Jan 22 / 2015

There have been so many times that i've sat and looked back on how far i've come since the day I decided that I needed help and opened up to someone. There have been days that i've looked back and wondered how I managed to do it, and wondered if I was really as sick as I had thought. But then I look back on the pictures and things that I had written and I wonder how nobody ever asked if anything was wrong. How nobody noticed that I was slowly ruining my body. I look back on pictures and remember the decisions that I made and wonder how the people that I was friends with never noticed. How they never noticed my destructive behaviour.

There are so many times that I look back and think about how far i've come, but it wasn't until this week that I really put myself back into that mind frame. The reason I was destroying myself, and the reason why I decided to get help. It wasn't until this week that I really thought about what was going through my head at the time and how much i've changed through out the past couple of years.

People do change, you may not see it right away, and you might be stuck in the mind set of who they used to be so you pre judge them... but people change. People change because of the things they struggle with in silence. They change and they grow because of the different battles they face daily.

I've been told so many times throughout the years that what I struggled with and what I battled didn't make me weak. It didn't make me a bad person that I fell so far off the path. It doesn't make me a bad person that I spent years hating myself and destroying myself. It's taken me years to realize that the things that you go through don't make you a bad or a good person.. what does is how you deal with them. It's taken me a while to realize that it wasn't my fault and that mental illness isn't something you choose for yourself. I chose recovery... I didn't choose an illness.

Two Years

I realize that I just posted something about a month ago… but it’s been two years. Some would say that the first little bit is the hardest to get through and it is. It’s hard because you’re facing all of the things you pushed away for so long. You’re fighting the voice in your head that is still stronger than ever. It’s hard to let people in and open up to them because you’ve been hiding from it for so long and lying about it. The beginning is hard… and it does get easier.

But there are still times that it’s hard all over again. It may be two years since I realized that I needed help but there have been several things that have set me back. It hasn’t been an easy two years, and it hasn’t been a cake walk at any time through out these past two years.

One of the hardest things to get through was when he passed away. My grandfather was the only person that didn’t make me feel like I had to be perfect… I already was to him. I was already perfect; there was nothing to change and nothing to improve. If I had been able to see myself the way he saw me things would have been different. When he passed away, it was like everything froze. There wasn’t anything I could do to make the voices stop from coming back… and there were times that I couldn’t eat. It made it easier to make excuses… but it wasn’t overly long before I realized what was happening and I got back on track. The thing about recovery is being able to face your fears and accept yourself for who you are. It’s not perfect and it’s not easy… sometimes you need to do things by yourself and other times there will be people there to support you, but either way it’s going to pass.

It’s been two years, and thinking about it now it’s hard to imagine that the time has passed. This time two years ago I couldn’t stomach anything without wanting to cry. Two years ago, I was more worried about how many calories I was consuming rather than what I was consuming. I was more worried about being perfect than being happy.

In the past two years I’ve managed to mend so many different relationships… but most importantly my relationship with myself. Two years is a huge milestone when it comes to overcoming something you’ve battled with and fought with for years… but everyday is another milestone.
Everyday I wake up and don’t push away food when I’m hungry.

Everyday when I look in the mirror and don’t want to cry.
Everytime I open up to someone about I feel.
It’s not always the big things that matter… but the smaller things that you don’t think about as much.

There are still so many things that I have yet to be able to do, and there are still so many things that make me think about the reasons I stayed quiet for so long. There are things that people say that make me understand why I didn’t say anything... and that make me want to continue to be quiet. For as many things that make me want to crawl into a hole or under the covers and hide away from the world there are just as many if not more that make me realize I need to speak up in order for others to understand they aren’t alone.  

Mental Illness isn’t something to joke about and it’s not something that should be criticized. There are so many different types of mental illness and yet people think that they aren’t there… that it’s just a phase. If it were just a phase , I would have been over it years ago… years before it got as bad as it did. If it had been just a phase I wouldn’t have notebooks and journals filled with the things I couldn’t say out loud.

So what have I learned in the past two years... 

-- Recovery isn't perfect and maybe you can't be "fully recovered". Maybe the fear of letting people get close enough to see the things you hid for so long will always be there... the fear that if they get too close it could trigger something may stay. But sometimes you need to let someone in, let go of the fear of being judged all over again, because they could surprise you. There are people that will judge you the way you thought they would.. but there are people that will surprise you and do the opposite. It's not perfect and even if it has been months or years there are still going to be hard days that you need someone to talk to. Just because it's been a certain amount of time doesn't mean that you're alone.

-- Most importantly... It wasn't my fault. I didn't choose it, but I did choose to better myself. I did choose to speak up and ask for help. 

a year and 11 months --- Neda Awareness Week

Earlier this morning, I looked at the Calendar and realized that it's almost been two years. It's almost been two years since I realized that I needed help, almost 2 years since I opened up and talked to someone. I also realize that I'm a little late to the NEDA Awareness week, but I don't think that they should only have one week to raise awareness for something that so many people are silently fighting.
I still can't imagine where I would be right now if i hadn't of had that realization. Where I would be if certain people in my life hadn't been there to ask me what was going on. There are so many people that have stood by me throughout the past two years and have made the hard days a lot easier.
Nobody told me that it would be easy to get better. You don't wake up and have everything go back to normal, although I wish it had been that easy.
The past year and 11 months have been such a huge journey, and sometimes a huge struggle. It's gotten to the point that the hard days become harder to come by, and it's taken almost two years for that to happen. It has taken so much time, and so much out of me but i've never been happier than I am.
1 year and 11 months, and I couldn't imagine my life the way that it has turned out. It's a huge step to open and talk to someone.
I can't imagine how hard it was for people to hear the things that were going on. I can't imagine what it must have been like to see someone that they care about and that they've seen for so long go through something and destroy their body the way that I did. It's not something that is easy to understand. It's not something that I could even begin to explain how it works. But for the past two years there have been so many people that have been there at 3 am when I needed to talk or just didn't want to be alone. I've spent the past two years working on myself, and figuring out what I wanted and where I want to end up. I've spent the last two years learning to love myself again without wanting to change myself. I've spent the last two years learning to love food. I've spent the last two years learning that the number on the scale or the number on your jeans does not define who you are. And that was probably one of the hardest things that I had to teach myself after spending so long thinking that it was all that mattered.
It's been two years.
There are still hard days and there are still days that I don't want to get out of bed or do anything. There are still days that I want to put on a big sweater and huge sweatpants and just curl up in bed by myself. There are still those days where I consider skipping a meal. But it's on those days that I see just how far I've come in the past two years. It's learning how to deal with your triggers and learning how to move forward from the bad days.
It hasn't been a perfect two years, and sometimes it's still hard to talk about what i was going through and how I came to accept the fact that I needed help. But sometimes talking about it can help you deal with it in a new way... and you realize that people do care.

BRANDON MARSHALL NOT ALLOWED TO WEAR GREEN CLEATS

As many people know the NFL along with several other sports deck themselves out in Pink throughout the month of October to raise money and awareness for Breast Cancer. Breast Cancer Awareness has sky rocketed over the past few years, and there is no reason at all that it shouldn't continue this. I think that having professional teams , college teams, and even high schools teams wear pink is a huge step to helping raise awareness.

However what I don't agree on at all is the fact that Brandon Marshall was told he couldn't wear green cleats for Mental Health Awareness. Mental Health is something that gets pushed to the side all of the time because symptoms aren't seen and people don't talk about it. If more people to support Mental Health Awareness and build the overall knowledge on the topic than more people would speak up.

I personally lost a lot of respect for the NFL with this decision. Not only because I've personally struggled with mental illness but because I know that I may have gotten help for my self, but there are SEVERAL others out there that are fighting it alone. There are many people out there that think they are alone and that people don't care. The NFL is a huge organization and I think that they should be taking a stand for more than just one or two causes.

Yes there are reasons they are strict with their uniform. Yes they have a uniform for a reason. But don't you think that the NFL should acknowledge the fact that there are millions of people world wide that are suffering from mental illness? Should the organization not realize that their players have a higher chance of mental illness than things such as breast cancer?

And my final thought/fact to leave you with:
Cancer patients have an 80 percent chance of living. 1 in 5 people with an Eating Disorder (a mental illness) will die.

Break the Stigma.