CONTROL

TW: therapy, mental illness, anxiety, depression, control issues, One Direction

As you have probably noticed by now, I take trigger warnings quite seriously, as I believe that it’s not only important to give people the chance to prepare for or avoid certain content, but also think that it is a good way of showing that one takes the mental health and wellbeing of others seriously. 

Which is why I included One Direction up there, because if anyone who has been part of this fandom will probably remember, Project No Control was one of the most insane and traumatic incidents to ever happen on this platform (Tumblr, that is). Although, I guess the trigger warning is kind of useless in this case, since it only comes after the headline of today’s entry. But hey, I tried.

Anyway, enough about One Direction (is what One Direction also said, five years ago ... still going strong on that “hiatus”, huh guys?), let’s move on to what I want to talk about today. The last couple of posts were definitely not all easy to write, as I shared some things that only the closest of my friends knew about me so far. In a way, simply putting them on this blog doesn’t feel as big of a commitment (remember the one about dumping your problems on social media? Yeah, that’s kind of similar to this) but it also doesn’t leave me completely cold. After all, I’m not just chucking out one sentence about how I’ve been crying into my pillow all day, but instead actually taking the time to elaborate on my feelings, and by doing that, trying to make more sense to myself and actually work through my issues.

Another part of this whole blog idea, was to not exactly know who was going to read it. While all the things I share on here are written and edited by me, the whole compromise lies in letting others read them too. And sure, those are mainly the people who follow me on Instagram (hi, there), since I’m not really influencer enough to have random folks read it, but even that causes me to feel a little bit uncomfortable.

Because I can’t monitor who sees it, I can’t access what people think of it and I’m simply not in control of what happens once I post something.

Ah, yes.

Control.

The little word that not only dominated Tumblr back when those five British guys were still world-wide sensations, but that also seems to dominate my entire life. Only that I didn’t really know that until a few months ago. 

I briefly mentioned it in my last post when I talked about slithering into my quarter-life crisis, which resulted in my anxiety and panic attacks, as well as a mean depression and my low-key burn-out. Anyway, back to the topic of control. I told you the story of how, back in autumn of 2018, I had suddenly and for the first time in my life, found myself in a situation where I was completely out of control in almost every aspect. I had realized that what I was doing and studying, was slowly turning out to be a huge disappointment and even worse than that: I had no idea what to do about it.

Sure, I could have dropped out right there and then. But that wouldn’t really have made things easier, as I still had absolutely no clue what I would have done next. I had no back-up plan, no safety net. Well, I mean of course I had a metaphorical one – that being all my friends who I’m infinitely thankful for – but I still wouldn’t have known what to do with my life in general, had I simply quit university.

This, in addition to the fact that my parents weren’t quite as supportive of the idea of dropping out as some of my friends might have been, just added to the feeling of everything slipping from my hands and me no longer being able to call the shots in my own everyday life. I had been so sure of so many things and from what seemed like one second to the other, that certainty that had always given me such a grand feeling of control, was ripped away from me before I could even bid it a proper goodbye. 

So, there I was. Stuck in a situation that didn’t seem to have a solution or emergency exit. And, well, you just need to read the last entry to see that it didn’t go too well after that.

I remember one fateful day where I had once again been sitting in the library, trying my absolute hardest to write my thesis (and, obviously, failing), until I just gave up again and started watching Netflix on the university computer. As I was sitting there, not really paying attention to whatever show I had clicked on anyway, I felt so insanely frustrated because I just didn’t know what was wrong with me. I didn’t know why I couldn’t write or read my books or just do anything that involved my goddamn thesis.

And this not-knowing, this feeling of staring at what seemed to be so obvious yet invisible to me, drove me up the fucking walls. So, in a desperate attempt of once again solving the riddle that was my own mind, I sat down and did what I’m actually doing right now as well: I started writing. I figured that whatever it was that was keeping me from working on my academic responsibilities (and also causing all my panic attacks and insomnia), must have had its origin at some point in the past.

And since I didn’t know what point that could have been, I decided to start at the beginning. And I mean the literal beginning. I opened a new Word document that – and I am fully serious – started with the words: “Let’s try and make a timeline that starts with me being born”. I know, dramatic as always. But I was ready to commit. I had never considered my life to be something that contained many traumas (oh, innocent past-me), but I was more than ready to dig deep to find some, so I could finally make some sense of why I seemed to be stuck, both emotionally and academically.

I still have that document and I actually briefly skimmed over it just now. And, oh dear. Reading all of that again was not easy. And writing it wasn’t either. I remember sitting at that computer and, despite having thought that there wouldn’t be anything worth mentioning from my past, just typing and typing and typing. When there was nothing else left that came to my mind, I stopped and started reading through it. It was all there, laid out right in front of me, and it was like going on a very nostalgic, sad and painful walk through all the events of my childhood and teenage years that had just been really, really shitty.

So, there I was, reading, thinking, comprehending. And all of a sudden, like the clouds clearing, like the lens sharpening, like the fog lifting, I saw it. I saw the red string. The penny fucking dropped and I literally couldn’t believe it.

“I knew in this moment, that I had lost complete control.” “I had no control.” “Maybe it’s just a way for me to wield control.” “I felt like something was happening that I didn’t have under control.” “It resulted in me trying to get back control.”

All of those sentences were among what I had just written. And you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out what the pattern I had recognized was.

You thought mommy and daddy issues were a cliché? Well, let’s add yet another layer on top of this pile of stereotypes: My incessant, compulsive and almost obsessive need of always being in control of myself and my surroundings.

I remember exactly how I felt when I finally, fucking finally, made the connection in my own head of why I was feeling so hopeless and lost. It felt like getting to scratch that annoying itch you couldn’t reach, like fitting that last puzzle piece into the whole picture. Needless to say, I burst into tears in the middle of the busy library, because while I might be very emotionally repressed, having that massive epiphany did actually make A Feeling happen inside of me, because I had been so desperate to figure out what was wrong for so long.

I’m aware that all of this sounds a bit like a crappy Hollywood movie, as big aha-moments like this don’t often happen in life – or in a library. But this one did. And I’m infinitely glad about that. Because it was in that moment I realized that a) I really, really needed therapy and b) I really, really was not going to finish this stupid thesis just for the sake of it and risk making my already worrisome mental state even more.

In a way, you could say that the urge of making a list and sorting all my traumatic memories from bottom to top, was in of itself a mechanism of yielding control for a short period of time. But okay, I don’t want to completely dissect every tiny action and choice of mine just for the sake of finding out what trauma it might have been influenced by (she says, writing the seventh, ultra-long blog post on dissecting every tiny action and choice of hers just for the sake of finding out what trauma it might have been influenced by).

Alright, let’s recap: On said very fateful day, I realized that the reason why I had been having those panic attacks, why I couldn’t seem to write my thesis and why, in general, I felt so depressed and lost, was because I felt like I was out of control of everything in my current life. And that terrified me. So much so, that it had almost stripped me of my ability to function like a normal person.

Quite the epiphany, huh? Yeah, it felt like that too, back then. And I know that not every realization happens like that. Most of my other soul-searching attempts that came when I started therapy, took a lot longer and required a lot more digging and work until I was able to untangle them. Like, for example, the question that posed itself after having figured out that I seemed to have very severe control issues: What the fuck caused them?

Because yeah, it’s one thing to finally understand what’s happening, but an entirely other thing to know why. Which leads us to part two of this wonderful post. The one where, and we’ve all been waiting for it, the two most important women of my life come back into the picture: My therapist and my mum.

Okay, I need you to know that I just laughed out loud at that last sentence for several minutes and then considered crying a little, too. But, I repressed that urge (healthily, don’t worry) for the sake of finishing this entry. So, let’s continue. (Why do I not have a career in stand-up comedy yet, seriously.)

When I started my personal therapy sessions with Kerstin, one of the first things I told her about, was that trauma-timeline list that I had written. Naturally, as therapists do, she then asked me the exact question I already asked above: “So, where do you think that need for constant control comes from?” And I said: “Well, damn, Kerstin, wouldn’t I like to know!” Okay, I didn’t say that. But in the imaginary sitcom that’s always happening in my own head I did, and then everyone laughed in that super fake ‘Friends’ way. What a blast it was.

Back in the real world, I actually did another load of digging through my past, this time to find the reason behind my, at the time, newly discovered issue with control. Or better, the issue with loosing it. I already talked a little bit about my childhood and teen years not always having been easy, mainly because of the sometimes very difficult relationship with my mum. And, well, it turns out that that “sometimes very difficult relationship” left a lot more scars than I would have ever liked to admit. I always have a hard time talking about this, because it makes me feel like I’m painting my parents as some sort of villains who constantly mistreated me. And that is just not the case. Life’s not black and white like that, and neither is family.

Again, I really had a great time as a child and teen, and my parents loved me, were always there for me and supported me in almost every aspect. But in some others, they let me down. Saying and admitting that breaks my heart. But denying it has broken it even worse in the past. I’m not going to go into much detail here because I don’t feel any need whatsoever to fill the Internet in on my personal family issues.

However, I do feel the need to remind myself why it is okay to talk about where your own current problems and struggles might come from. I’m not pointing fingers and blaming my own mum for everything that ever went wrong in my life, because that would be stupid and simply wrong. But I have grown and realized enough to know that, yes, by raising me the way she did, she did cause me some pretty heavy and painful traumas which I’m still working through today.

One of them being my problem with giving up and losing control.

My mum is such a strong and smart person and I learned so much from her. But she also never let me forget that whatever achievement I accomplished in life, was due to her providing me with support, knowledge and guidance. According to her, whenever I did something wrong, forgot something or made a mistake, it was because I hadn’t listened to her advice or done it the way she would have done it. And whenever I did something right, succeeded and made progress, it was because she had pushed me and told me how. She never let me have any credit of my own. She told me she was proud of me, but she never let me be proud of myself too.

In a way, she raised me thinking that the reason for any and everything I did, was because I either obeyed or disobeyed her. She always had the upper hand and she was always, always in control. Of my failures, of my successes, of my life.

As you can imagine, with puberty added into this already difficult family-mix, shit kinda hit the fan when I got a little older and we basically didn’t speak to each other for an entire year. Whenever we did speak, we’d just end up arguing instead. And that’s where I decided I to simply take matters (and back then, that was pretty much just school) into my own hands. Some other nasty stuff happened in reaction to that, but I actually managed to, from this point on, be independent when it came to studying, organizing and planning everything school-related. To some people, this might sound ridiculous and insane. But in my family, with my mum, this was almost reason enough to literally kick me out of the house.

But I still did it and for the first time ever, I was the one who controlled something. I was the one who decided when to do homework, how much to study and how to keep track of all my school stuff. Again, I realize that some people are probably thinking “Big fucking whoop, it’s just school?!” and yeah, I thought that too. But my mum didn’t. However, I didn’t budge and I kept the upper hand, for the first time in my life.

You can probably see where this is headed. As I got even older and started university, more and more responsibility became my own and my mum had to let go of more and more things she had always controlled for me. Not without a fight, never without a fight, but she did, eventually. I was now the one who decided what I wanted to do (at least most of the time, since I still lived at home and that came with its own set of struggles).

Without getting too carried off here, I’ll just try and make my point: When I realized that what I myself had chosen as a life and career path, was no longer actually something I wanted to do, this sense of control that I had quite literally worked years to get (from my mum and for myself), all of a sudden started to crumble. And subconsciously, without even realizing, this took me back to the mental place of being a hopeless, sixteen year old teenager that felt belittled, powerless and uncredited. Only that now, I had “no one to blame” but my own self.

The way that I had been raised with always having to have such a vice, controlling grip on my own life and academic “career” in order to be in charge of it myself, sat so deep inside of me that having had the minuscule realization of not being fully sure of my future anymore, was enough to throw me so hard that I could barely catch up with how quick I was falling apart.

That was one killer of a sentence, I apologize. But I hope that it got my point across somehow. Maybe this all sounds a bit ridiculous, maybe it doesn’t. I honestly can’t tell, most of the time. But by now, I have come to terms with the fact that how my mum taught or actually failed to teach me the value of giving up control, has greatly influenced me, even if it was just subconsciously. Because had you asked me, I would have told you in a heartbeat that it was no big deal to doubt your academic choices and even less of a big deal to change them or look for something new.

But, deep down, there was another truth that I had grown up with and into, and that one was what started to cause all my inner turmoil, the anxiety, the panic attacks, the insomnia and, eventually, my full-blown burn out. 

And all of that hit me on that one fateful day, in the fucking library.

I feel like I’ve been waffling for ages now but it felt kind of cathartic to get this off my chest. I’m planning on talking about this is another post soon, but this was the first time I realized the crucial difference between saying and living things you want to be your truth, and saying and living things that really are your truth. And back then, I didn’t know I hadn’t been doing the latter for a very long time. Hitting that kind of breaking point was a very unwanted, but definitely also very much needed jumpstart to my journey of working through my own issues. 

The first being the one I had with control.

I’m gonna shut up for good now and just leave you all with two screenshots because they’re just too funny not to include them. They were both reactions to my, dare I say, iconic sentence of my therapist and my mum being the two most important women in my life and well, just see for yourself ...

... sorry, mum. And also ...

... don’t we all?

#mental health #mental illness #anxiety #depression #control #control issues #therapy

[isa-ly]

IT’S OKAY TO BE CLICHÉ

TW: therapy, mental illness, anxiety, depression

Hey, so, I haven’t mentioned my super cool therapist in the last two blog posts, and I thought it was about time I did that again: Shout out to you, Kerstin, you’re the real MVP man, love you. Too much? Okay, yeah. Sorry. Professionalism, right. (I really hope she doesn’t read this blog, I mean she agreed it would be a good idea for me to write it but Christ, I doubt she’d wanna see me again if she actually found it.)

Okay, why this very odd and potentially problematic intro to today’s post, you ask? (Please tell me you asked yourself that, I feel so lonely here) Well, today I’m gonna tell you (or myself, I guess) the story of how I first started my therapy journey. Because, boy oh boy, is it a turbulent and long one. And we’re all about working through those turbulent and long life stories on here, aren’t we. So, let’s begin.

In all my previous posts, I’ve already given a pretty solid overview of all my various psychological issues that are deeply nestled in my mind and brain. However, as I wasn’t born a genius or psychoanalyst, you might be able to guess that I wasn’t always aware of those from the beginning. In fact, I had absolutely no fucking idea what was going on when they started, and kind of just floated in a constant state of anxiety, depression, insomnia and my general quarter-life crisis for a good few months.

Luckily, I have some very good friends (and also a few rational brain cells, big kudos to those fellas), with the help of which I figured out after a while, that whatever it was that was causing all my problems, was probably worth finding out by consulting an actual professional. A connaisseur of the mind. An expert on the depths and divots of the psyche, if you will.

Okay, we get it, Isa. You went to see a therapist. Stop it already with the pretentious big talk.

Excuse me, this is my blog, don’t tell me what to do. (I’m really Dr.-Jekyll-and-Mr-Hyde-ing it up on here, ain’t I?). Anyway. Yes, you are right, that is exactly what I was getting at. Only that between the realization of me needing professional and guided help, and the actual act of getting said help, lie about ten to eleven more months.

A year, basically. It took me an entire year to actually get my shit together and sign up for my first ever therapy session. Whoops.

To some, that might sound pretty unbelievable if one can trust my previous stories of how I was a) not really feeling anything, ever, b) had panic and anxiety attacks every night and c) was basically disconnected from my body and mind like 24/7. To others, though, taking a long time to finally make the step and ask for help, might be something very relatable.

And while I’m not necessarily on here to be related to, I myself am the latter of the two people mentioned above. As in: Asking for help is really not one of the strengths I mention on my CV (hence my last blog post about pointlessly shit-posting on social media instead). And even more importantly: Admitting to myself that I am in need of help and cannot fix my problems on my own, is even harder.

You see, autumn of 2018 hadn’t been the first ever time that I had struggled mentally. As a teenager, there were a couple of incidents where, looking back on it now, I had really been in urgent need of therapy. But I was too young and my parents unfortunately not understanding and knowledgeable enough, to see that that had been the case.

I graduated high school, some more time passed, water under the bridge and all, until I started university and my childhood traumas, as all my other problems, were swiftly brushed under the rug of repression. (That sounds like an edgy indie band, I like it). And for a while, everything was fine. Really, I loved what I was studying, I made some great new friends, acquired new skills, got way too drunk and made out with way too many people, went to study abroad, got even more drunk and made out with even more people. Let’s just say I was living the student life to the fullest.

But we all know that things didn’t just continue to be that peachy. That’s why I’m sitting here writing, after all. 

I’m not going to whine about how unfair life can be because really, there’s enough white, cis-gender, middle-class white women out there who already do that on a daily. Suffice to say, things did get kind of tough though, when that fifth semester of university hit, and I was faced with something I had never yet been faced before: The impending doom of the future. (Insert the dramatic sound effect from Inception).

Growing up, I had always had an exact plan of what I wanted to do in life, who I wanted to be and where I wanted to go. I was good at writing and coming up with stories, and also had a big mouth and way too many opinions, so I figured journalism would be the way to go. I got into the uni of my dreams and was finally doing what I had always wanted to do. Or ... well, okay, I liked some of the subjects. It sure was a huge load of work. And, actually, some of the professors, who were also journalists, seemed to be pretty big dicks. And wait, I don’t really agree on most of the practices and opinions they teach. Also, actually working at a newspaper isn’t that cool and more so a literal living hell. Do I really want to do this still? Is that really who I am?

Did I ... make the wrong choice?

Aaaaand there goes everything I built my personality, hopes and dreams on. Out of the window, just like that. Bye bye, future. Bye bye, all my plans. Bye bye, ground beneath my feet.

I realize that this sounds exactly like what I said I was trying to avoid (me whining), but I want to be honest and suddenly being hit with the fact that the thing I had been so sure of pursuing all my life, was actually nothing but smoke and mirrors, was kind of a punch to the gut. Strong enough to clearly derail me, yet subtle enough to keep me from noticing it at first.

I’m planning on talking about this in a separate post but I wan to pre-empt this much: I have a pretty big issue with not being in control of my own life and for the first time since literal birth, that was the case. I was completely clueless as to what would happen next, how I would figure it out and what the hell I was going to do with my life and academic education. It hit me like a wall of bricks but in a way, I was in too much of a shock state to realize that it was really starting to cause some bigger issues.

This was around the time that my nightly panic attacks started happening. I didn’t sleep well, started missing classes and began to hate every single thing about my course. I felt lost but didn’t want to admit it. All the other people in my class seemed so damn sure of where they wanted to go and here I was, a zombified insomniac, trying to get through yet another exam I didn’t give a single shit about, in order to do my degree in a subject I had lost all my previous passion for.

This confusing and draining state of just continuing to push went on for a few months, and I somehow made it into the sixth semester, with almost all my left-over willpower and what little energy there still was in my tired bones, having faded to the barest of minimums. I mean, I took one of my law exams on the very last try because I just hadn’t managed to get out of bed for all those 8am lectures, therefore loosing one of the three tries I had, not having studied enough to go the second one and then found myself sitting at the third try, secretly wishing to just fail so I could drop out, curl into a ball and sleep for a year.

You know, just your casual university breakdown.

Only that I was still violently denying that that was exactly what had been happening for the last semester. I didn’t want to admit it but ... I was breaking down. Not in a plane-crash-and-burn kind of way but more in a Titanic way, where I underestimated the ice berg that was my impending life crisis and then spend ages ignoring the fact that I was slowly but certainly sinking further into my demise. Okay, that comparison was in poor taste, I apologize. I’ll tune it back on the drama again.

I knew I needed help. Someone to talk to and figure out what the hell was causing my anxiety, panic attacks and insomnia. But I kept telling myself that I just had to push a little more until I wrote my thesis and finished university and then, then I would deal with all my issues. I just needed to keep going and do this first, just a little longer, just until I got my degree. Now was not the time, okay? I was still busy, and if those damn issues could see that and wait for another second, God damn it, why won’t my brain just let me finish this first.

Ding-dong. 

Can you hear that? That’s right. It’s the burn-out, ringing my doorbell.

And it didn’t wait for me to ask for it to come in. Burn-outs usually never do. And neither did any of my other problems. I had kept them at bay long enough, but the tide still came.

Because if we think back to my cupboard metaphor in my post about panic attacks and anxiety: Once that door opens, it all comes crashing down on top of you. In my case, this meant that I found myself amidst mountains of thesis literature, having nothing left to do but that one, single task of writing my final academic paper, before I finally got to be free of this horrid course, that I had apparently wasted the last three years of my life on.

I knew I had more than enough time left to write my thesis. I liked my topic. I had all the books. All the plans. All of it. Right there. Just write it. Just fucking start typing. Just– 

Just sit at the library every day, staring at the cursor on the page, blinking, reminding you of the emptiness of the document before you, and the even bigger emptiness in your chest. It blinks, like it’s trying to mock you and with every second that passes, every other minute of not writing, just sitting and staring, it mocks you more and that emptiness gets bigger. 

I don’t want this to turn into a pretentious short story, but this was what it felt like. I would open my laptop every day, ready to work, and then just proceed to stare at it for hours on end, until all of a sudden, the sun had started to set again and the day would be over. I’d go to bed, rinse and repeat, and do it all over again the next day. Still having my panic attacks. Still not sleeping. Still thinking that it was all going to be fine if I just kept trying and kept pushing.

Needless to say, I didn’t hand in my thesis on the first try. But hey, a lot of people don’t! Hell, even most of my class mates didn’t. So, it’s okay, mum and dad, friends and family, I’m fine! I just need to put more work in and make it better, so I can hand in a well-researched paper. I just need more time.

More time.

Time, that I would spend opening my laptop, every day, ready to work, and then just proceed to stare at it for hours on end until all of a sudden, the sun had started to set again and the day would be over. I’d go to bed, rinse and repeat, and do it all over again the next day. Still having my panic attacks. Still not sleeping. Still thinking that it was all going to be fine if I just kept trying and kept pushing.

I just. Needed. More. Time.

As you can probably guess, I also didn’t hand in my thesis the second time around. And when the deadline for the third and last chance to hand it in and get my degree came around ... well, I just accepted my defeat.

It had come to a point where even my delusional ass had started to realize that something was clearly wrong. Like, completely, utterly wrong. I had kept pushing, no, kicking my problems in front of me like a kid kicks a football while walking to the playground, pretending that if I just dragged them with me long enough, I could maybe outrun them and finish what I wanted to finish before finally dealing with them. But after an entire year of doing that, even I had to admit that that wasn’t going to work.

It never had and it never would. And finally accepting that, was as painful as it was freeing, in a way. There was something about knowing that I had hit my breaking point, that had a strange sense of relief to it. I don’t want to romanticize any of what happened to me just for the sake of story telling. But I remember feeling like by hitting my first ever rock bottom, I was now at the point where, as they like to say, the only way was up.

Right?

Right.

Well, kind of. Not really. But that’s for another post to tell, for now let’s continue with the therapy journey.

Don’t get me wrong, even though my stubborn head and me had finally accepted that it had gotten to a point where I had no excuses left to make, I still felt like an absolute cliché for having become one of the people who have a nervous breakdown in their twenties because their dream of a perfectly planned life hadn’t worked out exactly how they had wanted it to. What a big, privileged crybaby I was. Or at least, that’s what a part of me thought. 

But I kind of knew back then, and most definitely know now, that no matter how cliché or silly you feel for not being able to “fix” your problems by yourself, there lies absolutely no weakness or failure in admitting that you need someone else to help you with it. Quite the contrary is the case: it’s probably one of the bravest things you can do in life. And I know that in comparison to what other people might have gone through, my own issues might have just been a speck of dust in the universe. But to me, they were the ice berg that got my ship to sink. And that is exactly why your own problems are never invalid or “too small” to work on. Because while they might not seem like real problems (whatever the fuck that means) to society, your parents (we’ll talk about that one another time as well, yikes) or anyone else who clearly hasn’t gotten their priorities right, they very much are real problems to you. 

And they were real problems to me, too.

So, after a year of what felt like beating a dead horse, I was finally ready to re-animate that horse, so I could move forward in life (horse metaphors, yes, Isa, that’s exactly what this blog still needed). I signed up for my first ever therapy assessment, got my first ever diagnosis and even joined a session of group therapy. The psychotherapist I had my assessment with, actually diagnosed me with anxiety and depression disorder, which kind of didn’t come as a big surprise to me, since those were the two things I had experienced literally all year. Still, hearing a medical professional say it out loud after having listened to my story, was a strange yet good feeling. For the first time, it felt like something I could grasp. It was no longer just a confusing and irritating thing that kept me awake at night and brain-dead during the day. It had a name, and even more importantly: It had a treatment.

Unfortunately, the place I signed up to had no free spots for one-on-one therapy yet, so, plot twist: This isn’t where my heavily praised and even more heavily featured therapist Kerstin comes in yet. Tricked you, didn’t I? (No, I literally tricked no one because if anyone even reads this blog, it’s my friends who already know exactly what happened so really, who am I kidding.) There’s still a lot of stuff that happened between me having my first ever assessment and receiving my first ever diagnosis, and me actually meeting my first ever personal therapist.

But, this blog post has already been going on for too long and I don’t want to get ahead of my own emotional work schedule. Plus, I’m once again pretty heavily dissociated at this point, so I think it’s best if I give it a rest for today and continue another time.

If there’s any kind of take away and conclusion for myself and anyone who might read this, it’s that no matter what all those doubtful voices in your head are saying: Your problems are valid. Your pain is worth recognizing and you should never compare it to those of others in order to down-play it or make yourself think that you’re not doing “bad enough” yet. There is no such thing as being ill or miserable enough. Whatever it is you’re struggling with, it’s worth taking a break and figuring it out. Because the movie Titanic might have been a cinematographic masterpiece, but in the end the ship still sank. And if there’s something that can help avoid that happening, someone you can talk to and that can help you get better (and there always is) – you should do it, because it’s the least that you deserve.

#therapy #introspection #first diagnosis #anxiety #depression

[isa-ly]

“I HATE MY LIFE, LMAO”

TW: mental illness, therapy, self-hatred, self-deprecation

Let's start this one off with a text I received a few months ago from a friend, who I hadn't seen or spoken to in a while:

For anyone who isn't fluent in German, it reads as follows: "I'm hip and have a Twitter too now, as you probably noticed. Your own Twitter doesn't sound like you're too doing well. Can I help in any way?"

At first, I was like: "Huh? What does she mean?"

But, well...

Alright, I see her point.

And that's what I'm here to talk about today: Tweeting and joking your sorrows away (and why it's so hard to stop doing it). Before we get into it, however, I want to drop one last screenshot, because it just fits this current situation oh too well, and the irony made me giggle:

Okay, enough social media plugging, let's get back to business.

As you can see, I am quite active when it comes to tweeting about my struggles with mental illness. Which, in this day and age, really isn't a rarity. You just need to take one look at Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok or any dank meme, to see that joking, down-playing and iRoniCalLy tAkiNg tHe piSs out of personal problems and issues, has become quite the trend for millennials in general. Once again, I'm not the only one guilty of doing that.

Had you asked me a year ago whether or not I thought that constantly ridiculing very serious and traumatic incidents in my life was maybe a bit worrisome, I would have probably gotten very defensive and told you that "it's called coping, okay?” Because hey, making jokes and laughing about the bad things in your life gives them less power over you and helps distract from the pain. And that's good, right? That's what you're supposed to do. Right?

Well.

Dealing with your own issues, whether that's big or small ones, is a very personal process that, quite frankly, no one really gets to have a say in except for you. And yeah, sure, as we all learned by watching Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, ridiculing and laughing about something that really scares you, loosens the hold said fear has on you and makes it easier to deal with. However, there is a very big difference between the boggards of life (if you don’t get that reference, you clearly weren’t around when J.K. Rowling wasn’t problematic and transphobic yet) and medical mental health issues and disorders.

I am no doctor, I am aware of that, but even I know that having an ironic laugh about a shitty day is something very different to basically verbally abusing yourself and trying to make your own depression or anxiety relatable to ... well, to whom, actually? Random people on the internet? That are never going to really care or react to your self-deprecating jokes? That doesn’t seem like it’ll do much now, does it.

And that’s kind of the whole point, if you’re really honest with yourself. Social media has made it oh too easy to simply shout those invasive, painful and scary thoughts and feelings out into a void before they eat you alive. The thing about a void is, though: You're still alone in it. It doesn't answer you back. It's empty. And it will make you feel that exact emptiness inside you, too. It poses no comfort, it doesn't offer advice, it doesn't give you a hug, a shoulder to cry on or anything, really. It may swallow your word vomit whenever it bubbles out of you, but it will still leave you feeling drained and hollow because there's nothing you get from it in return.

Twitter, Instagram and every other easy-to-access-and-rant-on social media platform lets you dump your initial hurt all over it, but it doesn't lessen the pain. And neither do the self-deprecating jokes and dank depression memes.

I’ll say this once again, for the people in the back (me, I’m talking about myself here, I am the people in the back): Being mentally ill isn't a quirky personality trait, and making a lifestyle and constant comedy show out of is never, ever going to solve your problems and make you feel any better. You'll still be miserable if you don't actually work on solving your issues because you're too busy letting them define you.

Depression is not an aesthetic. Anxiety is not a competition. Panic attacks aren't funny memes.

I'm not saying that you can't and shouldn't joke or laugh about your own problems. Humor can be a very cathartic thing, I'm the living example of it. But staying put in your depression, anxiety or whatever issues you're dealing with, and trying to make a comedy skit out of it every time someone asks you how you are, is only going to make you more comfortable and validated in your own misery. And there are way better places to be comfortable in than that. Trust me.

You are not your mental illness. You are not your disorder. Those things will never define who you are. They're a part of you, yes, but they aren't you. You will always be the one that calls the shots and you always, always have choice and hope on your side. Even when it feels like you are alone and being swallowed whole by the darkness, it is never too early or late to get help. It might feel insincere, it might feel terrifying and impossible. But it never is. That's exactly what your disorders and problems want you to think. But they are wrong.

I had to accept that too. I had to accept that, once again, I wasn't as special of a snowflake as my mental illness painted me to be. By doing that, it simply did what any mental illness does best: it isolated me even more. With every joke, every #relatable tweet, every "lol" behind yet another truly worrisome sentence, I sunk back further and further into the cocoon of loneliness. And, plot twist, you can't finger-gun your way out of depression. Sorry, babes.

So, every time you’re about to chuck out another "I wanna die lmao" in a casual conversation with friends or yet another self-deprecating tweet, just take a second to ask yourself: Is this really a way of coping? Is it really making me feel better? Or is it actually a subconscious, desperate attempt of getting someone, anyone, to see that I'm slowly breaking on the inside?

Again, I don't want this to come across as a self-help guide on how to battle your mental illness. Not at all. If anything, the reason I phrase this blog and all my entries the way I do, is because it's what I need to keep telling myself, every time I revert back to old habits. It's a reminder. For me and, in case you want it to be, for you too. I'm not here to lecture anyone. Well, maybe myself, a little. But everyone makes their own choices and I'm no one's guide or saviour, nor do I want to be. However, I made a promise to myself to really commit to this blog thing, so here I am. I'm my own harshest critic, always have been, so if anything, this is a call out post for my own self-deprecating habits.

Receiving that message from my friend made me realize that even though I would have never admitted it to myself at the time, all those tweets and casually dropped “I’m gonna kms haha lol”s were nothing but very badly disguised cries for help. I was just too much of a coward to admit that to myself. Okay, maybe coward is a bit of a harsh word. I don’t want to diminish my fear or vulnerability just because I know the reason for it now. It’s just that looking back at my own denial, and still sometimes catching myself in moments where I slip back into this behaviour, makes me want to grab myself by the shoulders and shake me until I snap out of it.

Which is why I’m just going to do this through my blog now – for past, present and also future me: Get it together. Stop yourself in your own tracks when you’re about to word-vomit up another cryptic tweet or self-deprecating joke. Instead, talk to a friend. Type up a text. Call someone. Schedule a therapy session. It's always gonna help, way better than forcing out a laugh about something that is in no way a laughable matter. Reaching out is not going to fix everything immediately, but in the long run it will. And that's what we're in for, after all.

You can ask any of my friends and they will tell you that whenever they express feelings of insecurity about sharing their worries to me, I will be quick to stop them in the middle of their sentence to tell them that they can, and always should, talk to me. About any- and everything, be that day or night. It is something that I have been preaching for God knows how long, and I genuinely mean it, too. So, I’ve kind of just been a huge hypocrite by never listening to my own advice. And I knew that. Deep down, I always knew that I was ignoring the exact thing I kept telling the people I loved to do too. And what can I say, I hate being a hypocrite.

I’m not saying that any of this is easy. Hell, it can be the hardest God damn thing ever, especially when you’re as emotionally repressed and inept as I am most of the time. And yes, venting and shit-posting about how much you’ve been crying all day or how much you “hate your own life” might work as a quick fix to let off some of that frustration steam. But it’s never going to actually repair the underlying issues that cause you to feel this shitty in the first place. The only thing that’s gonna do that, is actually talking to people. Whether that is family, friends or a therapist, doesn’t matter. Because other than an Instagram story that disappears after 24 hours, or a tweet that has a 280-character limit, real life people who care about you will actually take the time to listen, say something in return, and provide the comfort and open ear no social media platform or meme ever could. You know that. And I know that too. 

So, I want to try and quit lmao-ing my way through life and instead do what I actually, secretly know I am trying to do anyway with all those self-deprecating attempts at morbid comedy: ask for help. No lol’s needed.

#therapy #introspection #social media #oversharing #self-hatred #self-deprecation #self-deprecating humor #mental illness

[isa-ly]

EVERYTHING IS FINE ... BUT WHAT IF?

TW: mental health, therapy, anxiety disorder, panic attacks, insomnia

I see now what my therapist meant when she said that, contrary to my own beliefs, I actually have a pretty big need to talk that I’ve just suppressed and ignored my entire life – and now that I’m starting, I can’t seem to stop. Well, we’re not at the actual real life talking part yet but, you know, the whole brain-to-keyboard thing is kind of kicking off at the moment.

Actually, I really enjoy writing this blog. So much so, that I sat down and made a whole ass chaptered schedule for all the things I’m still planning on sharing on here. Is that my obsessive and compulsive planning mechanism kicking in, so I can cater to my insatiable need for control because otherwise I will feel purposeless and lost? Possibly. Most definitely. Yeah. But we’ll talk about that another time.

Today, I want to write about something else instead. Something that also has to do a lot with control – or actually, the loss of it. Okay, I’m not gonna beat around the bush for much longer (and you read it in the trigger warnings already anyways): We’re talking anxiety and panic attacks today! Yay! Or ... nay. They’re not that fun, really. Whelp.

What’s also not that fun is that, actually, the first mental health diagnosis I ever received in my life, also included the lovely anxiety disorder. And if I say lovely I mean shit. Like, really crappy shit. Would you believe me if I told you I studied journalism for four years? Clearly, all those creative writing lessons and 350 bucks a semester really payed off. Pulitzer, here I come.

Okay, I got sidetracked again, I apologize.

For me, the best and easiest way to describe living with anxiety, is to tell people to simply put the phrase “... but what if?” behind every sentence or thought they believe or hope for to be true. Just try it out.

“It is only human to make mistakes and fuck up ... but what if?”

“I know I am okay the way I am ... but what if?”

“My friends and family tell me they love me ... but what if?”

“I am worthy of kindness, affection and respect ... but what if?”

Not so nice, huh. Yeah, told you so. And listen, I am fully aware that we can all relate to feelings of doubt, second guessing, fear of abandonment and overthinking. You don’t have to have an anxiety disorder in order to know what that feels like. The mild difference is, that when you get diagnosed with it and it’s an actual medical condition, these invasive thoughts tend to not simply go away with the shake of your head or a few calm breaths.

They’re always there, in almost every situation in life. In your personal relationships, in school or university, at your job and in your career, when you’re out shopping for food, clothes, books, wanting to catch that tram but being too scared that everyone will judge you if you run and miss it and oh my God, that would be so embarrassing, just imagine all of those people watching you fail to still get on, that would be mortify–

You get the idea. Or maybe you don’t, in which case: Congratulations! Seriously, I’m not being sarcastic this time. Not constantly having to feel nervous or anxious about every tiny thing in your life, is really something quite enviable. And, not to flex, but I have worked quite hard on the anxiety part of my issues and so far, it’s probably the area I have made most progress in. Especially when it comes to social anxiety. As I’m not a licensed therapist (despite my recurring try-hard efforts of pretending to be one), I’m not going to list all the characteristics of that, since that’s also not really the point of this blog. Instead, I’ll just leave you with yet another great meme that kind of sums the whole thing up pretty well:

What a good boy. Good, and nervous. Just like me, internally, 24/7. Because remember: I almost automatically repress every emotion that ever comes up. So, all of that spicy anxiety gets pushed far, far down into my subconscious, where it is left to rot and fester. Because, once again contrary to my own popular belief (or should I say delusion), the things you repress don’t really tend to just magically disappear. In fact, they’re much more prone to do the exact opposite, which is growing into massive, uncontrollable Boss Versions of themselves, that you then have to face at the most unfitting and unfortunate moments in life, with only 1HP left and no save button to hit.

And that, ladies and gentlemen (I say, yet again pretending that I am talking to a real life audience), is called a panic attack.

If anxiety is the villain of today’s story, the panic attack is its bigger, extremely jacked and high-on-steroids brother, that is ready to punch you square in the jaw when you least expect it. Which is something that I had to deal with an awful lot in the past. It pretty much made me into an almost brainless zombie for about half a year.

Okay, rewind. Almost exactly two years ago now, was when the beginning of my more or less unavoidable and concerningly rapid descent into a variety of mental health issues began. More Big Dictionary Words to say that, basically, shit was starting to go down. In many ways, I felt like my life was slowly but certainly starting to fall apart at all ends and edges which, you know ... didn’t feel too great. But, because I was not yet aware of all my unhealthy coping mechanisms (a.k.a. simply not coping with anything at all and just repressing it instead), I didn’t really know what to do about it. Which is why I did what I had always done: Pretend that everything was fine.

... but what if?

Sorry, what’s that?

What if ... it’s not?

Pardon?

What if you woke up in the middle of the night and felt like someone was sitting on your chest?

What now?

And what if it felt like no matter how hard you tried to breathe, there was never enough air in your lungs?

That’s ... I mean, that sounds awful.

Yeah, and what if your heart started beating so fast that you felt like you might go into cardiac arrest any second?

Okay, what the fuck–

Shut up, I’m talking now. Adrenaline is pumping through your veins, you have no idea what’s going on but I’m here to tell you that something is going on, right? Do you feel that? There’s always something going on, you know there is. Something is wrong, something’s not right, so breathe a little harder, worry a little stronger, stop sleeping, get up, something is happening, something is waiting, come on, panic. Panic. Panic!

Hm. Cringey description? Maybe. It’s the best I could come up with. Because this is exactly what happened in my head every single night, at around 4 or 5am, when I would be woken up by a massive panic attack, not knowing where I was, what was happening or why I felt like I was going to have a heart attack any second now (because again, it was 4am in the fucking morning).

I remember not even knowing how to explain this completely new and weird phenomenon that kept happening to me, to myself or others. The only similar feeling I had as a comparison, was the way I felt before big exams or whenever I had been told bad news of some sort. Lame, I know, but it was the only thing that kind of came close to describing what I felt.

That sinking feeling in your stomach, those gnarly whispers that tell you that something is up, while not telling you what exactly they mean. Feeling your heart beat way too fast in your chest and your sternum aching in between your ribs. It feels awful. It feels like falling off a cliff that never seems to end. Honestly, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

Panic attacks can be brutal. They don’t always have to be, but usually, they are. And getting them every single god damn night for the entirety of one uni semester? Not cool. Nope, that’s yet another bad Yelp! review, guys. Where’s that angry emoji on the Facebook reactions? Yeah, that’s the one I need.

Maybe the brainless zombie thing makes more sense to you now. Because in addition to panic attacks feeling like an absolute hell-ride, they also don’t really let you fall asleep again. Kind of hard to drift into peaceful slumber when you’ve got a heart rate of 150bpm and can’t breathe properly. So, I was basically a sleep-deprived insomniac for five months. Which, in turn, made my mental state even worse. Yeah, these mental health things tend to be very efficient downward spirals, kinda similar to the ones in my own head. Like dominos, you give one of ‘em a slight nudge and suddenly a million others collapse in like 0.5 seconds. Speaking of, anyone remember that TV show Domino Day? Good one, kind of miss it.

Right, so. Panic attacks and anxiety. Those two fellas were kind of the starting point of my 2018-journey into mental health disorders. They get the first few pages in the scrap book that is my broken psyche. Okay, I’ll take that back: I’m not broken. Just a little dented, like a fridge that you accidentally dropped while moving. It still works, just looks a bit wayward now, and makes weird noises. I’d say my metaphors are improving, what do you think?

Back then, I might not have yet had the right words or necessary understanding to talk about what was happening (and I also just kept ignoring it, because remember: Repress like a champion!), but thanks to a lot of therapy, some medication and heaps of soul searching, I managed to somewhat master most of my anxious thoughts and panic attacks by now. I still have and get them, obviously, stuff like that doesn’t just disappear that easily. But I have learned to deal with them in my own way and they have become a lot more manageable.

One of the most important things I had to realize, was that these extreme, uncontrollable and almost explosive feelings of fear and panic, were simply the result of my heavy repressing mechanisms. To do what you’ve all been waiting for and use another metaphor (that rhymed, #swag): Have you ever watched people in Hollywood comedies stuff an unusually large amount of clothes into a cupboard, close it and then open it again later, only for the massive pile of shirts and underwear to hit them in the face? Yeah, that’s me, emotionally. As in, I’m the person, the cupboard’s my subconscious and the panic attack is the impending doom of clothes, toppling over me.

If you keep water on a low heat for long enough, it’s still gonna over-boil eventually, and all that. You know what I’m trying to say. Your brain is an incredible and intricate machine, that spends all its waking and sleeping hours sorting away all of those millions of impressions you’re exposed to every day, from the very moment you are born. It honestly deserves a raise for that. But, if you play it like I did, and don’t let it do its job properly by being in denial about the negative emotions piling up in your metaphorical subconscious-closet, it’s gonna snap at some point. There’s going to be a leak and that leak, in my case (and also in many other people’s cases), was an array of panic and anxiety attacks that haunted me in my sleep for months on end.

Do I wish I could have avoided that? Sure, I’d be stupid not to. But I can’t really change the fact that it happened and, in a way, it helped me to finally realize that something was really off. It wasn’t for many months later that I actually started therapy (and there’s still a lot more shit that’s about to go down), but it definitely was something that later helped me understand why the way I was dealing with my problems, was in no way sustainable or healthy for my mental wellbeing. And that’s just going to have to be enough reason to accept how, to quote myself, crappy and shitty it was.

I could tell you a whole lot more about the hundred different anxiety and panic attacks I’ve had in my days (like the ones I would get after having a lot to eat, which made my heart rate increase due to digestion, leading to my body mistaking that as another panic attack coming up, or the one I had where I genuinely thought I was going insane because I was hearing things in slow motion) but ... okay, I kind of just did. But I’ll leave it at those two examples because really, it’s not about me showing off my traumatic low-points, I’m not really into hosting pity parties. If anything, this was once again an opportunity for me to a) realize the progress I have made, b) accept that those feelings of anxiety and panic were and still are valid too and c) maybe helping someone out who read this and could relate to it.

If you’re c) (which is totally okay, because I was c) too, not too long ago), just remember: I know it’s terrifying and confusing. But it’s not nearly as uncontrollable as you think it is. Talk to someone, a friend, a family member or, even better, a doctor or trained medical professional, and ask them for help. It’s going to get better if you make the choice to not swallow it down and ignore it. No “but what if”s this time.

#therapy #introspection #anxiety #anxiety disorder #social anxiety #panic attacks #repression

[isa-ly]

HOW TO EMOTION?

TW: mental health, therapy, repression, dissociation

Today’s just one of those days where I’m questioning whether or not I’ve completely lost the ability of functioning like a normal human and kind of feel like the Tin Man from Wizard of Oz. You know, casual Friday. 

I know this is a written blog, but since I am also very much a woman of images and metaphors, I shall once again try and elaborate the issue of today’s post by making it into a well-known, kinda dead and yet very accurate pop culture meme:

I am not kidding, this is what I look and feel like in most of my therapy sessions. I’m pretty sure Kerstin would agree with me here, as the topic of feeling, or more like my inability of doing so, has been pretty much been the red string winding itself through my mental health journey so far. I mentioned it briefly in the last post, but I figured since today is just one of those pesky overthinking ones, I might just dive in a bit deeper and try to detangle my knotted thoughts into something a bit more coherent.

I’ve talked about this before to some of my closer friends and honestly, every time I tried to explain it, I just felt like an absolute mad psychopath. Don’t get me wrong, I know that I’m not, but it’s kind of hard to get people to understand what it feels like to just ... not feel. Okay, that sounds a little bit too dramatic, let me try and re-phrase it in a way that makes more sense.

I talked all about the metaphorical elephant and it’s even more metaphorical stake last time and this is kind of the extended version of that issue. The Stake Supreme, if you will. Basically, one of the earliest coping mechanisms that I picked up when I was very young, was to simply swallow down any feelings of anger, rage, sadness or hurt and pretend that they just weren’t there. Now, that’s not really something very unusual, as we generally live in a society that doesn’t leave a lot of room to healthily express or work through our emotions with the crushing weight of professional, educational, financial, social and personal pressure constantly weighing on our shoulders. So, again, I’m very well aware that me pretending that my bad feelings don’t exist, does in no way, shape or form make me a special snowflake.

It does, however, make me a very emotionally repressed and mentally inept snowflake. And that’s not really great either.

It took me many therapy sessions to figure out that what I had used as a necessary protection mechanism for all my childhood and young adulthood, had slowly but certainly turned into the root of pretty much all my current mental health issues. And here I was, thinking that mommy and daddy issues were just a try-hard-to-be-relatable brand that pseudo-depressed people on Twitter liked to use to excuse their shitty personalities. Oh no, am I one of them now? Alright, back to the point.

I’m just going to try to explain, both to myself and you, what happens in my head whenever the aforementioned process of ~A Feeling~ occurs. Where normally, I would experience something that elicits an emotion that I then experience and feel, lately (and by that I mean ever since some of the more severe of my mental issues started happening) I instead feel like the actual emotion gets stuck somewhere between having been produced and actually reaching my consciousness. In a way, to get back to that earlier visual, it feels like I’m the Tin Man. The feeling gets dropped into my empty tin chest and while I try my absolute hardest to actually feel it, it just sits there. Not really arriving, not really unfolding, just existing while remaining completely detached from me. And I continue to feel how you would imagine a man made out of tin and air would feel: hollow.

I’m trying really hard not to make another load of self-deprecating jokes here, as sharing and trying to explain this makes me beyond uncomfortable. Instead, I’m just going to keep going because that’s kind of the point of this blog. When I told my therapist what I typed up there just now, she explained to me that this strategy of processing (or lack thereof, actually), is commonly referred to as repression and dissociation. And that with my history of handling emotions (or, once again, lack thereof), it actually made quite a lot of sense for me to struggle with this.

She then went on to explain that one could imagine it like this: Whenever anything triggers an emotion to be formed (which, you know, happens quite a lot, since that’s kind of all that human brains do), my self-taught mechanism is to immediately replace it with a so called ‘non-feeling’. I know, that word seemed strange to me too in the beginning. What it means is that by having constantly invalidated and swallowed down my own feelings of anger and sadness through the course of my youth, I unintentionally created this perfect, well-oiled machine of repression that unquestioningly does its job without me even noticing. In a way, I somehow mastered the art of literally, fully and completely detaching myself from my emotions and simply viewing them as separate entities to my own mind.

Now, while that sounds like a sick villain superpower, I’m gonna be honest: It kind of fucking sucks. Especially on days like these, where old habits resurface and I once again find myself looking at my own emotions as if they were statistics on a computer, knowing that they are there, knowing that they exist within me, but for the life of me not being able to actually feel them.

That’s yet another thing I also learned in therapy. There are miles, literal continents, if not even multiverses, between rationally knowing you should feel something and actually feeling it. I’m not completely insane and oblivious, I very well know that I am capable of having emotions and that they are there and being produced by many funky chemicals working together in my brain. However, simply knowing this on an intellectual level is no where close to satisfactory if you cannot actually feel it too.

It’s like looking at ice cream, knowing that it’s there, seeing it with your own two eyes, remembering and being able to imagine the taste, the texture, the sweetness and yet never really actually being able to eat it. Never really feeling it melt it in your mouth. It remains an idea, a concept, close to smoke in thin air that you can very clearly see, and yet never really grasp.

And that, as you might be able to imagine (or even relate to, if you’ve experienced it before), is just not a lot of fun, to be quite frank. Emotional repression? Yeah, no, that one definitely gets a bad Yelp! review from me. Wouldn’t recommend. Zero stars out of five.

In addition to accidentally failing to process my own emotions (are you proud of me, mum?), there’s also the other half of the problem which is, as my therapist already mentioned, the dissociation. Now, I want to be clear here: While I’ve gotten quite a few medical diagnoses in my time in therapy, the actual condition of dissociation or dissociative disorder, which is actually a personality disorder, is not one that I ever received. The dissociation my therapist talked about, ergo the one I am experiencing, is more situational and linked to the repression. Funnily enough, it is literally happening at the current moment, while I’m writing this post.

Actually, it’s been there for every post I wrote. It is also there during almost every therapy session and whenever I attempt to talk to someone about my problems or feelings. If you ask me how I am and we get talking about my mental health, you can assume that I’ll be dissociating about two minutes into the conversation. Usually, it’s not something that is very noticeable. At least that’s what I like to believe, maybe it’s also super obvious, like my soul leaving my body, and people are simply confused or kind enough not to mention it. Who knows.

My therapist, however, did notice it, as she let me know after a few sessions, when I first tried to describe what dissociating felt like to me. “Oh, yeah, I can tell whenever it happens. I just thought I’d give you your space until you wanted to talk about it”, was what she had said. Oh, Kerstin. You’re a real keeper.

So, what does it feel like to dissociate? (I once again pretend that someone is asking so I don’t feel like I’m talking to myself about myself). It’s a little hard to explain but here’s what I have told some of the friends I have talked to about it before: Imagine from pretty much one second to the other, your entire head is filled with cotton, kind of like you’re really tired and exhausted and everything that you see or hear doesn’t really get through the thick wool that seems to have replaced your brain. Forming thoughts and staying in the moment gets harder with every minute that passes. There’s this weird pull at the back of your neck and the front of your forehead that kind of just wants you to close your eyes and drift away. Far away to somewhere where it’s quiet and cotton-y and there’s no one or nothing else around you.

It’s not just mental, it’s physical. It feels like your brain hit the shut down button without your consent, like it’s slowly closing the blinds as it gets darker and darker and you just want to fall asleep. Speaking seems to become almost painful, thinking coherent thoughts is close to impossible and following what others are saying is a million times harder all of a sudden. It’s like the world has gone out of focus and you’re trying to sharpen the lense again, to no success.

Actually, I think that a lot of people have experienced dissociative symptoms before. Not to play Dr. Freud here, but it happens quite a lot, for example during panic or anxiety attacks. Some of my friends have told me that it felt like they had suddenly left their body and were watching themselves as from across the room. That’s why often dissociating is also described as an out of body experience. Because in a way, it literally is one. 

As my therapist explained to me, and as I experience it too, it’s comparable to your brain throwing a metaphorical fuse because it’s in danger of short circuiting. My dad would be so proud if he saw me making electrician references (yes, he is a trained electrician, okay). Anyway, what I’m trying to say is: Often, when I’m exposed to emotions (and that includes talking or writing about them), my brain will run a little too hot like an old, wary car engine, and before it gets too close to exploding into a fiery death, it simply flips the switch and disconnects itself from the body and the emotions that are happening in it. Just like the repression, this is yet another safety mechanism that my brain came up with in reaction to me never really learning how to correctly process emotions. So, whenever some of those stronger feeling resurface or leak out, it tries to protect me from them by cutting the connection between the both of us.

In almost every way, it feels like I’m being locked out of my own head and can no longer really use my own brain. To someone who’s never felt that before, this might seem a little terrifying. And I agree that, objectively, it is. Knowing that the grey goo behind your skull has the power to shut out what in the ever-loving fuck is considered your conscious self, is a bit worrisome, to say the least. However, to me, it’s something that I have a) gotten very used to by now and b) in the moment don’t actually experience as something scary at all. I’m disconnected, remember?

Which is also why it’s sometimes very, very hard to get grounded again and find the way back into my own head. Like a bird that’s accidentally escaped its cage, proceeding to go fucking rogue in the living room, then crashing into a wall, all while trying to figure out what the fuck is happening while it’s on the verge of blacking out. I’ll often feel so dull and dizzy that all I really want to do is curl up and stare at a wall until eventually, my mind and body connect again and things are back to normal.

To kind of circle back to the whole theme of this post: This whole dissociation thing is very strongly connected to my tendency of emotional repression. It’s somewhat of a vicious cycle, which is why days like the one I’m having right now, can be a little tricky. It starts with me feeling empty and hollow, bim-bam-Tin-Man, and is usually followed with feelings of isolation and depression, since I cannot seem to get joy, satisfaction, or any emotion, really, out of anything. This then often leads to me trying to force some sort of emotion into myself, struggling to dig through my subconscious in hopes of finding something, anything, and eventually becoming even more frustrated. Aha! Frustration! That’s an emotion, right? It’s there! Can you feel it? I think you can, oh wow, there it is! Oh, wait, no ... no, now my head is getting heavy. Everything’s blurry. Is the feeling still there? Maybe. Who cares, just close your eyes now. So sleepy, hm ... floaty float.

Okay, sorry, that just turned into a weird combination of a badly written slam poem and a pretentious high school theater class rendition of some old play no one has ever heard of. I’ll just use the fact that I’m still dissociated as hell as an excuse for now. Wait a minute ... if I’m this spacey and zoned out right now, how am I even managing to write this post? Huh? Isa? Explain yourself!

Well, I haven’t been in therapy for nothing. It’s been over eight months of Kerstin and me figuring all of this out, finally putting a name and label to it and therefore understanding why it’s there and how it works. Which has helped me a great lot in actually handling it. That’s kind of the whole point of therapy after all, isn’t it? Don’t get me wrong: These days where I feel repressed, empty and dissociated, can still be hard and they’re rarely ever fun. They honestly make me want to bash my head against a wall in hopes that that will make it go back to normal.

But since I don’t really favour having a concussion on top of feeling depressed and detached from my body, I have learned to use other counter-measurements to help the process of finding my balance again. Rebuilding that mojo, am I right? This post is already pretty long, so I won’t go into even more detail on all the different methods and mechanisms of bouncing back, but I’ll say this much: I spent a good portion of therapy trying to learn when to push and when to rest whenever I’m feeling dissociated. And yeah, it’s a fine line and I still haven’t fully figured out how to walk it without falling from one extreme into the other.

But take this blog, for example. I know that writing it, actively facing my problems and the very strong, repressed emotions connected to them, will make me dissociate like hell. A few months ago, that would have been reason enough for me to not do it and simply ignore it again. Now, however, after working with my therapist and on myself, I have learned how to push my own limits just far enough in order to, in this case, continue to write even though it feels like my brain is about to burst into a cotton explosion. It’s a give and take, a sort of push and pull I’m playing with my own mind and head. But as time progressed, I figured out the game plan a little better, I learned my own rules and the secret short cuts and cheating methods (because come on, who really plays fair, that’s for boring losers) and the resting time it takes for me to restore my strengths again.

So, today for example, I woke up as Mr. Tin Man, progressed to being a lost, numb and rogue dissociation-bird (man, I really gotta work on my metaphors, this is just getting worse by the minute) and then decided that the best way to counter-act all of it, would be to sit down and write my lovely new blog. Has it helped? A little, yeah. It took my mind off the right things, made some others a bit worse and intense but now, I feel a little more stable and like I managed to talk some sense back into my spiraling, detached brain.

Kerstin, please tell me you’re proud of me. Because as we all know, therapy is about impressing your therapist and not about getting better for your own sake. Pft, who needs that. What do we want? Validation! When do we want it? All the time, because we never got it as a child, so now it’s the only thing we crave in life!

Yikes.

Alright. So, here we are. Since I’m still feeling a little zoned out and dopey, I’m not fully sure if everything I wrote made complete sense. But hey, while this blog is for others to read should they feel like it, it’s still mainly there for me to sort my own racing thoughts before they can spiral out of control. And I think I managed to do that just now. And I know that that feels kind of nice.

Actually, I feel it too.

P.S.: I just had to. A little self-deprecation doesn’t hurt anyone.

#therapy #retrospection #repression #dissociation

[isa-ly]

THE ELEPHANT’S STAKE

TW: mental health, therapy, repression

Did you know that my go-to party trick is drawing an elephant with just one line? I know, pretty lame. Now you know why I never go to parties.

Okay, so, what’s with the random elephant theme, you may ask? Well, funny you should mention it. (I say, as if we were having and actual conversation and it wasn’t just me pretending to talk to someone in order to feel less awkward. The irony here is that writing this blog is supposed to help me to do exactly that. I never said my brain’s logic made any sense.)

Anyway, I asked myself that exact question too a few months ago, when my lovely therapist Kerstin asked me whether or not she could read me a story about an elephant. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love animals and those big-boned, long-tusked, gentle-calm giants definitely have a soft spot in my heart. However, I never really expected them to come up in a conversation with a trained psychotherapist. But hey, what the fuck do I know about cognitive behavioural therapy. Not enough to be aware that it includes elephants, apparently.

Since I didn’t want to be rude and was actually kind of intrigued, I asked my therapist to yes, please, read me the story about the elephant. I actually found the story online (pft, Kerstin, where’s your originality), so I shall copy and paste it here for you to read it too, in case you want to:

“When I was small, I used to love circuses, and what I liked best about them were the animals. The elephant in particular caught my attention, and as I later found out, other children liked the elephant too. During the performance, this enormous beast would nobly display its tremendous weight, size, and strength. But after its performance, and until just before it went out on stage, the elephant was always tied down with a chain to a little stake in the ground that held one of its feet. The stake however was just a minuscule piece of wood, hardly a couple of centimeters long. And although it was a strong thick chain, it seemed obvious to me that an animal capable of tearing a tree from its roots, could easily free itself from that stake and flee. This mystery continued to puzzle me. What held it there? Why didn't it escape? 

When I was 5 or 6, I still trusted the explanations given by grownups. So, I asked my teacher, my father, and my uncle about the mystery of the elephant. One of them explained that the elephant didn't escape because it had been mastered. So, I asked the obvious question: “If it's been mastered, why do they keep it in chains?”

I don't remember having received a coherent answer. With time, I forgot about the mystery of the elephant, I only remembered when I found others who had asked themselves the same question at some time. Years later, I discovered that, to my luck, someone had been sufficiently wise to come up with the answer.

The circus elephant does not escape because it has been attached to a stake just like this one since it was very, very small. I closed my eyes and imagined a defenseless baby elephant fastened to the stake. I am sure that in that moment, the little guy pushed and pulled and tired himself out trying to get himself free. And, regardless of his efforts, he couldn't do it, because the stake was too strong for him. I imagined him tuckering himself out and falling asleep and the next day trying again, and the next day, and the next. Until one day, a terrible day in his history, the animal accepted its futility and resigned itself to its fate.

That enormous powerful elephant that you see in the circus does not escape because, unfortunate thing, he thinks he can't. He has that memory etched into his mind: the futility that he felt shortly after he was born. And the worst part is that he has never returned to seriously question that memory. Never again did he return to test his own strength.

The first thing I said to my therapist after she had read me the story and was waiting for my reaction was: “Am I the elephant?” To no one’s surprise, she had nodded and then asked me how I had gotten to that conclusion. And well, that’s what I want to talk about today.

It’s a little hard for me to find a beginning to this, so I’ll just start with what came to my head first: My childhood. Oof, what a bummer. A few minutes into her second post and she’s ready to whack out the big guns. Okay, back to being serious. Somewhat.

Don’t get me wrong, I had a lovely childhood. Really, I was an only child, born to two very lovely parents who really cared for and loved me, and I have tons of wonderful memories of growing up. Oh, what’s that? Can you hear it? Sounds like a big “BUT...” that’s about to smash through the glass wall of my positive nostalgia. Look, let’s just say it as it is: While my time as a kid and teenager were truly lovely, fun and filled with good people and better friends, there were undeniable issues and traumas in it as well, and it would be simply wrong not to acknowledge those.

And one of those not-so-great things was that growing up, there were a lot of ‘can’t do’s’ in my life. Especially when it came to emotions. I’m not gonna give you the full rundown of every single issue in the relationship with my parents or my own self, but I’ll say this much: My feelings, especially ones of anger, sadness and hurt, were often brushed over, my arguments ignored and my attempts of standing my ground nipped in the bud. Discussions, fights and quarrels, especially with my mum, made one thing very clear: I had to stay as quiet and small as possible to avoid being yelled at even more. If I spoke up, even when I thought I was in the right, things would escalate and get even worse. Ergo, if I showed and displayed my real emotions and thoughts, I would suffer the consequences – which were never good.

So, I learned not to. I learned to stay quiet. To revert back into myself and zone out, go some place else in my mind and just wait for the storm to blow over. Instead of getting angry, I fell silent. Instead of getting sad, I went numb. As my therapist always says: Instead of feeling, I would simply not feel. Because at the time, it was what kept me safe. It was what kept me loved. And all a child wants is to be loved.

In many ways, this was my stake. This was what kept me standing in one spot. Whenever I tried to pull it out, I would fail, struggling and thrashing to escape, to make my emotions clear and feel them freely. Every time I tried, it would only leave me even more exhausted, would leave me feeling like a fool for thinking that maybe if I tried just one more time, pushed just a little harder, the stake would yield. But it never did. And at some point, I just gave up.

This all might sound very sad and tragic. I’m aware that I’m by far not the only teenager that fought a lot with their parents. And probably also not the only one who just kind of gave in after a while. However, I can’t deny the fact that this has shaped me in ways I am only now recognizing years later, while sitting in therapy and having elephant stories read to me because for some reason, for some fucking reason, I cannot access, feel or share my emotions.

For some fucking reason, I am chained to that stupid stake. 

My therapist read me the story because she knows that I’m aware what it’s about. It’s about me, as a kid and teen, trying to escape from the emotional boundaries that were set by my parents and eventually by myself, and failing time and time again. As I grew up and got older, those boundaries grew with me in my head. And yet in real life, they were nothing but a tiny stake of wood that, having grown a lot stronger, I could have completely overpowered and ripped out of the ground by now. But because they have been with me my entire life and because I hold all those memories of never being able to shake them, I never thought I could.

I always looked at them like the elephant looked at the stake. As something that couldn’t be moved, that couldn’t be changed.

“Until one day, a terrible day in his history, the animal accepted its futility and resigned itself to its fate.“

Hits different now, huh.

So, what’s the moral of that story and brief delve into my emotionally compromising childhood? Fuck the circus, I guess. 

In all seriousness though: I wanted to write this post because that therapy session actually helped me a lot and I find myself coming back to this story whenever I slip into the darker place of my mind. So, I wanted to put it on this blog as a reminder. A reminder to myself and anyone else who needs it, that even though it might seem virtually impossible to change something, be that your own thought patterns, behaviours or personality traits, it never is. 

You know that cheesy saying that change is the only constant in life? Well, as cheesy as it is, it’s true. And I think by realizing that, by hearing that silly story of the elephant in the circus, it opened up some new possibilities. One of those being that whenever something feels like it’s unyielding and not doable, maybe you just need to take a step back and look at it again. And maybe you’ll see that it’s actually just a small, wooden stake and you’re a whole ass elephant that could take down a tree, if it wanted to.

The exact opposite might be true too, and the stake might still be too big. And in that case, that’s perfectly okay too. Remember what I said one post ago about picking your battles according to your own strengths? Yeah, that’s still valid too. But it also doesn’t mean that you have to despair. Because there is always room for growth and the chance of becoming stronger. Emotionally, mentally, and in every other way.

I hope this doesn’t sound too much like a self-help book from some self-proclaimed lifestyle guru who’s also a part-time pickup artist and sells questionable detox teas on the side (not sure where I’m going with that one). Metaphors can sound super lame but in my case, they’ve always been helpful as my brain really loves translating lessons and conclusions into images. Essentially, I’m just the kid that was always into Arts And Crafts and I need to ~visualize~ everything in order to process it. I know, I annoy myself too.

But hey, my therapist made a good call by telling me this metaphorical story because it made me realize a thing or two about how I’ve set myself all of these boundaries I could just as easily (or should I say isa-ly, HAH) kick again if I tried. That stake I chained myself to might have provided a sense of safety all those years back when I was a child and teenager, being yelled at and not listened to by my parents. But it is no longer providing that security. If all, it’s holding me back in realizing all of my newly found strengths. 

So, maybe it’s about damn time I ripped it out of the ground and got the hell out of that circus.

#therapy #retrospection

[isa-ly]

OH MY, WHAT’S THIS?

TW: mental health, therapy

Golly gosh, has she really gone and made yet another god damn blog? Yes. Yes she has.

Let me explain myself. I know this is probably like what, my tenth or eleventh online blog that I’ve made now? You would think that I would have a huge and dedicated reader base by the rate and ferocity I create these blogs with, but well, since I forget about every .tumblr.com and .wordpress.com after about a month or two, it comes to no surprise that these unattended digital corpse-pages don’t really have many readers. Should maybe give them a proper burial by hitting that delete button and letting them move on to the afterlife of 1′s and 0′s. But since I don’t even remember half the URLs I came up with, they’re probably just gonna keep peacefully existing in the graveyard that is the the forgotten blog section of the internet.

So. Why another one? Why add onto the pile of aesthetic yet virtually empty “personal” websites?

I’m just going to tell you what my therapist told me: “It seems like you have so many thoughts in your head, it probably feels like exploding.”

Don’t worry, I’m not saying that I’m Miss Big Juicy Brain and too smart for my own good – that’s not what my lovely therapist meant either. The reason she said that to me was because in our latest session, she had asked me to give her a quick rundown of what goes through my head whenever anything emotionally triggering happens to me. I had then proceeded to talk for twenty whole minutes (there go twenty whole bucks, thanks a lot, non-existing public mental healthcare system) about what happened in my old noggin whenever ~A Feeling~ occurred. And I described it in such excruciating detail that I think she stopped taking notes halfway through and just zoned out. Can’t blame ya, Kerstin, twenty minutes of incohesive rambling doesn’t really meet the expectation of a “quick rundown”. Sorry for that.

Anyway, we then proceeded to talk about overthinking, as we have done a million times before. And, as we have also done a million times before, we came to the conclusion that my inner monologue resembles a thirty-meter death-ride water slide, when it comes to the velocity and severity of how fast and far I tend to spiral with my own thoughts.

Now, don’t worry, by now I’ve been in therapy for long enough to know how to safely land back on the floor. However, I did agree with my therapist that my intense introspection does sometimes compromise me in my day to day life, as I will spend days on end in my own head rather than in the world that lies outside of it. That then usually leads to self-isolation and that, in return, leads to even more introspection. Hooray, to unhealthy processing mechanisms!

Alright, enough self-deprication. Basically, the conclusion I came to in that session, was that I’m pretty much the exact opposite of the “no thoughts, head empty” meme. For me, it’s more like “all thoughts, head explode”. And while I’ve been trying to get better at sharing face-to-face what’s going on in my head, I don’t always have the energy to text, call or meet friends and make my brain form words that my mouth then says out loud (which, I realize, is also known as talking). 

I have made progress in that direction but ironically, these thought spirals tend to be the exact reason why I sometimes get into the bad mindset of thinking “Ugh, why even bother sharing? It’s already exhausting enough to just think it. Talking and explaining will be even harder.” And I know that that is not entirely true but listen, change comes in waves and you can’t battle all your inner demons at once. It is important to choose your battles accordingly to your strengths.

So, that is what I’m doing. I am choosing a battle by making a compromise. And making a blog. 

God, how awfully millenial of me. What’s next? A TikTok account where I ironically document my panic attacks over the sounds of Jason Deulos’ ‘Savage Love’? (Hold on, just gonna note that idea down for later...)

Seriously, I realize that this has a certain bobo-esque, self-absorbed cringe vibe to it (did I really just say vibe, this is worse than I thought). However, I also care for and know myself well enough that I tend to downplay and ridicule the fact that I really do have a massive stick up my ass when it comes to talking about my emotions, my traumas and all those pesky, invasive thoughts. And that’s why Kerstin and me came up with the idea of me simply making a blog where I can dump all my thoughts whenever it feels like they are getting too much.

This is obviously not the first time that someone thought of jutting down what’s going through their head. I am self-aware enough to know that I didn’t invent the concept of writing about my life and inner turmoil. YouTubers and ex-Vine stars already did that before me, just look at the list of New York Times Bestselling Authors and you’ll see it for yourself. And if Gabbie Hannah can publish her own poetry book (never forget “Link ... in Bio”), I can damn well make another unknown blog where I share what seems to have gotten stuck somewhere on the way from my brain to my mouth.

Sorry, by the way, if nobody got those weird references. Whenever I’m not busy bashing my overthinking head against the metaphorical wall of fear of my sharing emotions, I spend most of my time watching drama channels explain why yet another book published by yet another unproportionally famous vlogger is yet again unsurprisingly shit. But that’s not the point of this first blog entry, so let’s let the money-hungry world of YouTubers performing figurative self-fellatio rest.

Bottom line: I need to get better at talking. To people other than my therapist, that is. Because frankly, if that poor woman has to listen to even more twenty minute rants of me dissecting my own broken psyche, she’s probably gonna quit her job and then I officially have no one left to chew through my issues with. And that would be quite unfortunate for everyone involved.

So, I want to practice. Try out the whole brain-to-mouth thing, but in a less confrontational way, by making it a brain-to-keyboard thing first. And not just that, I want to make an active effort in setting myself reminders that no matter how deep and lost I am in my own overthinking patterns, I can always put a stop to it and just spew it out onto virtual paper. To get it out of my system, manifest it into something more physical, read through it, recognize what’s lacking and what I need to change and lastly, editing it into something that makes more sense to me and also others. 

In summary, this is kind of just me making my own “How To Talk About Emotions – For Dummies” guide. I expect no one to read all of what me and my sore yet hyperactive mind come up with, but I still gladly invite you to, should you care to see what that looks like. I apologize in advance though, I do tend to over-dramatize and under-estimate the way and amount I write about most things, including my own feelings. 

But hey, maybe by writing this blog somewhat close to regularly, I’ll also figure out a way to talk about my emotions in a way that isn’t filled with unnecessarily smart-assy Big Dictionary Words and pop culture references barely anyone understands. Let’s hope for the best.

After it now took me exactly 1.291 words to explain what could have been explained in about two sentences, I’m finally gonna shut up. “Thank the Lord”, I hear you say. Or ... maybe that’s just my overthinker voice and fear of vulnerability that heard you say that? Kerstin would probably smile and nod proudly now. Gold star for me, yay. Just kidding, I never get any cool stickers for my achievements. Honestly, that whole therapy thing is way less fun than I thought it would be, I just want a stamp that says “Great job!” or “Super cool!” every now and then. Is that too much to ask? Okay, I think I see now what she meant when she said that I seem to secretly rely on the approval of others for personal successes so I can compensate the fact that I never give myself any credit for them.

Phew, that whole writing things down idea seems to already pay off. But okay, enough self-revelations for today. I have no idea how often I will actually write on here and even less of an idea what the topics will be. However, I will always include tags and trigger warnings, so that if there actually is someone who reads through it, they can know what each post is about.

So, yeah. That’s it for now. Brain-to-keyboard to you soon. (Get it, that’s my way of saying talk to you soon, because– okay, yeah, you got it. Right.)

P.S.: Yes, the name of the blog is a pun, let me live a little.

#about #introduction