The Key to Keeping Resolutions

To a lot of people the term “New Year’s Resolutions” sounds rather daunting and final.  “I will lose weight”, “I will quit smoking” sound pretty definite and when they don’t achieve it or fall off the wagon by the second week in January they get rather disheartened and quit.

To combat this, I stopped making “resolutions” about 8 years ago and switched them out for goals. I don’t even make these goals at the start of the year anymore unless I have been contemplating doing something for so long and have decided there and then to make a change. Instead of “I will…” I now say “I will try.” I will try means that you are giving yourself a chance to actually try to actively change something rather than “I must do x/I must do y” and then feeling bad when you don’t stick to it. It means you are allowing yourself the chance to continue should you, say, break from the new lifestyle change you are implementing (I loathe the term “diet” as it only sounds temporary). It also means you are aware that there will be days when things will be more difficult than others and are therefore allowing yourself to be OK with the fact that it’s not going to be plain sailing; that you will try again whether it’s in the next hour, day or when you have recovered.
I firmly believe that one of the only ways to achieve your goals is to change your mentality and not be so hard on yourself when, if your eyes, you’ve failed. Another is to keep trying. The more often you do something, the more likely you are to stick to it. You also have to want to do it. A sure-fire way of resenting what you do and not accomplishing it is doing it purely for other people. If you don’t want it then your heart will not be in it and you will never really be happy with anything you do.

Last year, instead of resolving to lose weight, I thought “it would be really nice if I lost one stone (14lbs) by the end of the year” and then put in effort to do so by changing what and when I ate, making sure I was within the recommended guidelines for calorie intake, sugar intake etc. If I had said “I will lose weight” it would’ve seemed an impossible task as I had vowed to do so before and it had never worked therefore I would quit by week two or by the end of the month. By trying and not being so hard on myself (allowing myself to be fine with knowing that it’s OK to “fail” or have days/periods of time where I was more lenient), not only did I lose one stone (14lbs), I – at the time of writing this – have lose a total of 4 stone 10lbs (66lbs) with only 4lbs to go until I have lost a total of 5 stone (70lbs) and I am now two dress sizes smaller in both my top and bottom halves.
I said I would try to maintain a blog (win) and to relaunch my other passion project (double win). I wanted to do a lot more writing last year  - 25 stories to be exact - and by setting aside some time each day/each week I accomplished that plus more.

This year my goals are to:

Continue to try to lose weight as well as tone up. I needed to do this for my own wellbeing/health but I also wanted to. I did it for me and not because other people told me to. I’ve always been big but I’ve also always been content with who I am as a person and have never seen why I should do what other people say just so that they’ll like me or so that I’ll be included in what they do. Why would I want to be friends with people who couldn’t see past my weight or who wouldn’t take me for who I am?

I want to be more open on my blog’s Twitter account with other projects that I do and what I lend my name to. I have a website that I think a lot of you will enjoy or will support me on and whilst I do promote it on Twitter, I don’t ever say “this is actually mine” as it has links to personal details of mine (my YouTube channel, my nickname etc) that I want to keep separate from the blog.

I want to read more books. I used to read 10+ books a week (not to brag but this was also when I had a social life and a full time job) and now I’m lucky if I read one a month. I’m aiming to finish my second of the year either this weekend (at the time of writing this it is Friday 26^th January) or early next week (the week you’ll see this post) and to start a new one.

I want to write more. I have a goal of 25 stories to write by December. This is a goal I have been keeping annually over the last 4 or so years as part of my other project/website. It started out with just writing enough for ten days and I’ve now built it up to span over 25 days from December 1st up to and including Christmas Day.

I really want to keep questioning why I feel the way I do when I have a bad day and to not let others make me feel bad.

Finally, I want to keep saving up for when I eventually move out and keep buying in smaller items so that when I do, I just need to think about the bigger items like furniture and carpeting.

What are your goals for this year/in the long term?

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Agoraphobia

Agoraphobia.

Google’s Definition: extreme or irrational fear of open or public places.

Dictionary Definition: Noun, Psychiatry - an abnormal fear of being in crowds, public places, or open areas, sometimes accompanied by anxiety attacks.

My agoraphobia started back when I was in high school. Back then I didn’t know it was agoraphobia or even anxiety that was causing it; I just knew that I couldn’t stand being in crowds or in big groups for very long and that this intense feeling made me want to run away and stay at home. As I said; I didn’t know that there was a name for this feeling and no one seemed to understand that when I felt this way I needed to leave whatever situation I was in and either come back when there was no one around (if it was a busy place) or be in an environment where I felt safe (at home with only my family) and that when I felt this way I couldn’t bear to be with anyone bar my parents. I would feel myself getting ill at even the thought of going out and would have what I would eventually discover to be panic attacks.


It made being with my group of friends quite difficult as in spite of being left out of many plans, I would find myself making excuses (too busy with homework, seeing my best friend who lived miles away etc) just in case they ever did invite me out. I thought that this was just because I had grown so accustomed to being left out and to being bullied whenever I left the house that I was putting a stop to getting hurt in the first place but it turns out that this panicky state I was getting into was due to anxiety. In a way, it did grow from my fears of being bullied and left out but sometimes I wonder if I was always just supposed to be this way because I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t anxious.

From the age of 17 this feeling only grew stronger. It got to the point where at school I would only hang out with my friends at the bottom of the back staircase during break as no one went there and if they wanted to move away from that area, I was stay behind by myself as the thought of going out into crowded hallways where I would be shoved and going out onto the grounds where I was be used as target practice for ball-based sports and as a human bin for other kids’ home economics (cookery class) creations terrified me. I was being allowed out of my classes 5 minutes early (thanks to my P.E teacher when I entered 3rd year at 14 who also let me study in the library during her classes to avoid the bullies) in order to beat the crowds and get to classes safely and at home time I was allowed out 10 minutes early to be able to get far enough away from the school that I would nearly be home by the time the rest of the kids got out. By college I was only going out to go to classes, my work placement or to a kids’ club I was a leader at. I was barely getting by due to my anxiety and depression and the only thing that made me happy was that one night a week where I could focus on entertaining the children with my best friend at my side. After I left college (you can find out the story behind that here) I was unemployed for two years and only left the house to sign on at the job centre or go to interviews for jobs that I didn’t even want. Nothing was going right, I was a complete mess and it led to me being even more depressed and anxious.

I would love to be able to tell you that now I go out as often as I can and enjoy it but that would be a lie and if there’s one thing I am not; it is a liar. I still hardly go out. I used to be in a routine over the last year or so where I would go to a group session one day a week and go into town every Friday but even that has stopped as I am longer seen by the department where I was receiving said treatment and have been waiting since last December for a referral to another. Going out it still extremely scary to me and I’m still recovering from all the times my now ex-best friend would guilt trip me into going out. I didn’t want to go out because I felt so ill and she would keep going on about how I “barely did anything”. Eventually she would say she desperately needed something and I would pull on my shoes and coat because I can’t stand people to go without.

Anxiously,

Me


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My Experience with... Depression

My Experience with… Depression

As some of you are aware from previous posts of mine; I’ve had depression from a very young age. I showed signs of having it from when I about 10 but was only officially diagnosed with having it at 19 when I was no longer considered being of school age. I think I have mentioned before that my doctor didn’t want to formally diagnose me until I was out of school and I think that it’s because it is not really recommended to give anti-depressants to children/teenagers. Initially it was put down to “being a teenager”, “hormones” and “rebellion” – which I resented as I wasn’t intentionally being rebellious; I felt like I was drowning and bullying at school made me not want to go (it made me so anxious and down) so, if I could get out of going to school, I would. In my post about anxiety I wrote that I would call up the school myself and tell them that I wasn’t going back (if it was after lunch) or that I just wasn’t going in at all that day. Being depressed and anxious made me physically ill (on top of dealing with horrendous periods but I’ll skip that for now) so I often felt too sick to even get out of bed and didn’t want to go to school for fear of being sick in class and not being able to get to a toilet in time. I would constantly have breakdowns – particularly the night before homework was due in or tests – and I regularly battled between not sleeping most nights (Sunday nights – Thursday), getting an hour or so of sleep, waking up every 20-30 mins or even sleeping too much (Fri nights – Sunday daytime. I was so low, physically & mentally ill and tired, and no matter how many times I went to the doctors or told my teachers; no one seemed to want to help. The bullying made me suicidal, as I stated in my anxiety post. I didn’t want to go to school where I had to be with those people and I didn’t want to have my home life invaded by them either as by the time I was in my final year of Primary School, the bullies had literally brought their insults and taunts to my front door. It was a really miserable time.

I thought things would be different when I went to college but it wasn’t. I was still being bullied, this time by new people who I had no connection with, and I was having a really difficult time with coping. It was during college that I had such a massive breakdown that I was signed off sick for weeks at a time until I eventually had to leave about 2 months before the end of my course due to being so unwell, not being able to go to college and not wanting or having the energy to do my coursework. I felt like such a failure for having to leave and sometimes I still do when I’m reminded of it with each new school year and “back to school” post. However, I remind myself that I made the decision to leave because I couldn’t cope and that it wasn’t worth my mental health suffering any more than it already had.

Another thing that affected my depression was the lack of sunlight. Here in Scotland schools start in August and finish in June so a lot of our schooling done in the autumn & winter months but even our springs can be quite dark as well. At college, we started in September so it was already getting darker at night. I left my house at 6:50 in the morning when it was still dark and would return after 6pm, sometimes after 8, when it would be dark again. The only times I saw daylight were walking from the bus to my college and if I happened to look out of the window during lectures. I’d wake up, get ready, go to college, be in lectures from 9-4, get home for 6, have dinner, shower and go straight to bed. My time was either spent in theory classes, at the schools where I did my practical work or in bed crying. I wasn’t living. I merely existed. And I didn’t want to.

I spent the next two years on benefits because I couldn’t work due to my depression and anxiety but, as doctors wouldn’t diagnose me or give me treatment other than medication which I didn’t want to take, I had to sign on every two weeks. Going to the job centre every two weeks would drive anyone insane. It made me feel worse to be made to apply for jobs (otherwise you get sanctioned and your money gets stopped) that I knew either wouldn’t get or wouldn’t keep due to my illnesses. I felt pressured into getting a job every time I went in and was made to feel as though my efforts weren’t enough despite applying for more than 2 jobs a day and going to interviews. They could clearly see that I was in distress but, again, no one wanted to help. It was only after I got my first “proper” (translation: paid) job and lost it due to being ill that my adviser suggested that I apply to get ESA (Employment & Support Allowance). I didn’t even know that that was choice. It seems to be that to be considered a “valuable member of society” you have to get a job and you can’t have illnesses that make you unable to do so as it then automatically makes you a “scrounger”. I’m far from being a scrounger and I’m not lazy; I am mentally unable to cope with having a job due to crippling social anxiety and can’t keep one because most days I can’t even get out of bed due to my depression and severe anxiety. I felt bad even being on benefits but I had my share of bills to pay and no means of being able to live without it and now I feel bad about being on ESA. I didn’t choose to become ill. I didn’t choose to be unable to cope with what goes on in my head and what happens around/to me. It just happened.

I don’t know how to get over these feelings of depression and anxiety or to stop feeling guilty for being on benefits/not being able to work so I do what I feel I do best; I write. Before it was writing fictional pieces loosely based on what I was going through and now I write these blog posts. I still get nervous sharing them, though, as there are people who simply just don’t understand. That makes me scared. It makes me scared that, like when I shared my thoughts and feelings on the internet when I was of school age, that my comments section will be filled with vicious trolls who get a kick out of making people miserable because they know they are susceptible to being tormented by it. Unlike back then, today I can just delete any negative comments and there are ways of banning people so please keep that in mind.

Anxiously,
Me

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Blogtober Week 1 Recap

Weekly Recap : 1^st – 7^th October 2017

Instead of throwing another new post your way, I thought that on Sundays I would do a recap of everything that has been posted over the past week.

This week on “Anxiously, Me” saw the start of Blogtober – a month-long blogging event where you post every day. You can read more about that here. As the month of October began on a Sunday, I’m now dedicating that day to doing recaps, as I mentioned above.

On Monday I did a personal post about school and the bullying that I endured during my time there. It was so traumatic that it still stays with me to this day and effects everything I do – or don’t, in the case of my anxiety.

Tuesdays are now filled with my thoughts on things like social media cleanses and some fun things that I like to do in my spare time.

Sometimes I have “bonus blog” days where I post some information regarding mental health matters so for the next few weeks I’ll be posting the same kind of posts on Wednesdays. This week I talked about the “Circle of Avoidance”.

As you may have already seen on my blog and as the title of one of the tabs above, I have a “Self-Care Q&A” that I like to send out to my friends/readers. For the past couple of months these were scheduled on Fridays and, whilst the first run of them recently finished, I decided that I would bring them back for the Thursday slots during Blogtober. This last Thursday saw the return of the segment, this time with answers from one of my new blogger friends, Jen.

On Friday I posted my first ever “Favourites” videos with a list of my favourite songs from over the years. You can have a nose through that here.

Finally, Saturdays are now dedicated to some of the bloggers that I really admire. Yesterday I talked about the first blogger friend I made; Courtney (Unfiltered Mama) and how her friendship has impacted what I blog about. You can read about her here.

I hope you’ll stick with me on this blogging journey – there are still loads more posts to be published!

Anxiously,
Me

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Social Media Cleanses

Social Media Cleanses

Periodically I like to do social media cleanses. I find them to be a quick, easy mental reset when I’m getting weighed down by what I see on social media. With my illnesses and who I am; it’s so easy for me to “catch” how other people are feeling – mostly when they are feeling low – and it brings me down even more so here are some of my tips for doing a social media cleanse.

1. Unfollow/unfriend. If there are people on your social media platforms that you have no connection with now or who are just toxic; unfriend/unfollow them. You won’t miss them because you haven’t spoken in so long and, to be honest, they won’t even notice.

2. Mute/unfollow (Facebook) them. If you have people that you just can’t unfriend/unfollow because they’re family, friends or the type who will make you feel bad for unfollowing them (Twitter)/unfriending them then simply put their account on mute or use the unfollow feature on Facebook. You won’t see their posts and they won’t be any the wiser.

3. Go offline for a while. I usually go offline for a day to test the waters (and by that I mean; see how I feel). If what I see annoys me/makes me want to fire back a response then I stay offline. Nothing good ever comes from responding to anything when you’re wound up. Avoid using your phone/laptop at all – if you can – to remove all temptation of looking at the likes of Facebook, Twitter etc.

That’s it, really. I go through those 3 stages whenever everything online gets to be too much for me. I avoid all social media sites, I don’t Tweet anything bar my usual promotional Tweets and ways of contacting me in an emergency or if it’s urgent.

Apologies for such a short post today. Aside from that really being all there is to doing a social media cleanse I just figured that, what with there being so many posts to look forward to, I didn’t want to bore you all with having loads of lengthy ones.

Is there anything you think I’ve missed out? Feel free to let me know in the comments below!

Anxiously,
Me

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My Experience with... Bullying

My Experience with Bullying

*Sensitive issues warning/trigger warning*

Bullying is something that I have experienced from a very young age. Back when I was in Primary School, up until the age of 10, it didn’t bother me to the extent that it eventually would.  I was so used to being called names, of being made fun of and only having one friend at a time that it became the norm. That, as far as I was aware, was how all people were; unkind and intent on causing me as much emotional and physical harm as humanly possible. These days it’s hard not to still feel that way as from the age of 5 to 18, it was all I knew and it really stuck in my brain that this was how people like me were/are supposed to be treated. In fact, I’m so used to being treated this way that anytime someone says something positive about me or is even the tiniest bit kind towards me, the alarm bells start ringing in my head as, when childhood bullies were nice to me, it was because they were trying to pull some sort of prank on me or were trying to get me to believe that they had changed so I would let down my defenses so that they could hurt me all over again.

When I was about 10, something inside me changed and every single thing that happened to me seemed to cut deeper than it had before. The comments about me would ring out over and over again in my mind until I got so angry that I started taking it out on my parents when they would ask me a question or try to talk to me.  I wasn’t just being teased about being fat anymore; I was being subjected to bullies coming up to my front door and yelling their insults through it. They were no longer just aimed towards me; they would pick apart the way my parents looked, things that they did etc. They literally brought the bullying to my door, as if going through it at school and on the way home (thankfully I lived - and still do – just across the road from my old Primary School) wasn’t quite enough. It certainly wasn’t enough for them either to yell obscene things at my parents as they walked our dog or to tell my dad that at 10 I was “shagging” people (I wasn’t and that remark has stuck with me and effects my relationships  - or lack thereof). I became afraid to go outside and to even try to connect with my peers as nothing good ever came out of it. This has led me to being diagnosed with severe anxiety and depression. I suffer from agoraphobia and even the thought of going downstairs or going outside makes me so upset to the point where I will go only go downstairs to get something to eat if no one else is home.
During this period in my life, as I walked to friend’s house with her one day after school, some girls that I didn’t even go to school with but who still had it against me for looking the way that I did, threw broken glass at us. It was traumatising to say the least and further cemented why I shouldn’t go outside.
I got called things like “sumo wrestler” because of how awful I looked in an old bridesmaids dress of my mum’s that I wore one Halloween. People in my class would tell their younger siblings (I helped out in their playground to avoid my own) to avoid me because they couldn’t stand them liking me more than them. I was nice to their siblings when they weren’t and even that pissed them off to have someone who was willing to make sure said children were OK if they were having a tough time of things.
When I got to be a bit older, at around 11, I begged my parents to stop making me go to before and after school clubs and to also let me start going home for lunch just so that I could eat in peace without people taking my food away because I didn’t “need to get any fatter”. I wasn’t eating anything different to the kids at school. In fact; my lunches were healthier than most of theirs but apparently I wasn’t deserving of any kind of food whatsoever because I was fat. Is it any wonder, when kids are that cruel that their victims and those that witness their behaviour end up with eating disorders? That’s something else I will cover at a later date.

High school wasn’t any better. As I was constantly shamed if I ate lunch in front of people in Primary School, I took to going home at lunch as it was only a 15 minute walk away. This did leave me only 15 minutes to eat and another 15 to get back to school but I didn’t care. I was free for a whole 15 minutes. It didn’t mean I escaped the cruel taunts going to and from school during lunch, though. People would throw bits of their food at me as if I were a wild animal and one girl even went as far to jog beside me yelling “knees up fatty! You need to lose weight!” as I walked home. Needless to say, I refused to go back that day and protested going back to school for the rest of that week.
This is when I started to skip school more frequently and would just flat out call up the school myself and tell them that I either wasn’t going back after lunch or that I wasn’t going in at all. I honestly didn’t see the point in going if I had to be let out of classes anyway because people kept putting gum in my hair and was constantly being made fun of because I liked to learn and wanted to. I really did want to go to school because I wanted to get an education – hence why I didn’t leave as soon as I turned 16 but opted to stay until the end of 6^th year- but it was really hard to get the motivation to do so as my time there was always filled with bullies making it known that I wasn’t welcome and feeling so bad to the point where I seriously questioned my existence. I only became worried about not going to school when there became talk that if kids skipped school then their parents would be fined or even jailed if they didn’t send their kids in. I still didn’t want to be there but it wasn’t my parents’ fault that I wasn’t going; it was down to me not wanting to spend yet another day in hell. I didn’t know it at the time but I was suffering from severe anxiety (something I wouldn’t discover until I was 23) and (formally) undiagnosed depression.
It was then that I also became suicidal. I didn’t go down the self-harm root of cutting myself but if I had a spot or a scab, as gross at it is, I would keep picking at it until it bled or hurt. I would also think about dying a lot (still do but in a different, more anxiety-filled way), specifically my want to die, but I wasn’t suicidal in the “I’m going to kill myself” way that the world has become accustomed to. It made me careless. I started to not pay attention when crossing the road. I didn’t care if I got hit by a car because it physically would’ve hurt less than the internal pain I was feeling. I didn’t care if I were to suddenly get really ill to the point of hospitalisation because it meant that I wouldn’t have to go to school. I didn’t care about how I looked as, even if I tried, I would still get taunted for being “ugly” or “too fat to wear human clothing” and I didn’t care if something bad were to happen to me.
If I questioned why they treated me that way or had the audacity to let it be known that it bothered me and that it made me want to hurt them (something I never did or would’ve acted upon) then I would be subjugated to rumours going around about how I was “weird” and wanted “to kill” them. Rumours were another form of bullying that I had to put up with. I was off school for 3 weeks once due to multiple infections in my throat, chest, sinuses etc and when I came back I was met with “Oh. So you don’t have cancer.” Turns out people were thrilled to learned of this new rumour and were even more so of the fact that, if it were true, then I was probably going to die. Unfortunately for them I wasn’t sick and that somehow made them hate me even more.

My biggest downfall – and it’s not my weight, how I look or my passion for learning – is that throughout it all I was still kind and forgiving towards every single one of them. I would still offer them a smile in the hopes that they would see that I wasn’t as bad as they made me out to be (not that any of them really knew me) and I would let them play with the toys that I brought for “Golden Time” to the point where they were really just taking advantage of me. One Christmas I even gave a candy cane to a girl who had not only made my life hell but had made me want to kill myself as a bid to get her to stop. Did it work? Did it fuck. She was nice to me for all of 24 hours after one of the deputy heads called both of us into his office so that he could try to shock her into leaving me alone by telling her (and what he told her was absolutely true) that my parents were worried that I was going to kill myself. The only time I ever fought back against a bully was when one of them and her cronies cornered me at the bottom of a secluded staircase. My fight or flight instincts kicked in and this time it told me to fight. I did try to walk away but she kicked my back really hard. I lost it. I didn’t know who it was that had kicked me but I was going to make sure that it never happened again. My eyes locked on one who had dared to keep insulting me and I grabbed her by the collar, hoisting her upwards. I didn’t have to do much else other tell her to stay away as the rest of them backed off me and promised to never even look my way again. Maybe I could’ve handled it better but maybe they should never have decided to bully people in the first place. I didn’t see much of them after; they chose to avoid me and I was grateful for it. If they saw someone else trying to bully me they would pull them aside and warn them to stay away from me. I’m not proud that it got to the point where I had to take that kind of action but when you’ve got an endless tag-team of people bullying you and no teacher willing to take them on you get desperate. Desperate enough to fight back and desperate enough to call in sick day after day.

This is still something that is really hard for me to talk about. Writing this recount has made me cry and reminded me that even though I am aiming for recovery, everything that has ever been said to me or has happened to me has stuck with me and made me the anxious, depressed mess that I am. It’s made me so anxious that I am scared to post pieces like this for fear that those who read it will call me names, won’t believe me or worse; try to call me out on something that I’ve said when, really, I know that I should be as I can just remove their comments and block them.

If you ever want to talk to me about what you’re going through/have gone through with bullies, feel free to message me. My Twitter DMs are always open.

Anxiously,
Me

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