Vulnerabilities

10/5/2015

Hello there people of the internet, I hope you're having a wonderful day.

Ever since I was little, the two places I have felt most vulnerable have been in bed, and in the bathroom. For some reason, these still resonate as situations where I have to be on edge constantly: I still jump at the tiniest rustle or someone else's door opening. Rational me knows that these fears are absurd; I was convinced for the first 14 years of my life that a murderer was going to climb through my second floor window in the night and stab me (although somehow my duvet protected me from this, causing me to curl up under a thick layer of feathery duvetness right through the depths of summer).

Mostly, this particular fear has subsided, mainly due to living on the tenth floor or a high rise block, but occasionally when the insomnia hits, my brain takes these childhood fears and magnifies them into a situation that could seem almost rational.

When you're lying in bed at 4am, paralysed with fear that one of your flat mates is, in fact, a serial killer, you realise that the crazy you thought you had grown out of is still there.
What I mostly am confused about is how my mind creates these ridiculous situations, yet I appear to be completely unaffected by every horror film I have seen to date. Where did this crazy come from? Will it ever go away?

The bathroom is a strange one - I love the thinking time you get during a warm shower, the warm water almost melting the tension away. The issue with the bathroom has always been being faced with my own, slightly lumpy body. It can be scrutinised from all angles, every little scar is a reminder of past mistakes;  all the bruises and spots are reminders of my clumsiness and poor diet. The fear remains that I didn't lock the door properly so someone will walk in on me inspecting my slightly wonky teeth in great detail.

I don't know why that is associated with being bad, I guess it's just not living up to the image of a perfect being.

Projecting an emotionally strong image is one of my talents, and any crack that is shown in that scares me; it's like a chink in my metaphorical armour that protects me from what others think, that stops me speculating on whether my legs look fat in that skirt or if my hair looks stupid or if I look like a ghost due to my general lack of good quality sleep. I don't know why this matters to me so much. Sarcasm is my shield.

I suppose that my vulnerabilities may seem odd to me, but they don't come up in conversation much, so my knowledge of others' is limited.

Am I crazy? Or do I just have an over active imagination?

Peace out x

8/5/2015

Well hello there; how are you today?

I thought that seeing as this is my first blog post, I would share a little about myself.
My name is Isabel, I am 18 years old and I currently reside in the United Kingdom. I've been thinking about starting this blog for a while - a collection of personal thoughts, struggles and joys as well as a few product reviews, but it takes me a good few months to make decisions.

I'm going to be straight with you right now: this blog will not always be the happy musings of a carefree 18 year old. I suffer from anxiety and depression, so this blog is a way in which to share these thoughts and feelings with a wider audience, and I hope to aid others by sharing my experiences, as one of the most important things to remember is that you are not alone.

Seriousness over, I thought I would tell you about my day.

Having stayed up until 2:30am to watch the results from the General Election come in, my morning got off to a slow start, culminating in removing myself from bed 4 hours after getting up in order to drag myself up to university to collect some assignments. It turned out that I didn't fail quite as dramatically as I presumed I would. Following this was my appraisal, in which I was informed that my managers do actually like me (despite my constant paranoia that they, in fact, hate my guts) and I acquired a pay rise.

Then I got back to my room and went straight to bed.

If you have a mental illness of some sort, you may well know that bed feels the safest place to be when you have had a pretty horrendous day/week/month, but equally sometimes even great things (like payrises) take it out of you, and you feel as if you want to just escape from the world a little. I've been here for three hours now. I didn't realise that it had been three hours until I glanced at the clock just now.

I need to stop allowing time to just disappear.

Life is tough sometimes, y'know? Somehow, writing about my surreal, dream-like day has caused me to feel slightly better, as procrastiblogging is semi-productive, right?

Righty-ho, time to go and forage for food in the big bad world.
To all: I hope you have a wonderful day, week, month and year.

Thank you,
Isabel (here's me wearing my 'confused' face)