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There are so many traditions around the holiday season. As soon as December hits, all the Christmas carols start to be broadcast everywhere. The decorations and the lights start going up. Everybody starts looking at the weather forecast, and they start wishing for a white Christmas. Start planning menus, start planning parties. They get family heirlooms out that are connected with the season and display them. Everybody is suddenly expected to be a better person and be kinder regardless of how they have treated everybody over the year because nothing says giving and sharing like Santa Claus. For us, as Romanians, it starts on the 30th of November when we plant wheat in a pot and see how big it grows until the New Year as an indication of how good the next year will be. Then, on the 6th of December, we will get our boots all cleaned up in preparation for Saint Nicholas bringing us presents. This will be a dressed rehearsal for Christmas because, if you are not good, he will leave a stick in your shoes and if you have been good, there will be fruit and candy. We will slaughter a pig, make sausages, and cured meats, and get our appetites ready while we fast. Christmas is next with the bigger presents and the family dinners, school shows, church concerts, carolling from strangers, peace on Earth and all that. Every single year there will be reports of people ending up in the emergency room after stuffing their faces and becoming ill on the day. All culminates with New Year with the standard, fireworks, bubbly and a meal towards midnight, sparklers cause nothing says the night between years like letting children run around with a fire hazard and talks of New Year resolutions. We also had the cheese pie, close to a cheesecake but not really, in which we put a coin to be found by the luckiest of the group and my family also smashed a bottle to break the bad luck from last year. On the 1st of January, we would go around with a custom called “Sorcova”. That is a stick with coloured paper flowers attached to it and you kind of use it like a magic wand and you wish all the best to your relatives, and you get paid for carolling. One would expect all of this to be a season of joy but in my family, it has always been a tense affair. Something about the entire family coming together just brings all of this tension. When we were young, we always got dressed nicely for Christmas and New Year and we did the meals and the visits. We have told poems to show how smart we are. We have shown our report cards so our parents can get their validations from our grandparents. We would then eat the family dinner with mom and dad and while we would be watching movies about families coming together and celebrating in peace and harmony, my family had a tradition of fighting on every holiday, birthday, or special occasion. It would always be something before, during or after the meal. My dad would be set off in a way, he would abandon the meal saying that he doesn’t need food and go to his room. It was always a matter of when it will happen, not if it will happen. So, holiday celebrations had always had a tinge of sorrow, always knowing that they would be ruined one way or another. My tradition is to watch “A Christmas Carol.” I have watched all versions and regardless of how cheesy they might be, I have enjoyed every single one of them. From all the Christmas movies, I choose the one where if somebody admits their mistakes and takes responsibility, they can turn their life around and be a better person. After a string of bad relationships, forever hopeful, Miss Christmas Carol met Mr It’s a Wonderful Life, another Christmas classic about a man on the brink of suicide that is shown that his life has indeed meaning, and he has improved people’s lives by being in them. The first Christmas we spent together was in Bucharest. I bought a Christmas tree, decorated the house, and bought everything traditional for him to try, and we spent the day together. It was peaceful and relaxed, and we didn’t have one single fight. We drank hot chocolate, watched movies, and exchanged gifts and it was the best Christmas that I have ever had. Funny how little I needed to be happy. The next ones were spent in Scotland. We would go and see all his relatives, share gifts with everyone, catch up, and enjoy wine and food. It was so weird to see so many people just getting along, not a single fight in sight, everybody smiling and having a good time. It felt so unnatural, but it became one of my favourite holidays. I properly got involved. I might have made him write all the cards that he didn’t necessarily care to write but I knew that we would get one and it would be nice to have written one as well. I have chased and pushed and prodded and found options and made sure that we got gifts for everybody and tried to bring them as close to what people would like as possible. Every year, he would fight me every single step of the way but on the day, we would go and hand the gift over and the person would be happy and grateful, and his face would light up to see them happy. I would be happy knowing that all of it was worth it for those moments. He would be grateful in the morning, but he would still fight me on it the next year. The first December after we broke up, we were in pandemic times. There were still quite a lot of restrictions around travelling and Romania was not doing very well with the vaccination so, there was always a risk that the borders would be closed, and I would be stuck in Romania, with my family. I stayed in Glasgow, and I had taken almost three weeks off since I had so much holiday time left over. I was so exhausted after this first year that I just lay on the couch watched TV and slept, barely eating and drinking. I was completely checked out as I had processed my emotions for so long that now I was exhausted and giving myself a chance to dissociate. I would just watch the same series that I had already liked and enjoyed in the past. At least that way, I could be sure that I would enjoy it. I had Bruno with me for New Year, and I bought him and myself presents, and we opened them together. He was just as excited about opening mine as he was about getting his. We had dinner and Bruno was the only spark of joy I had. It has been a tough year and while I was an empty shell, I was still there, still alive. The next year, dissociating was no longer a luxury I could allow myself. I took the same three weeks off at the end of the year and I considered what my life was and how much I had achieved in the year, how many of my objectives I had achieved. The next year, I spent with my blinds drawn feeling exposed and fragile. I brought my beanbag chair to the living room; I got the footstool and a blanket, and I just watched Netflix while eating crisps and chocolate. My main hobby was crying, and I was so depressed. I had Bruno for Christmas week this time and he went for New Year with my ex. He has been such a supportive boy. He would try to get me to go out for walks and I would be in the middle of crying my eyes out so, he would lick my tears away and then he would get up on the beanbag chair and just cuddle with me and comfort me. I would pet him and rock him until I would calm down and then we would go to the park and walk around just in time for coming back home and having another breakdown. Since I had the time, I was a bit more active, and I also had time to tend to my hobbies. I quite enjoy puzzles, and I started to buy 5D diamond art kits. I would light some candles, get a nice glass of red wine and work on adding hundreds of rhinestones to these pictures. The activity allowed me to concentrate on some of the areas of my brain and kept me exhausting myself and avoiding being hyper-stimulated, while still allowing me to be able to weep uncontrollably, think about everything that is happening in my life and work through my feelings. The problem became that I was toxically goal-oriented and I kept on pushing myself to complete the image as quickly as possible even though my body was in agony, and I would have spent the entire night working on it. My brain would be fully engaged so, I wouldn’t have time to realize that I was actively hurting myself while still thinking that I was not achieving my goal fast enough. I have also managed to be more social, and I have seen my friends for Christmas and New Year. I was completely anxiety-riddled the entire time, I was shivering because of it but I just got nicely dressed, put makeup on to give myself confidence and went out to see them. The next year, things have taken quite a wild change. I was no longer crying my eyes out, but I was instead enjoying my free time. I have spent my time reading, writing, and watching TV, I have eaten good food and drank wine and this time, I have allowed my body to take over and just act as it needed. That unfortunately meant that I would stay up the entire night, go to bed at 7 and then wake up in the evening but I felt balanced and at ease. I was so relaxed that I could rest, dream, and remember my dreams. I still like doing the 5D art kits but this time around, I enjoyed the activity, I have slowed down and I have allowed myself to stop when I felt that my body was getting tired, and I needed a break. I also saw my friends for Christmas and on New Year when I wasn’t feeling well, I allowed myself to just stay home and not feel the pressure to have an activity. I would have gotten everyone sick since I had the cold. I cleaned the house, took a bath, cooked, put a mask on and cuddled with Bruno while watching TV. It might sound boring but, it was exactly what I needed, and I realised that I am finally enjoying solitude rather than fearing being lonely. That was the biggest win that I could have for the year. I can’t say that will happen next year, but I enjoy these periods where I can leave the usual stream of life, get off the hamster wheel and just allow myself to exist naturally. It allows me to realise where I am, and how far I've come, and have a think as to what I want to do. I enjoy treating myself, buying myself gifts, and I am so generous with myself. I have had to provide a list of options in the past from which my presents would have been picked, when all I wanted was someone to put the time and effort to surprise me, to show me that they know me and that they see me. Every year, I realise how magical my life is becoming each year. The spirits might not be able to do it all in one night, but nowadays, I spend a lot fewer days being hunted by the past, my present is filled with self-compassion, and I no longer spend my time scared of the future.

On a lazy morning when I was feeling down, I kept questioning when it would be my turn to be happy and when I would get everything that I wanted. The more I complained about everything and felt sorry for myself, this idea kept on taking shape: Who said that everybody has to be happy? Who says that everybody has to have a happy ever after? Every single self-help book sells the idea of happiness. Do this and in 21 simple steps, you will be happier. “The Secret” goes even further and says how you need to put your intentions out there and that the universe will realign itself to make every wish come true and if it hasn’t, it just means that you didn’t want it hard enough. People are buying crystals and trying to manifest the life they want and even more, the life they think they are owed. Just one more thing and I will be happy. If I get this one thing then it will be enough. Sometimes you get it, and you are so happy and then you post it on Instagram, Facebook, whatever, but you don’t get the likes you want, so you get a bit sad because you thought you were happy, and you wanted people to be happy for you or to be just a little tiny bit jealous, cause is it not enough if other people don’t watch you, is it? It seems that the concept has stayed the same, but the unit of measurement keeps changing. What was enough yesterday just lost its lustre a little bit today. Derren Brown said in his book, “Happy”, that if you buy a house, it will bring you immense joy but, in six months, your brain will more or less get used to the change and it no longer registers as such. If you come to think about it, happiness makes one content. If one is content, one does not have a strong drive to progress, and it makes you less aware of dangers. Thinking about it from an evolutionary point of view, we needed to be always on guard for survival so, I assume that if we relaxed completely, a wild animal would have eaten us. Does that make any sense? I am making this up as I am going along. Wolves do not chase us anymore but we are haunted by the fear that we might lose it all. Before I used to say that all I wanted was to be happy but now when I stop to think about it, I am not entirely sure what happiness looks like for me. I suppose you can’t reach a goal if you don’t know what the goal is. On a simple level, happiness is the absence of pain, fear, or any other negative emotion for that matter. Our brain is certainly geared up to keep us safe and away from anything that is perceived to be negative but how realistic is that goal? Good and bad experiences come and go. Something always happens and things will not happen exactly how we want them to so, how would we ever just have good experiences? I find that if you try to keep all bad experiences away and take only the safe decisions, the ones that always give you the results you want, you will also keep good experiences away. I know these people that have a plan for what they want. They have a clear idea of everything that they want to achieve in this lifetime and how they are going to get there. They have clear goals, and they are going after them. Always taking steps to promote that end goal. You see it with some celebrities as well. They just had this one thing that they were always good at, and they believed that they had this light in them, so they persevered no matter the setbacks. I always looked at those people with envy. I never had that clear line of what I want to be, I never had a clear life goal and how everything will happen for me. I have done this questionnaire that was meant to help me with my personal brand and one of the things that they were asking was what was unique about me, and what would have not happened the same if I had not been there. I kept thinking about it, and I couldn’t say what was special about me. I think that people would have achieved things and while I love to get involved and contribute, I wouldn’t know what makes me unique. I hate this question as much as I hate the one about interesting things people should know about me. If I look back, one of the wishes I had growing up, was to meet my prince charming, get married, and have a family of my own. I suppose that is the propaganda Disney was pushing since every princess was meeting their amazing man and getting married and then they lived happily ever after. I had this image of living in marital bliss. We would do things together and we would not fight but, we would have discussions instead. We would support each other and grow together so both can achieve our goals. He would never hold me too tight because he would know that he was the first one I wanted to share my achievements and sorrows. Later on, I have added the idea of children. A boy and a girl. I thought about it so much that I considered names, and they took shape in my head. I could hear their laughter, and I could picture them in my head running towards me. They would love me, and I would love them. Armed with the fantasy of my future family, I entered the dating world and met people who were not Prince Charming. I figured that one has to kiss quite a few frogs before one gets her prince and I had read that story too so, I was playing the long game. The years passed though, everybody else got married, and everybody else had children, and I am still searching. While I tried to keep my spirits up, at some point the doubt crept in that maybe, just maybe, marital bliss might not be in the cards for me, nor might motherhood. The years are passing, and the clock is running down, I might be able to influence quite a few things, but I cannot fight the passage of time. This image being so far from my grasp is causing me a lot of pain and the only way I can be happy is to let it go, to accept this idea of destiny and things happening for a reason, to accept that if it meant to be it will happen and no matter how much I push, or try to force it, it might never happen. The next big one was having a job. I somehow felt that because I was small and didn’t have any money, I also had little choice in what I did and how I lived but, if I had money, I could live how I wanted to live. My dad was a very big fan of telling me that while I lived under his roof, I would do as he said, I always had that sense of wanting my own home. As a child, I thought I could be anything that I wanted so, I would watch TV and dream the dreams of possibility. I wanted to be a ballet dancer at first since being a princess seemed a bit out of reach. I would see them glide with such grace and I wanted that to be me. When I mentioned to my mom, I got to hear how expensive everything was in terms of training and hard work so, it seems less and less possible that I would be a ballet dancer. I also wanted to be a PE teacher or a couch and that one fell away on his own. Life proved that I was better at intellectual endeavours than physical things so, what can one do? I also thought of being a lawyer after watching Law and Order and Ally McBeal. To be strong, confident, and come up with just the right answer at the right time and win everybody over. I figured that there would be a lot to remember and I am terrible at memorizing things if I don’t have a direct interest in them plus, the laws change so, it would be a lifetime endeavour to keep up with them and I was also terribly shy so since I couldn’t speak in a group, grandstanding in a courtroom didn’t quite seem like a thing I could do. When I went to university, my dream was to be an interpreter. I had hoped that I would go around the world and translate at conferences or books which was right up the alley of my liking to read. In my last year, a teacher asked me what I wanted to be and when I told her, she told me I was in the wrong course and that they make teachers there, not interpreters. I am so glad that they took my money for four years and never asked the question. I had been offered a job when I was in my third year which I would have been happy to take but, I didn’t have the same teacher in my last year and her offer never got renewed. I tried to find a job on my own when I finished my degree, and everybody was asking for at least 6 months on the job or I didn’t do as well as I expected when it came to the tests they sent me. I kept on going and I found a corporate job. They were impressed with my language skills, so I started to work for the UK&I. Having an ear for accents helped me in the beginning since I sounded English and then helped me when I moved to Scotland because I started to sound reasonably Scottish. This might not have been the dream but, I finally had a way to make money. I know what everybody is going to say. Money doesn’t bring happiness. That is correct. Money itself doesn’t bring happiness, but it surely does bring peace of mind. Health is one of the most important things so think about getting ill and not having enough money to buy medicine or get an operation that can improve the quality of your life. Having that money would bring happiness. Putting food on the table is also important so, while some people talk about going to Michelin-star restaurants to have the most expensive mouth bites for the experience, some people dream of just having the essentials every day without having to struggle. Back to my dreams though. I had wanted to travel and see the world but while I was making money, I wasn’t making enough money to just through a dart at the map and go anywhere it may take me which has always been my dream also, I found that the idea to travel alone terrified me and I wished that I had a buddy that I could travel the world with. I was terrified that I might get there, my wallet was going to be stolen and I would have no way to return home, and I would be stuck, and that fear paralyzed me. I also dreamed of having my own house. It doesn’t have to be huge because I consider the time to clean it, but my own house would give me so much freedom. Not having to ask permission from everyone whenever I have to do or change something. It will always reflect my desire and here comes money again because it seems like it is a far dream to have a house on my own in today’s economy. I might have enough money to buy it but what if anything breaks and my insurance won’t cover the repairs? Problems are so much easier to deal with if you have money to throw at them. I am not saying that money is the answer to everything, of course, it isn’t. When I am at my lowest, I don’t want any food, I don’t want any water, I don’t want to get off the floor let alone travel the world. In those moments, I only want one thing and that is peace. I wish I had a way to quiet my thoughts, I wish for a way to find rest and stop my thoughts from overwhelming me. I wish I had a way to live without fear every single moment of my life. When something happens, I feel weaves of panic and sorrow reverberating all over my body and I am crumbling on the inside. I feel the need to lie on the floor because emotionally, there is no way I can get any lower. I feel so much pain and shame in my chest that I feel it might get crushed sometimes. My dreams are of me waking up, resting, stretching, and enjoying the morning sunshine on my face. My body is free of tension and my mind is not racing, I am just in the moment, and I am just observing my life as it unfolds. I would make a cup of tea and maybe some breakfast while I watch the birds in the trees, the cats running around from yard to yard, and people just going about their busy lives. I have things to do but there is plenty of time to do everything that’s scheduled. My mind is so peaceful, no torture from the past I can’t change, no fear from the future I can’t control, just contentment that I can face everything that the present moment brings to me. In this dream, I wouldn’t feel like I am failing all the time, I wouldn’t feel like a fraud, I wouldn’t feel like everything is happening to me because I am a bad person. I wouldn’t worry that everybody leaves me or just never quite gets who I am because I am happy within myself. In this dream, I can wake up, brush my teeth, feed myself three meals a day, listen to my body, and take care of myself without a problem. While I have people around me, I don’t feel like they are more important in my life than I am, that they know better what I need than I do. In this dream, I love myself so much that I build the life that I want no matter the risks. I understand that nobody feels like this all the time, but I wish I could have that at least sometimes because I find myself walking for hours and I feel like there is nowhere to rest because I am not safe anywhere and no matter where I try to sit, I will not be safe. I walk because I don’t know what else to do but I still can’t calm the struggle that is inside me. I wish I could just find the perfect solution, the perfect switch, and then, boom, I am just everything that I ever wanted to be. I wish I understood how other people experience life because it feels lonely to feel like I am struggling while other people just know what to do. I wish that I could feel and experience the world as someone else, like a mind meld from Star Trek, so I can understand what they felt and what their emotional world was like and understand if their struggles resemble mine and then I wouldn’t feel so alien. I would be able to find a middle ground where I would accept my feelings for what they are and deal with them better. I don’t know if I will ever achieve happiness the way I want it and if it comes if I can hold onto it for long. One thing I understand is that what happiness looks like is different for each individual and that it changes throughout our lives based on our priorities at the time. At the moment, I am happy that I have someone to whom I can tell my worries, with whom I can be fully honest about my fears, and they tell me that I will be fine, and because they believe it, I believe it too and I can keep going on.

I was born at night. At 1.20 am, I decided that it was my time to shine, and I came out umbilical cord wrapped around my neck like a scarf because I wanted to make a stylish entrance and there was not a lot to work with. Well, entrance or exit, depending on the point of view. I used to get told all the time that my time of birth must be the reason why I am a night owl. My sister is a morning lark, just like my parents. They like going to bed early and waking up early, for no reason, even on the weekend. I used to wake up later and by the time, I was up, she had had time to do her morning routine, eat, and think of a million things to say. By the time, I woke up, there would be just a period of talking at me, on sight. This feels so intrusive, first thing in the morning. Nothing angers me more than being talked to before my brain has had a chance to properly get going. The nights were always different. I have been afraid of the dark since I watched Chucky by myself, as an impressionable youth. I can rationalize that the darkness itself is not dangerous, but I feel that it has something hidden in it and that something is looming, waiting for the perfect time to get me. By the power of imagination, a hoodie on a hanger becomes a murderer in wait. A good example, I feel, of my mind filling in the gaps when it doesn’t have enough information. While I am afraid of it though, I also think it has a lot of magic in it. I love the stars and how they twinkle. I love the crisp air on my skin. I love the calm of the night and how there is no expectation to achieve anything or be anywhere in particular. During the day, the world rushes about in its race to achieve things, with no time to lose but, nights have a completely different rhythm. My house was full of rules, of expectations, full of looks of disapproval, full of other people’s feelings and ideas of what I should be, hints of how I am letting people down, and a state of conflict, so I felt that I had to have my guard up the entire time. At night though, things were different. All the energies would go to sleep and the air would be cleared. You could hear the house settle and breathe a sigh of relief and I felt free. When I was young, I slept in the same bed as my sister so, once we were sent to bed, I was meant to fall asleep right away so she could get some rest. There were nights when she would tell me bedtime stories but, as we grew, I was just expected to do without. Sometimes, I would get restless and tossed and turned and I would get shouted at because I was l keeping my sister up too. There were times when I would tip-toe and step on the right boards so I was not heard and sit hidden in the hallway and watch TV as my mom would be awake. I would then have to go and lie down and try to fall asleep. For the longest time, I would just listen to the clock. The monotony of the tic-tac lulled me to sleep. Once my sister married and I had the room to myself, I could watch TV on my own, with the volume low. When my parents would come to check on me, my door handle would stick so, I would have a few seconds to turn and pretend I was sleeping. As I was maturing, I had nights when I had to stay up and work on my studies so, my parents would have nothing to object to as I had too much work to do and too few hours in the day. The worst was when I had back pain in my last year of university, and I couldn’t sleep because of the pain that would go from my lower back down my right hip towards my knee. No matter how I would try to lie, I would still be in pain so, I have used the time to work on my dissertation for my BA. I would read and research and then exhausted, I would be able to fall asleep at 6 or 7 in the morning. Once I did physio and sorted the back pain, I was able to go back to sleeping normally. Finishing my paper has also helped alleviate my stress and allow me to fall asleep more easily. When I moved on my own, it became somewhat easier to regulate as I was not affecting anyone else. I would have times of high stress when I couldn’t sleep, and it got worse when my dad got cancer, and I didn’t know if things would work out. I would be anxious and depressed, and I would watch TV and then fall asleep at 4 or 5 in the morning, get up and go to work and try to function. Sleep enriches the ability to learn, memorize, and make logical decisions and choices so the lack of it leads to inattention, disorientation, memory problems, fatigue, drowsiness, tiredness, and moodiness. Essentially, I am slowing down mentally. It is harder to concentrate on what people are saying and remembering instructions. It takes longer to formulate answers, and my mind forgets words to use and forgets what I was doing mid-task. At the height of it, I was staying awake all night so I could sleep the next night. As I was working in Romania, every year, we would have a medical check and they would do blood tests, check our ears, and our eyes and then we would talk to a GP about our overall state of mind and health. When he heard about my lack of sleep, he prescribed me sleeping pills, but he warned me that they are highly addictive and that I should only take them whenever I was struggling. He has given me the lowest dosage and said I should half that again. Believe me, sometimes it felt like it did nothing and other times, they did take me out and if I woke up, my pupils would be the size of dinner plates. This too passed though. When I moved over to the UK and I moved in with my boyfriend, we got into the habit of staying up late, so my circadian rhythm changed. The way it works is that melatonin begins to rise in the body soon after dusk and it signals to the body that it is dark. It slowly decreases during the night. Sunlight entering the brain through the eyes shuts down the release of melatonin. Cortisol spikes up temporarily when waking up and helps one feel refreshed. Then the production reduces as melatonin production ramps up. The cycle works on routines so if you keep staying up, the body will adjust. While my sleeping time was moving to the early hours of the morning, having to get to work meant that I had a very strict waking time. Some days I would be so tired that I would fall asleep before my head even hit the pillow. Other times, I would stay there and worry about all the things that I would have to do the next day, thinking about things I had to solve or even better, after trying not to think about anything during the day and keep focused on my work, my mind would finally see a break in the schedule and would start to analyse everything that happened that day and start making to-do lists. It usually starts with trying to magic myself to sleep, trying to stop the thoughts, looking at the watch, calculating how much time I would be able to sleep if I slept right then, and thinking about how bad I would feel the next day for not having slept well or at all. Regardless, I got used to having a sleep debt. That means that for all the tiredness accumulated during the week, I would try to compensate by sleeping loads at the weekend. That is when we wouldn’t play video games all night while stuffing our faces until the sun would come out and the birds would begin to sing. Sometimes he would snore, and I could just fall asleep before him most of the time and be fine but when I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t fall asleep due to the noise. I would be so tired sometimes that I would lie there planning his demise or wishing for the Lord to take me right then so I could maybe get some rest in the great beyond. One night I was considering if putting some Wicks under his nose in the middle of the night would be rude. I then thought that maybe I could just hold the jar to his face and that would be enough for his sinuses to cooperate and just give me five minutes. I decided that it was rude, and I just nudged him gently and asked him to turn on his side to stop him from snoring. That didn’t last long so, after quite a few failed attempts, I just went to the other room. The next morning, he came over to ask me if I was upset since I went to sleep in the other room but, I wasn’t looking for a fight, I was just looking for some rest and negotiated that as one of my tactics for being able to sleep when his snoring is too bad. The period during the pandemic shot my anxiety through the roof. I would have problems falling asleep, I would have problems staying asleep, I would have nights when I realized that while I was sleeping, my sleep was light and I was making lists in my mind, I had nights when I realized that I would be fully aware of every single time I would turn during my sleep. On my left side, on my back, on my right side, back to start on my left side. I tried to walk my anxiety off and use that time to think about my issues. I would use these walks as a way to wear myself out. I have tried warm showers, aromatherapy with essential oils, and lavender lotion. I have drank calming tea before bed. I have tried to not watch TV before sleep and trying to just sit there and think nice, calming, positive thoughts. I tried reading before bed. I once again ended up at the GP since my anxiety and depression had conspired and created some nice suicidal thoughts but this time the GP recommended I take antihistamines. Since sleeping pills were so problematic and I was also meant to take antidepressants, using the drowsy formula antihistamine would be using a side effect to treat a condition. I take the pill, the pill makes me sleepy and then I can get to sleep. I have had times when while I could fall asleep, I woke up in the middle of the night due to my anxiety, convinced that I needed to take action and do something only to collapse by the door when my brain convinced my legs that we should be asleep or I just get to my door and I realise that it is the middle of the night and the only place I should be going is back to bed.  I still have times when my body feels broken and exhausted by all the walks that I have been doing but my mind is still wide awake and has no intention of winding down anytime soon. My relationship with the Sandman has remained as difficult as ever. While I love sleep, that does not mean that it is going to happen for me. It is just like love, if you try too hard to make it happen, sometimes you just push it even further. Nowadays, I try to journal when I am anxious and caught in a circle of ruminating and overthinking. I put all my thoughts on paper, and I try to give them a way of expression. I try to sit with my emotions and figure out what problem my mind is trying to solve and what triggered it, in the hope that once I acknowledge what my subconscious wants me to deal with I will add it to my to-do list scheduled after I get some sleep. Sometimes nothing works so I just accept that is the case and I go do something else with my time. I reorganize a drawer, I will read a book, whatever I can do that does not involve waking up the neighbours. Sometimes, I just feel like I can fall asleep easier on the couch, and I need the TV running to sleep so I do that. Sometimes, I need total darkness and complete silence, so I lay in my bed and put the covers over my head. Sometimes, I feel like sleeping in my spare bedroom. I just listen to whatever my body wants to do and hope that it gets results. I used to think that my lack of sleep was a punishment but now I take it as a gauge. If my sleep is poor, then I need to work on my self-care, and self-compassion and work on getting myself to a calm state again. I accept that from time to time, I will not be able to sleep, and that I will have to rely on coffee and the help of 4 alarms to make my commitments. I accept that if I don’t sleep well, I will not have the energy to socialise so before accepting invitations, I make sure I have the energy to enjoy them and I opt out if I don’t. I will try to go to bed early tonight and if I am too tired tomorrow, I might take a nap to help me make it to my bedtime. Have a good sleep! 😊

It is endlessly funny how when we are in a relationship, we expect the other person to know us fully. We expect them to anticipate our thoughts, our reactions, our wishes, our needs. We expect them to know when we would have wanted them to come home and when we were genuinely happy for them to go out so we can have time to ourselves. We expect them to know what to get for our birthday or Christmas since we had it in our cart or wish list for ages, even though our wishes and aspirations changed five hundred times that year. He should know me because we live together and we spend time together when in fact, we spend more time at work with wee Janet who thinks that if she leaves, a multibillion corporation will collapse. Ludicrous idea considering that parents made us, raised us, taught us to do most things and still don’t have a clue who we are but Barry whom we met in a bar, half cut and ready to sell his granny to touch a boob, is meant to be this great mind reader that just does everything right. If we go a level deeper, why should Barry be “the one that knows me best”? How many times have people asked why we do certain things, and we just said that we had always been that way, or this is something that we just enjoyed? There is no “JUST” about it, by the way. There is a deliberate reason for everything that appeals in the way that it does. It turns out that my reaction to things and the way I experience the world is not because I am a Scorpio with the Sun in Scorpio and the Moon in Pisces and water signs are hella emotional, it is because I never felt safe, I have all of these warning bells to protect me, it is because I measure 10 times before I cut once and while others deserve love, empathy and compassion if they make a mistake, none for me, sister. The idea of somebody else knowing you so intimately becomes even more ludicrous still when we walk in this fog of not knowing what is wrong with us and why things don’t work out when everybody else could have a pretty accurate guess at what the problem is by what they saw and experience around you. A quick Google search will tell you that self-awareness is your ability to perceive and understand the things that make you who you are as an individual, including your personality, actions, values, beliefs, emotions, and thoughts. If you watch any movie, you will learn this idea that you just need to have 2 cries, eat a bit of junk food, get drunk and face plant because you are so quirky, take a bubble bath or two, medicate under a tree, light two scented candles, maybe paint something or have a makeover and ta-da you have turned your life around. Good job, you! Now, that this is done, here is your perfect job, here is the man of your dreams and your perfect friends. Essentially, everything you have ever wanted and all you had to do was be embarrassed a few times. If art imitates life and this is the process of achieving self-awareness, it is so amazing that more people are not out there surrounded by everything they ever wanted. My journey to a better sense of self-awareness began with admitting there was a problem. I have done things in the same manner for so long and nothing was changing, I wasn’t getting any closer to what I wanted in this life. I was so good at not feeling anything and pretending nothing bothered me that I didn’t even know I was doing it. I would just feel like I am gracefully getting over life’s hardships, and I am being resilient in the face of adversity. Smile even though your heart is breaking. Be gracious and forgiving with everybody who wronged you because nobody likes it when you are angry about it, you sound bitter. Talk about it but not too much, darling, you are bumming everybody out. I was told that I had to feel my feelings but, I didn’t have a clue how to do that. The brain is all about getting pleasure and avoiding pain. The whole thing about numbing is that the mind can’t cope with the emotion so, to protect itself, it buries it. Once the brain has done that, it is not very keen to try and dig up old emotions and feel them. It is like when you make a comment to somebody and all of a sudden, they start to either attack you or put together a vague answer and then change the subject. The comment touched a vulnerable area, and they are trying to protect themselves from going there thus they would lead you down the path and change topics so many times, so you forget what was being discussed. Once you stumble upon something like this, internally, the brain sounds the alarm that opening this door will be painful and sounds all of the alarms to keep one away from pain and discomfort. The path to awareness for me is paved with the knowledge that pain and discomfort will come, that they indicate where the problems are and the only way to be freed from them and do better for myself in future is to go through it rather than try to run away from it or go around it. Once something arises, the first phase of it is shock and denial. How can this have been there, and I didn’t see it? Surely, this isn’t really happening, I am just misunderstanding it because if the situation is not real then these feelings are not real, and I can just be fine. Everything tells me that I took a peek behind the door and now it is time to let it go. We tried. Stop. Walk away from it. It was real, though. How can it not be when I have details of it, clear memories that frame it? Anger rises, mostly towards me for ignoring red flags, also anger for the event itself and any person that might have been involved. Anger steals clarity but it also propels me forward. Anger wants to know why me. Why always me? Anger gives answers and they are not always the kindest so, there is a sifting of what is self-hate and what is fact. Anger hides the fear that things will never be the same. Anger hides the fear that I might not be able to find a solution. Anger hides the fear that I might not be able to cope with what is happening. Anger hides the dear that if I was wrong about his, I might be wrong about so many other things that I have built my beliefs on. Still, I stay in that space and my brain becomes obsessed with it. Always in the back of the mind, always a sense of discomfort, always trying to make a story that ties things together. Surely, I am missing something, and I am misconstruing. What happened? What did I do to make this happen? How did I react? What could I have done differently? What did I feel at the time? This is the bargaining. Maybe if I do this one thing, this could be resolved. Maybe if I had done these three magical steps and said this sequence of words, this would stop and still go in my favour. Again and again, thinking about how this was not what I thought it was and if the next day I wake up, I will discover that this was just a big misunderstanding. Hoping for a miracle. Hoping, wishing, praying but nothing changes. The next stage for me is acceptance. Admitting that this is happening, admitting that I had a hand in the way things progressed and turned out, admitting that I will have to let go of familiar things despite wanting to hang on to them, admitting that I am hurt, admitting that I am scared, admitting that I am overwhelmed, admitting that this can’t be ignored any longer. Once this happens though, the last stage kicks in and that is depression. After all of the pain and anger has kept me tense and awake, the body now needs to release it all and my mind needs to rest. I cry to let it all out. Sometimes for minutes, sometimes for hours, sometimes again and again for days and weeks. I might stop eating, drinking, sleeping. I forget that I am a human being and not just the vessel for this pain. Through depression, I keep working with acceptance to adjust the reality to what it is rather than a delusional version of it and I allow myself to grieve for what was and what could have been. It seems endless but all of a sudden, it starts to ease. It stops being all-encompassing and the body starts to remember its needs. I get hungry again, I get thirsty again. I start to feel more comfortable being me overall. From this process, a revelation is born. It is an understanding of what happened, what got me there and what I should do in the future to not end up in the same place. It has been a tough process, it feels like a victory, and it feels like this has been resolved, I figure that this door has been closed. It has not been meditating under a tree, it was ugly crying with snot while curled up on the couch, or walking aimlessly and feeling there is no place to rest because it is the reality in your mind that no longer feels like home. I go on for a while, and then the same thing turns up again in a different form. I look at it in shock again and I think to myself that this can’t be because I already resolved it but, it is happening, and the process starts again. All the steps and then I uncover more and more, get more pieces of the puzzle and I figure out that I never had the full picture. I realize that this comes in layers and as I level up in terms of acceptance and more importantly the curiosity that I approach the entire process with. I have accepted that I do not know much and that I should strive to understand who I am and how I got here. I made it my goal to know myself fully. Once you look and want to see, it becomes easier for my therapist to gently push me in the right direction. Just a crumb, just a hint can push me on the right path. I become a sleuth on my own figuring out who has done it and every time the answer is me. That can be so incredibly hurtful that one wants to stop looking. It was so much easier to lay the blame on everybody else and have it stay outside of me. It feels disheartening but also it gives hope. If you got yourself into this, you could get yourself out of this. You have no power in this world greater than the power to control your reactions, your perspective, your timing. This inkling of awareness starts to make you mindful of your potential. Change has started to grow within you. Another thing that people might not realise is that challenges might not come in a sequence, there might be two or three issues you are trying to release at the same time, each with their own intensity. It feels that once the lid has been taken off, it cannot be put back on the box. Again, and again attacked by emotions and things that have laid dormant for tens of years and now they all feel it is their time to come to light. You go for so long that you start to wonder why everybody has it together and why you keep getting lessons. It feels like you are getting your head just above the water and as soon as you take a breath, something else pulls you back under. All of this is on top of going to work, doing your job, paying your bills, keeping good relationships with people, keeping active, doing your housework, and trying not to let things slip behind. It feels like hell on earth but what is happening is that you are feeling all of your feelings. No longer numbing, no longer disassociating, no longer denying. You are slowly seeing your patterns and you are unlearning everything that does not serve, and you are slowly shedding the person that you used to be. I start to know who I am; I start to understand what I want; I start to understand how I react, and I start to see the change. My internal monologue changes from “This is happening, and I can’t handle it” to “This is happening, you are now triggered, look at the situation and understand what the trigger is and what wound has been activated. Listen to your body and see where the sensation resides.” Small steps, most hopefully, in the right direction. Knowing who you are also comes with the awareness of the effect you have on others. For example, if I feel lonely and a man comes along and talks to me and gives me attention, validates me and I reply, I have to think am I talking to this person because I am bored or am I truly interested? I am a strong believer that one should treat people the way that they want to be treated. It is better to let someone know that I have no interest in them, with the risk of hurting their feelings in the short run, rather than using them to meet my needs and hurting them worse in the long run. I know we all had that conversation about how we don’t like a person, and we are just having a bit of fun but, it is not taken as lightly when it happens to us. We tell ourselves that they knew what they were doing, and they did it anyway, but we knew what we were doing, and we did it anyway. With awareness of self and the effect on others, also comes empathy. The peace in your mind on some situations and things being released completely makes one not react to situations at an impulse but decide what path to take in each case. I can think if their words or actions are about me, I can consider their purpose, I can allow for space to develop and I can ask questions to clarify rather than react, stop things in their track and then try to fill in the blanks myself. I can make better decisions if they are worth keeping in my life or if they should be cut. Peace over popularity all day every day. I have been told in a conversation that I seem so self-aware that the person didn’t think they could tell me anything new about myself. It sounded nice, and I wish it were true, but I know that I still have blind spots, I still have things I am ignoring and that there are high chances I still have issues that I have not even touched and that are going to come up during the course of my life. I figure that since I spent so much of my life people-pleasing and trying to make other people happy, it is a worthwhile endeavour to make myself happy and put in the effort to get to know myself. It’s not always easy, it’s not always fun but what an adventure to share with the only person that I will have for life. Myself 😊

Competition - the act or process of trying to get or win something (such as a prize or a higher level of success) that someone else is also trying to get or win (Britannica Dictionary) Ever since the first organism crawled out of the primordial ooze, the principle that has driven evolution has been the survival of the fittest. The predator that is the smartest and the strongest will eat, while the weak one will perish. Even in a pack, the strongest eat first, while the weak are allowed to feed on the leftovers. For the prey as well, the strong specimen will survive as they are the most resourceful; they will be able to get out of harm's way without an issue. That also extends to romance, if we can call it that. The best specimen will have no problems finding a mate and creating offsprings. There is a documentary I saw about a peacock’s mating ritual. He was trying to show his beautiful plumage and impress her, but while he was doing his dance, he kicked a rock, and she had the attention span of a fruit fly, so all his hard work went to waste because she just walked away. Oh, well. Can’t get them all. Then there is us. Everything is faster, bigger, and stronger than us and yet, we have managed to take over the entire planet and thrive and all of that with the power of our mind. Ingenuity was one of our strongest weapons. It allowed us to adapt and overcome, to create weapons to allow us to overcome our shortcomings. The human mind continues to find new ways of improving the way we live, and we can dream our dreams and then find ways to make them real. What is considered the best in people is also very nuanced, though. Is it looks, is it wealth, is it size, charisma, or knowledge? The possibilities are endless. It starts young. When children first come into the world, they have infinite potential and no self-awareness, so if they are asked who is the strongest and who is the fastest, they will all raise their hands. As they develop, if they are asked, they will provide a name. They now have measurable standards, and they know exactly where they are in the hierarchy. Then here come the grades. They are an indication of one adult's opinion of how well you did on a certain day. All of them together decide a person’s academic future, and all those grades decide what school you can go to. Then one finishes university and here we are in the workforce, competing for jobs, promotions, bonuses, training, and projects, and since everything happens behind the screen of confidentiality, one does not know how hard they have to work because they do not indicate where the competition is. You are swimming in your lane but instead of goggles, you have blinkers, and you know what you got as a result of your work but if it is not a clear promotion or a new job, you just don’t know. Treat them mean, keep them keen seems to apply here. Now, let’s turn the TV on together and what do we see? A cooking competition, a dancing competition, a singing competition, a quiz show, and then the big world of sports. When we do not compete ourselves, we relax with other people competing and we sit and comment on how they could have done better. I love watching the documentaries showing athletes’ careers. They have always focused on themselves, worked hard, adjusted, and then went to competitions and saw where they were in terms of comparing with other people. They watch films and they see how others achieve their results, and they learn from other people’s performance just as much as they learn from their results. I love seeing them interacting with other athletes and while they will give it their all, they are still friends outside the court, field, whatever. I give you this story in contrast. In one of my jobs, I have put together a project for improving team collaboration. As part of that project, I had to come up with a recognition method that didn’t need any funding so, I came up with a star that is given to the person that does the most requests, and they can choose where the team goes on the night out as a reward. No money since we were paying for our drinks. I then left the team not thinking much of it. The project has been put into practice and the starts have started to be awarded. Months later, I found out that people were fighting, and hard words were thrown because the same person kept on getting the star. Oh, how I love the human psyche and behaviour! Athletes fighting for world recognition and million-dollar contracts can be friends, but a cardboard star can break an entire team of corporate people. Have you ever had someone compare themselves to you right in your face? Making the calculations of what he has going for them, finding themselves better, and heaving a sigh of relief? I have. I looked at the person in front of me and asked myself if they realized they said it aloud cause surely that was an inner monologue thing. I then asked myself how many times they had done that before. How many times have I been punished when they found themselves lacking I could remember looks of disgust, statements full of disdain, and nostrils flaring with a downcast look while I spoke about my successes. Nothing hurts more than trying to share your triumphs with someone you care about and seeing how your success hurts them. I am not one to gloat because I never really expect success as a given so when it happens I think it is more gratitude and surprise if anything. Some people are obsessed with competition. They need it to keep them motivated and they somehow feel that if they don’t come up on top, they are nothing so, they will stop at nothing to ensure they are the winner. Have you ever competed with someone and not even realized it until you have seen them celebrate how they were better than you at something you care nothing about? You are not competing with them but in their mind, they are competing with you. You see that they compare clothes, makeup, tidiness, work achievements, and progression in life. I have had someone tell me how great I looked and how they wished they had my body, then go on a diet and try to exercise more than I do. I was then comparing my body to how I was before, and I mentioned how I wanted to get back to that shape and they said that I shouldn’t want anybody’s body. Well, hold on. I challenged and reminded them of their statement only to be told that they were just saying that to encourage me. Oh, is that right so, what you are telling me is that you are a liar, and I can’t trust anything you say because I have never asked for compliments.  I have had Bruno being compared which is insane because Bruno is magical, and nobody can ever match him. He is perfect from the tip of his nose to the tip of his tail, and I don’t care if other dogs are astronauts and can fly to the moon, I will never think that any dog is better. I was returning from a hike, and we stopped at a fast-food restaurant. The guy in the window clocked Bruno and the man got excited to the point that he started calling every person in the shop to come and see him. The person I was in the car with just snapped back that they also had a dog in the front, but the guy didn’t care, he was enamoured with Bruno. I smiled cause I go daft for his cute face all the time and when the guy said that we come back any time and bring the dog too, they got a snappy reply. Different people love different types of dogs, it’s not that deep. There were plenty of people that were super impressed with their dog and how cute she was so, I couldn’t understand the drama. I had somebody that I was on the dating apps at the same time with and we would exchange opinions and talk about matches and stuff. At some point, she was asking how guys talked to me, and they didn’t quite talk to her. I didn’t have the answer to that. I was just myself and men seemed to respond to that for whatever reason. She understood that we were not comparing the same people so, like the little data scientist that she was, she decided to start hitting on the same men I was talking to. Even more so, using our friendship to get information about them to try and start conversations with them and make it seem like they have things in common based on what I told her. She did that on four different occasions. Whenever those men would not respond to her like she was expecting, all of a sudden they were horrible people that didn’t deserve me, and it would have been best for me to break contact with them and seek people that were better for me. I couldn’t wrap my head around this. We are meant to be friends, you know what I am going through, and you decide that you are going to go on an ego trip. Needless to say, we are not friends anymore. I would watch those movies where the girl is so mad that everybody else has things that she wants, and she feels that they are living her life. I could never understand that mindset. I can see that other people have things that I want, and I do get sad for myself that I am unable to get them, but I can also be genuinely happy for the people that have made it. We are different people, I can’t take their shine, and they can’t take mine away. It is not like there is a finite quantity of opportunity and happiness in the world and if this person gets some, she takes some from me. We can all succeed, and we can all achieve. I have had times where I was happy to compete with my ex and if I beat him in like cars, a board game, or a videogame, I would be so happy because I thought that he was good at them and if I beat him, it meant that I was doing well for myself. I suppose that my personality is more focused on connection rather than individual achievement. Of course, I want things for myself, and I have goals for myself but, I don’t have that cutthroat, step-over-bodies-to-success mentality. I am more of a we can shine together kind of person. I adore people who are highly achieving, and they mentor people and give their time to help them achieve their goals. There are some examples that I met over time that are the embodiment of Women supporting Women. Whenever you feel down, they don’t look down on you, but they offer encouragement, they make space for you, and they offer support to help you get to that new stage. I can only hope to make them proud of all the help that they have offered me. The only real competition that I subscribe to is the one with myself. How was I doing yesterday and how do I compare today? Have I grown? Am I learning? My highest goal is to be the most genuine version of myself so, how can I compete with anybody at being me? We are all born with different attributes and while we can learn skills throughout our lives, we can make them shine differently. I am going to help as many people as I can at every opportunity that I get. I will ask people to share their secrets with me and I want to make the world my teacher. Everybody has a story to tell and there is something to learn from every person. Some tell you about their mistakes, and some tell you about their successes. Some tell you about their struggles and how they overcame them. Everything can make me think and give me a clue about myself, an idea of how I can become better, or expose a flaw that I need to work on. In the words of Dr Seuss: “Today  you  are  You , that is truer than true.  There  is  no one  alive who is Youer than  You .”

I was always interested in the way my mind worked, and I was always introspective, mostly because I didn’t have a choice and nobody was interested but, all in all, it is a particularly good skill to have. The same pursuit got me interested in doing all sorts of tests and at some point, I found this website that allowed me to do endless psychological tests on multiple topics. One essentially said that I had sorted all of my issues up to the age of sixteen… not sure about that one. Another one said that I chose partners that I could help and that I saw them as a project on which I could work. Working on them and helping them with their issues gives me purpose. I have always wanted to help everybody I could in every way that I could. I never really had that idea of competition where you have to measure yourself up to everybody. My happiness has always come from being useful. I loved training people, I loved to see their confidence grow, and I loved to see them achieve and get recognized for their talents. They get themselves there, of course, but I always feel proud that I could be part of their journey and that they were able to become all that they can be. When I did my therapy, I would talk about how I tried to help this person and how I felt concerned about this other and I would get the comment:” Of course, you are. You are a saviour.” This was not sinking in quite right so it had to be repeated a few times before I could take a hint. First of all, I thought it was a compliment. I genuinely thought that the spandex suit with heels would look amazing on me, and the cape would be useful when I was cold and also on my bloated days. After having heard it a few times, I was ready to admit that it might be a hint, I took to the internet to see what it was all about. Being a saviour or white knighting involves trying to save people from distress and I might be drawn to people that have had a tough life. I then found an article that said that the only person that the saviour needs to help is themselves and that brought it home. I could see how every time someone would talk to me about a problem, I would automatically start to think of ways to troubleshoot., ways to improve and things I could do to support them in that. It is fine to want to help but it is not a good thing when you try to run away from your problems because you busy yourself with solving everyone else’s. When you offer to help but grudge them for needing help in the first place. When you use help as a way of getting people to like you by making yourself useful and getting them reliant on you. I have taken a personality test on 16personalities.com and it turns out that I am an INFJ, the Advocate, and one of the statements on the website was “Nothing lights up Advocates like changing someone’s life for the better.” It’s part of my personality so, how can I change that or why would I even want to change it? The goal would be to have it not be toxic. I gathered all the information, and I sat with that idea. The conclusion was that I need to focus on my issues, that it is not my responsibility to help everybody, and it is fine to say to people that I am not able to help them at a particular time. The fact that I started to learn how to build stronger boundaries helped in that because some individuals were using that to manipulate me. As I was oh so ready to be the knight in shining armour, there have been situations where people were more than ready to turn themselves into damsels in distress to get me to do things for them, things that they didn’t want to do or things that they felt entitled to have other people sort for them. When I was processing all this, I saw the title of Amy Tan’s book “Saving Fish from Drowning” and while I haven’t had time to read it yet, the title stuck in my head as the perfect way to describe this situation that I keep finding myself in. Putting time, effort, and resources towards saving people who have not asked to be saved or people who would pull me close when they needed my help and would drop me as soon as they were in a better position. My therapist went even further and suggested I read up on what the drama triangle was. This is a concept that was introduced by Stephen Karpman, and it looks at roles taken during stressful, emotional or conflict situations. The triangle has the “Victim” as the main role. That is the person who feels powerless over what is happening, and they are either complaining and going into a “poor me” state of being or completely falling to pieces. This role and perspective are activated by the “Persecutor.” This second role can be either a person, an event or a condition that is perceived to be the source of all the problems for the Victim. The third role is that of the Rescuer and it steps in to save the Victim. Now, the fun part is that the roles are not fixed, and a rescuer can become a persecutor. How could that be? Well, imagine you are with a couple, and you see that the man is not treating the lady right so, you decide to step in and advocate for her. That seems to make her feel a bit more empowered, you feel good about herself, everything seems to be going well but, he is not getting what he wants so, he starts pouting. She sees that he is upset and feels responsible for his well-being. From being the persecutor in the situation, he is now the victim, she used to be the victim, but she is now his saviour, and you used to be the saviour, but you are now the persecutor. What an opportunity lost to drink water and mind my business. I started reading “The Power of Ted” by David Emerald. This book gives an easy explanation of the concept itself and also the strategy to get out of this mindset. It described the victim’s perspective as an automatic reaction to just escape the current situation one is in. It sees it as a way to keep one feeling powerless and helpless, avoiding responsibility, and giving away control. I sat in this knowledge, and I looked at my life and what I saw broke my heart. I had always lived this way. In the beginning, as a child, I had no real power and no agency, no authority to make decisions for myself. My dad and my mom have moved between the persecutor role, dominating through blame, criticism and imposing their authority, and the rescuer, where they would step in to fix an issue. They have gone in even further and made sure that we were ashamed for needing their help and created the idea we couldn’t do anything right unless they helped us. It is something that they still try to do today. They still have a lot of ideas of what I should do, and they seem to ignore the fact that I am perfectly capable of solving my problems and I have done so, for quite some time now. I was pushed into the rescuer role and told that it was our duty as a child to pay back what we were given. That showing love meant putting the other person first and giving up my desires and priorities. My dad demanded it, my mom demonstrated it as she does this all the time. Moving forward on the timeline, I looked at all my romantic relationships and I saw them through the filter of the triangle and that put things in a different light. How I would ignore the red flags, and I would put myself as a saviour and then when they felt better and they had taken what they needed, they would leave, and I would be left behind. I always thought they were horrible people, and this happened to me every single time because that was all that I deserved. Allowed me to do things for them, and surrender leadership despite me saying that I would become a dictator if they didn’t do their part and keep things equal and then I got accused I held them back and I mothered them. When I started to take responsibility for my actions, I could see that they were treating me the way that I was allowing them to treat me. More so, it does take two to tango and I was part of that relationship, and I made my decisions. Did I not start this by saying that I ignored red flags? I ignored things, I lashed out, I was petty instead of discussing things, I manipulated, and I stayed quiet when I should have talked. I didn’t ask for what I needed and then I pretended they should have guessed all of my desires. It is an absolute stab in the heart when you find out that the reason for your happiness is you. The truth is though that it also brings a lot of hope. You can’t change people that don’t see a problem with the way they are but, you can change yourself. You can’t control everything, but you can control yourself, how you react to things, how you adjust your standards to achieve the result you want, what you accept and what you opt out of. The Empowerment Dynamic that David Emerald sees the opposite of the Victim's perspective as the Creator's perspective. You don’t react to just stop a bad situation, but you choose the life that you want, and you go towards it with intention. Accept that you may have a timeline in your mind but even if you can only take baby steps, progress is progress. You have to be flexible and accept that sometimes you will have setbacks. That it is fine for the plan to change, and it is ok for the goals to change if it doesn’t align anymore. It is all about consciously making decisions and taking responsibility for all of them. The way that I look at failure changed, as well. Things might go wrong but even if I don’t make it happen on the first try, at least I have tried my best. Every failure is a run-through, a dress rehearsal for trying again. A chance to introspect and check my processes, patterns, and reactions. The Persecutor has now become a Challenger and it’s not here to punish and oppress me but to motivate me to grow and learn new skills, an invitation to advocate for myself and show up in ways that I have never done before, that I expected other people to. The role of the Rescuer is then taken over by the role of the Coach. In this role, one just supports people in fixing their issues. It is intrusive to help someone who has not asked for help or advice, to just tell them to stand aside and do everything for them. Offering opinions and advice that nobody asked for does the same thing. Helping people in a way that makes you feel better is not helpful if it doesn’t match what the person thought they were lacking. I will allow space for people to speak about their issues, and while I will offer my help to the extent that I can offer it, it will be up to the other person to decide if they want to take it or not. I will not take it personally if they find more comfortable accepting help from somebody else or if they want to do it by themselves. I do not owe anybody happiness, but I am happy to offer support and encouragement. Now, I can look at situations and see how people are trying to position me in a rescuer position, and I can tell myself “It is not my responsibility to save them.” More so, when I get into a relationship, I know for a fact that I don’t want to save anybody, I want people who have already done the work on themselves and take responsibility for their actions. I refuse to fix men; I refuse to mother them. I refuse to put my wishes aside for anybody else. I won’t let people push me into taking options that are not working for me and my timeline. I see that I thought that by fixing other people I might find a way to fix myself. I am not saying that this is a perfect system, and I get it right every single time or that I don’t get caught up in my old ways without realizing it. I just don’t commit to it the way that I did before. I become aware that I am doing it, and I refocus my intentions and my attention to where I want to go. I am the maker of my reality; I am responsible for my perception I have the power to make all my dreams come true.

What a strange thing trust is. Strong enough to move mountains when it’s there, powerful enough to crumble them when it’s gone. Gain with so much effort and slowly over time but lost in a second and so hard to win back since now doubt lurks around every corner dripping “what if” in the mind and poisoning it. I went from one extreme to another with it. From trusting blindly in everyone that I met to looking at everybody with suspicion. Both of those are problematic in themselves but I keep on turning the issue in my head and I can’t seem to decide about where the happy medium is. What is the appropriate stance to take on the issue? I read the Attributes by Rich Diviney, and after a bit more research I ended up on his website which listed four elements to trust. Competency, consistency, integrity, and compassion. These apply to my issue as I need to see that you have what it takes to get the job done and that you will match what you say you are going to do with your actions if anything changes and you are unable to, I want to see that you are going, to be honest, and open about it. I also must see that you have a good moral compass and backbone so that you will do the right thing because it is the right thing to do not just switch up when you think no one is watching or when the wrong thing brings you more entertainment or popularity. The last element of compassion is the sympathy and empathy side, how you talk about others in front of me matters because you will talk about me in the same way when I am not there. We say that we FEEL that we can trust somebody but is trust an emotion? To me, it seems like one collects data and makes an informed decision if a risk is worth taking or not. If one does not have the necessary information, one trusts a gut feeling or intuition. What is intuition? While it manifests as the little rumble in the stomach telling me that something is up, I consider it to be your subconscious mind telling me that in my experience this looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, and historically, it has turned out to be a duck but, there was that one time when it turned out to be a goose and there were… consequences so, an evaluation is needed to see if the right state of mind is present at this time to take the risk. If all conditions are met, then it is very much the dealer’s choice. Spin the wheel and see if we get the prize. Past experiences such as betrayal, inconsistency, and broken promises, all my past experiences scream out if I should trust someone or not. I suppose like everything, it starts in the family. My parents always had a strong view of lying. Even now if you ask them, they will tell you it is the only reason they have ever spanked us. Spoiler alert, that’s a lie. They had this standard set up for us that we should tell them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth but when we would then watch them not doing so or making us accomplices to it. “Don’t tell your grandma how much we spent on X thing,” “Don’t tell you’re your mom that we stopped for a beer on the way.” I child watches everything and emulates everything so, there is no conversation needed for me to see that you said one thing and you are lying through your teeth. At a young age, I wouldn’t understand why you are doing this; I wouldn’t understand there are levels to it, but you have just shown me that we can opt out from telling the truth. When and for what reasons, not sure because there was no discussion to explain the situation. Also, similar to this situation is when promises are made and then when you ask your parents, they say that they haven’t made the promise, or they said it, and they now say they are unable with no explanation sometimes even getting me in trouble for asking for reasons why. My favourite one is making a promise based on me fulfilling a commitment and when I fulfil that commitment, they moved the goalpost to make it seem that I was lacking instead of just admitting they couldn’t meet their end of the bargain. Trust comes from consistency. Doing what you said because you said it, acting and reacting predictably. It is the sequence of patterns that lets me know that you will be who I need you to be in that moment and you will react in the way that I need you to react. If you say that you are going to help me and when I come to collect on that promise, you act like the conversation never happened and even more so, you have a go at me and try to make me feel bad for being upset, that creates an environment where I can’t express my feelings, I can’t ask for clarification to soothe myself. If sometimes my input is received with kindness and sometimes it is received with anger, I get destabilized because I don’t know what I am walking into when I have a conversation with you. You are now making me feel like you are not a safe person, you are unreliable. You are teaching me that I need to be hypervigilant because I am always at risk due to your unpredictability. My dad was quite explosive in his reactions so, I had become quite attuned to his reactions to manage my reactions and avoid starting a conflict. This is something that I take with me in every room I go into. If I stay in the same room with a person and they seem upset, I will ask them several times if they are all right. If they decide to not share and just say they are all right, I will continue to monitor the energy and look for clues. It might seem annoying and paranoid, but the reality is that I feel unsafe. Somewhere in my subconscious, I am afraid. Nothing to do with you, I suppose but, I just need a few more data points than the regular person to conclude that everything is fine. Growing up I felt I couldn’t talk to my mom and dad about my issues and my sister was older and interested in talking to her friends and not me, but I did have a few friends I chose to trust along the way. One knew that I liked a boy, and she made a point of dating him, despite claiming that she was trying to help me talk to him. Another shared the notebook we would write all our secrets with other people to read showing that there is no privacy. The desire for popularity made loyalties shift with the frequency with which one hangs out with people. I would get pulled in close because they didn’t have anybody at that time or they needed my help but as soon as they could spend time with other people and they could get something off them, they would talk behind my back to them. I had a friend call me and instigated me to talk about other people in the group while they were listening in on the conversation. This pattern repeated itself and I believed that I was overreacting in the early stages, that I was imagining things, and I thought that I was a bad friend for even considering anything wrong. Life showed me that if anything, I was too trusting. Worst of all, I ignored the evidence to avoid being alone. With my first boyfriend, I found out that he was cheating on me with someone from his class. He was in the high school football team, and they were participating in a tournament, and he told me that I needn’t come. I found out after we broke up that all my friends had seen him at that tournament and not even one of them told me about it. They thought that I would have a go at them if they said anything. I don’t learn though and after a while he comes back and wants to get back together. Turns out he was now cheating with me on the girl that he had left me for. This was the start and there were some manipulators, users, and liars on the way. There have been other scenarios, like being upset with me because I was upset with him, which made no sense but meant that no responsibility was taken, and I was made responsible for ruining the mood. Another one of my favourites was discussing something and agreeing on a plan and when it was time to follow through, I got told “I didn’t say I promised.” Are we adults here or are we playing Simon says? I am sure that if I made a promise and I didn’t keep it, I would never hear the end of it and I would get told that I am not a team player, but Peter Pan over here is telling me that rules don’t apply to him because he had his fingers crossed behind his back? If you ask me how I am doing, really doing and I tell you about my feelings and you try to shut me down, I will not trust you with my feelings again. You can’t hold space for me and that is fine, it is not your responsibility, and we just discovered the boundary of our relationship. Not all conversations are for all people. What I would ask though is that you don’t feel surprised you have been taken out of the loop and I don’t lean on you. I tried to give you access to my inner life and you couldn’t handle it. Sometimes, I even get avoided afterwards or promises are made to meet up that never materialize. I won’t call you up on it, but I know that I can only trust you up to a point. There are levels of friendship and there are levels of intimacy. When you have been lied to so often, it is hard to know who to trust. Of course, I would like to have good, deep connections with everybody, but I have let people in before and they chose to let me down. I kind of started to think somewhere along the way that there must be something wrong with me because it seemed that I was the easiest one to discount. I am the easiest one to leave behind and sacrifice. Without wanting it, I start isolating myself and it gets better in terms of having time to think about everything, but it is not real healing, it just keeps me from being triggered. I started trying to open up more and letting people in, but I remember that being vulnerable and sharing things about myself, didn’t really make people want to be vulnerable back but instead gave them ammunition to manipulate me. I started letting people approach but keeping them at a distance because if they can’t come close they can’t hurt me. I can’t allow myself to get attached fully to anybody because they are going to leave anyway so, just see them as passers-by. Trust issues are viewed as being a red flag and people tell you to stay away from folks who have them. I feel alone, I want to connect to people but I am afraid that they will leave me so I approach them with care, and they leave because I am afraid which then in turn makes stronger the idea that I should be afraid of people. The truth is that while you might scare me, the person that I am doubting is me. I made so many wrong decisions in the past and I stayed in that place of pain regardless of how bad it was sometimes. It was like getting electrocuted and continuing to hold on to the wire. Even when other people tried to break the circuit and save me, I told them not to worry about it because they didn’t know this wire as I did. I have had good experiences too. People that I have shared parts of myself, slowly and awkwardly and they accept them and take care of them. They said they were going to show up for me and they did. They said I can lean on them, and I can tell them my troubles and they have created space for me to feel safe and be able to share and they were able to hold that space for me. When they couldn’t, they were open and honest about it, and they allowed me to return the favour and be there for them in need. It takes two to tango and I must be accepted in just as much as I allow other people in. I am trying my best to fight against everything that my experience has taught me. I suppose the biggest fear is that if someone hurts me, I don’t believe that I can recover from it. I have worked on making my sense of self stronger, raising my self-esteem, and my self-compassion. It’s a mixture of believing in myself more and allowing myself to get it wrong sometimes. I suppose the only way of not making mistakes is not even trying in the first place and staying a hermit. I have also learned to listen to my body and listen to my anxiety. If it keeps getting triggered every time around a person I just listen to it and let that person go. I am trying very hard to get in the habit of saying what I need and asking people for clarification. Accepting that some friendships have expiration dates, it is best to be grateful for having had those people for a while and letting them go to the next chapter of their lives. I can understand that people can make mistakes and people can change but I now know that people only change if they want to so if they want us to get back to a place of trust, we can rebuild as long as the change is real and goes beyond the speech level. Even this is an exercise in trust. I have told you things about me and I have let you into my reality. What you do with this information is up to you. You can use it to hurt me, or you can use it as an opportunity to share something back and show that faith in humanity can be restored one act of kindness at a time.

It is amazing how well we can see other people’s lives. How clearly we can identify their issues and their blind spots? We can see the patterns and if we know them well enough, we can recount instances in their lives where they were in the same situation and had similar decisions to make. We have the perfect advice for them and the perfect strategy that they can take if they only dare to do it. It is easy to advise as we don’t have to suffer the consequences. Then we go back to our own lives, and we blind ourselves to the reality of it. We lie to ourselves that everything is fine, and we hide our heads in the sand. We tell people our stories and hope that if they believe them, we will too. Things change and then reality comes in and shows us that all of those perfect pieces of advice we were dishing out were the same ones that we should have been following all along. After hearing story after story about friends, relationships and so on, the question came to my therapist: “Why do you think you struggle so much with letting go of toxic relationships?” A very good question but one that I, unfortunately, did not have an answer to. I was aware that it was happening, I had been in plenty of relationships that ran past their expiration date and still, I hung on to them. I knew I did it but why was a complete mystery. One thing about me though, I love a puzzle, and I love a good mystery so, I have started to think about it and tried to figure out where this problem started. The easiest place to start was my relationship with men. I have started to think of all my past boyfriends and think about how they treated me. I thought that they were horrible people and then the reality hit that they treated me this way because I allowed them to. There is nothing worse than realising that you are the cause of all of your issues. Every friend group has that one friend who has the funniest stories about the men she has been on dates with. That is me. I am that friend. If I had a pound for every time my friends have asked me where I managed to find this guy or the other… My answer was always that I didn’t find them, they found me but now in hindsight, clearly something in me attracts them. Like the time I went to an office Christmas party, and I had the choice between the two bartenders. The one I picked and went on a date with had told me on sight that I should stop wearing heels because he doesn’t like to be shorter than the girls he is out with. He then proceeded to scoff and look down on me during our entire conversation. At the end, we were walking, and he hugged me all of a sudden in the middle of the mall, and I asked him what we were doing to which we replied, we were looking for each other. I thought I was going to sprain an eyeball rolling my eyes at that one and that was my cue to go home. He was shocked when I didn’t agree to a second date. I have always wondered what would have happened if I picked the other one. Another time, I agreed to a date with the guy that sold me my laptop. We went for a walk in the park and as we walked, I was trying to explain to him what I do for work. He did not get it and kept on insisting that I was a secretary. I get that I had a corporate job where roles and responsibilities are specific but the way he insisted I was a secretary was just unreal. He then decided out of nowhere that he was going to buy me a gift, earrings, opal earrings. I was baffled at this and asked him why he thought that he should get me anything as he had just met me, but he said that it would be his pleasure, and it was his wish. By this time, I already regretted my athletic ways as there was no other way to end this date but to complete the tour of the park and I was stuck. The final nail in the coffin came when I said that I was moving house, and he offered to help me carry furniture and build everything for me and then proceeded to explain the roadmap to us moving in together. No, thank you. Taxi! One of the recent ones was when an acquaintance wanted to get to know each other better and hang out. I told him that I was chatty and friendly but I was not looking for anything so they should be aware of what was happening, and friendship is all that I was offering. I always worry when it comes to being friends with men that the boundaries are going to be blurred so, I wanted to make sure he was aware of what this was. He said that was fine but as the conversation went it was clear that he was trying to stay in the friend zone to get more. I tried to restate my boundaries, and I almost got “yelled” at via text that he was a good guy and that he was going to show me. If you have to say it like that, you are not a good guy. I was so scared by it that I was happy that he didn’t have my address, and I locked my door that night regardless. These are ones that I dodged but there were so many others that I entertained despite the signs. It starts well and it seems all so exciting. They are doing all the right things and saying all the right things and I start to imagine how amazing everything will be, and I start building that pedestal. Time passes and it seems that this might work out, but things change, and they start to say hurtful things. I start thinking that I am imagining things. I started to find excuses that maybe they had loads going on, a tough day at the office. Maybe they didn’t quite say what I heard and that I am looking into things, and I am imagining them. They start breaking promises and say they forgot or don’t even admit to making those promises. More and more hurtful things get said and done like they are trying their best to hurt me and see how much they get away with and because I let things slide or seem to forgive them, the more spiteful they seem to get. And yet I stay and think that I am the problem. That they are right, and I should change things about myself. Everybody leaves and I don’t want to be alone again, so I stay. Better the devil you know. They hurt me and I think why would they do that to me? It is so far from anything that I would do that my mind can’t wrap itself around why somebody would lie and hurt somebody just because they can. I have wanted the best for them. I would have given them everything that they could have wanted or needed and instead, they decided to hurt me. Even worse, they knew that they were doing it, and they didn’t care. I think that they must take pride in it and how they pulled the wool over my eyes. Why do they just want to hurt me? And at this moment, you no longer hear the strong, independent woman who can give herself everything she needs, but a scared little girl, desperate to be seen, understood, loved, and cared for. She is always put to the side and forgotten. The perfect example of seen and not heard. She is quiet because when she talks, she is not listened to, she is mocked, or spoken over so she has convinced herself that she must not have that much to say. She escapes by fantasizing that one day someone will save her. That she too will be like one of those people in the movies and she would just be living her life and boom… fairy godmother comes along and changes everything and makes my dreams come true. It is very tough when you have hopes that everything will change but life keeps going and it stays the same. Everybody that is lost just wants to be found. What happens when you feel like no one is looking? And here comes someone who says they love me. They say that I am special. They say that they have never seen anyone like me. They said they never want to hurt me and in the embers of that promise, it feels so warm and inviting and I am so tired and weary. What would be the harm of one moment of rest? Of course, I can hear the wolves howling outside and the wind blowing a gale but what if I could just pretend that they are not there for a while? Pretend that I too can be at peace and have happiness. I have had my guard up for so long and I am so tired that just this once I will allow myself to be seduced and give into the fantasy that this can indeed work. But instead of seeing it for what it is, I remain trapped and say that I can turn it around. I can make it better. As I slumber, the spider’s web grows tighter around me. More time invested, more feelings added, and a stronger bond created, making it harder to cut the ties. Once I am out of it and I can fully see what happened, I can’t imagine how I ever allowed myself to be treated that way. I think to myself that people told me but no, I had to do my own thing because I knew best. So much time invested and hoped that if I could only show them how special I am, they would love me. All the hatred that I should maybe have for them, turns on me for letting my guard down and allowing this to happen. I thought long and hard as to why I got stuck and the best response that I could come up with was that the models of women that I had in my family taught me that I shouldn’t have boundaries, that I should accept what I am getting, that I should do anything I can to stay in a relationship so if this is what I saw how could I act any different? Toxic relationships though don’t only extend to romantic relationships. For work, it has been the same. Working with people who push my boundaries, tell me that they appreciate me, that we are a team and then they pile on more and more work and when I am exhausted and make mistakes, they are the first ones to treat me poorly. And again, I start believing that I should work harder and that I should not be making any mistakes. That their poor treatment of me is a result of me making their life more difficult and that I should work on improving myself. Once I saw things for what they were, I tried to put up boundaries again and that did not go well. They have actively tried to stop me from progressing and developing, despite years of telling me how they were supporting me and that they are putting my name up for awards. This was an important lesson. I learned that sometimes, the people who seem to be rooting for you and see you as their go-to person might also be the ones trying to hold you back and use you to achieve their purposes. You are there to serve and you should not follow any other goal than working hard to help them achieve theirs. Advocating for myself was a hard-earned lesson. It hurts when this treatment comes from friends. From people that you thought you could trust, people that you have entrusted secrets to and opened your heart and they seemed to have done the same. One friend shared my secrets with other people to make herself more popular despite me knowing hers and keeping them, as a friend should. Worse still is when you are at your lowest and you think that you found someone to support you, and you support them and then you start to realise that they try to stab you in the back at every turn. They are petty and jealous and try to take the little that you have to prove their worth. I saw the signs, but I thought that surely, I was imagining it, that I was being a bad friend for even thinking bad things about her. That she helped me, and I was being ungrateful. I never said anything to anybody about it because I thought that it would mean that I was disloyal. Until it got blatantly obvious what they were doing. Even more so when they were trying to start fights in private and then when we were in groups, they would push my buttons so I would react and then they could make themselves a victim in front of people. I could see the change in her, and I could see the change in other people as they were siding with her and rolling their eyes at what I would say. When I accepted that this is happening, that I am not imagining it and even if somebody helps you at some point, it doesn’t mean that they are entitled to treat you poorly, I decided to break all ties. Finally, I was starting to learn to let go of toxic relationships. It is complicated to be selective when you come from a place of wanting but holding on to things hurts more in the long run. Learning to set boundaries, learning to say no, knowing my worth, and being able to admit that I misjudged people and that letting go of people who are not good for me is the best form of self-care, were all important lessons and they were hard-earned. I can’t change people, I can’t change who they are and how they react, but I can change how I react and for sure, I can fight to see people the way they are and let their actions do the talking no matter how alluring their words are. In the end, I have to be thankful to those people. They hurt me and pushed me so far into a corner that they left me no other option but to come up swinging and give myself the love that they wouldn’t or couldn’t give me. They served a purpose; they are forgiven and their access to me is forever denied.

I had been fine for months and then the storm started to brew. I could feel it gathering in my chest, and I could feel the pressure trapped in my throat. I could feel myself off balance and off-centre. I had been on antidepressants, and after a period of peace, I started to feel like my thoughts were gloopy. Formulating an idea was like walking through molasses. I kept trying to tell myself that I had to remember things, that they were important, and then I could not remember them. I couldn’t count on my mind anymore. There was something that I needed to see, and it kept escaping me. This was when I decided to stop taking the pills. This was not what anybody suggested. This was very much against what I had discussed with my GP; it was against what my therapist had recommended when we initially discussed it, but I felt that this was what I had to do. As the medication left my system, all of my friends were back. This was the reunion that nobody wanted or needed, but I felt in control of my mind again. I could think straight and apply myself to assess the situation. More importantly, I listened, watched, and looked at what was around me, and the more I watched, the more I disliked what I saw. I kept on thinking about it, and I decided that I needed help again, so I texted my therapist and we set the time for a session. I had so many things to get off my chest, and I had thought about this for so long that I didn’t allow for a break or any feedback for fear that I might run out of time and not get to say everything. On the dot, my therapist finally got a chance to say: “Do you know you barely took a breath this entire time?” She suggested I take the standard tests like before, but I didn’t want to because this was not anxiety or depression. This was anger. My relationship with anger has always been quite troublesome. As a girl, the message from the women in my family was that it is not ladylike to be angry or have conflicts and that I should always avoid, mediate, or look to extinguish a fight at all costs. My mom didn’t fight with us; she would give us a look of disgust as if we weren’t worth her time and effort, and she would leave the room. One would try to engage further, and she would say that that was it, and she had had enough. I was left alone with all my thoughts and no way to release emotions, nobody to debate. On my dad’s side, things have always been more turbulent. While my mom was quiet and dismissive, my dad would fully engage. He would be going from shouting matches, to leaving his room when it wasn’t convenient for him anymore and going to his room and closing his door, to being hit by him. When we would complain to my mom about how he flew off the handle and how volatile he was, my mom would say, “What can you do? That is how he is, choleric.” Which didn’t help at all, nor did it offer any solace. It just said that this is how things are, and they will not change any time soon, so it is best to get with the program. There is a traditional position that a child has to earn respect, but the parent is automatically owed respect regardless of what they do. There was a false sense that there had to be fear established to assert authority. How did that affect me, you ask? On the one hand, it taught me to continuously monitor the room, expect a fight and know that one will be coming, so I needed to pay attention and see where it would be coming from. Nobody is safe. If a topic is being debated even though I am not comfortable or interested, earlier attempts to raise these frustrations resulted in a fight starting, so now I stay quiet and allow it to take place, as it is easier to swallow my frustration and allow my boundaries to be crossed. Better still, I learned that whoever yells the loudest wins the fight, and if you bark loud enough, you will not have to bite, so I yell. I yelled, and I allowed the anger to consume me because I was scared. I didn’t get to walk away; I didn’t get to have distance like they did. If I left the room, I was told that I was playing the wounded princess and that would not be acceptable, so I had to get back in the room and discuss. They said discuss; they didn’t mean discuss. They meant to sit and listen to all the reasons they were right, and I was wrong and how I should change. None of them would sit down and discuss what happened. Mom would allow me to apologise, and then she would decide if she forgave me or not. After a big fight when they came to visit me in the UK, I decided to reconcile with her and my sister. After I made that step, my mom never apologised but even suggested that the youth would need to maybe seek some help with calming those tempers. That was after she had pouted, made faces, made hurtful comments, and made sure she dredged up every single bit of painful past that she could think of and started daily fights. She took zero responsibility, even went the extra mile, and blamed it all on us. I was too stunned to speak. My dad will glide back into the room like nothing happened and be all smiles and jokes, or offer you a sandwich in terms of reparation. In my entire life, I can never remember my dad apologising to me for anything. We have fought multiple times and sometimes every single day, and there was always this sense that we are fine, and we should get over it. Nothing in this family is explained or discussed; everything is just a big smile and wave exercise. Ignore the elephant in the room and just go on like nothing happened. Armed with no skills at all, I have been walking in society, engaging in people-pleasing to avoid a conflict, allowing my boundaries to be crossed, staying silent when I was wronged, allowing resentment and hate to build up, crying and losing sleep thinking about it again and again, reacting to make everything stop in outbursts but mostly turning all the anger on myself. I wasn’t good enough. The best I could do is to learn to control myself long enough that I don’t have to answer at the moment, just control things enough and calm the situation enough so that it gives me time to think. I would leave the fight, and while people may think that is dismissive, they really must consider the alternative. I was born in chaos, and I lived in chaos. I did not choose violence; violence chose me. Whenever I go into crisis mode, I am like a trapped, wounded animal, and I will do whatever it takes to get out of this situation. Also, what people don’t understand is that a big part of people pleasing is understanding the person and how they operate. While I might not have been self-aware, I was fully aware of the likes and dislikes of other people. To people please, you have to avoid upsetting the other person. I know and understand the weaknesses and things that hurt and might make a person lose control. I can manipulate one and cut extremely deep, but I choose not to. I choose empathy, I choose to see that I am in no position to think straight at the moment, that instead of resolving an issue, understanding the other person, and growing from it, I will dig a deeper hole. I understand that I need to regroup and reconsider, so I initially self-isolate. I am also afraid that if I hurt them, I will lose them. In the initial stages, I will start feeling myself getting annoyed, and more things will start to bother me as the storm is brewing. I will start breathing shallower, I might start tapping my foot, pace, feel pressure building in my head, and I will feel the need to rub my temples or my forehead, rub my eyes. As my heart starts beating faster, my voice is starting to get higher in pitch and volume. I will isolate, and I might shout, I might hit something, I might throw something. The physical distance from the issue will give me a chance to calm down and repair. That is, if I don’t start putting myself down and add fuel to the fire and keep on adding my own self-loathing and feeling like I deserve everything that I am getting to it and then get stuck in this circle and add the shame of having reacted in front of somebody and letting them know that I am bothered. When I can’t take any more, the pressure gets too much, the only way to cope with it is crying, crying until I exhaust myself, and I am too tired to be angry anymore. I will start to think logically, then, try to analyse what part of it was my fault and if I am right in what I assigned as blame to the other person. Next, I will check my reasoning with someone else. I tend to take on blame that isn’t mine, so I need to check that I am not taking on too much, nor do I give myself too much credit, and I find excuses for myself. I am a verbal processor, so whenever I am angry, I need to say it all so, the poison of the anger escapes me. I hate it when people try to tell me to just get over it or when they try to stop the cycle. Someone tried to hug me to calm me down, and regardless of how many times I have said that I am not ready for a hug, they tried to push it. That made me even angrier because it made me feel patronised and handled, it made me feel like they just didn’t want to deal with me, and all the negative energy got turned on them. They became the target where my anger was trying to find release. When I started doing therapy, I came to understand that not all anger is the same and that not all of it is bad. Initially, the reason I was so depressed was exactly because I could not muster and maintain anger, and therefore, I could not move forward, I could not act towards healing because I was stuck in denial. Once I could accept the facts, once I knew that I was not to blame for everything that happened, but that I needed to change myself to protect myself from this happening again or me being in the same low state, anger was a good motivator. Sometimes you are more than right to be angry. When people have taken advantage of me when the treatment I am subjected to was unjust when they are trying to push my boundaries. I am fully entitled to feel angry, but the matter is how I express that anger, how I use it to get my point across and in that I need help. Fast forward to discussing it with my therapist, and she suggested hitting a pillow or yelling into a pillow, trying something like boxing or running to try to channel and release the anger. So, there I was in my house, trying to yell and seeking the right place to do it. I tiptoed in my own empty house from room to room and felt like there was nowhere to yell or hit because I would disturb the neighbours. I settled for a soundless scream. It might sound weird, but it engaged the same muscles in the body as an actual scream, and it provided tension relief. In exorcisms, they ask the demon to reveal itself because knowing the name of something gives one power over it. A demon that says its name is weakened. In that aspect, I could see my anger, I could see how it affected me, how it hurt me and how if I didn’t find an outlet for it, it would morph into anxiety. The brain tries to seek out and focus on threats in an attempt to eliminate them and to be safe again. When I don’t deal with things, my mind keeps raising the alarm until I act. I started by observing myself, taking walks and trying to do as much exercise to eliminate the energy from it. I have journaled and I have written my problems down so I can analyse them and see what upsets me. I have started to catch myself and take deep breaths and visualise the bad energy gathering in my body being replaced by liquid calm, and just pushing the darkness out of me. I will also visualise that I am punching somebody in the face when I am in a fight, and mentally, it is very soothing and satisfying. I am never violent, but the idea still brings a smile to my face. I said I am healing, not that I am healed. I have changed my work conditions and my life conditions to give myself more mind space to manoeuvre. I have focused on improving my self-esteem, and my boundary setting and reinforcing them, I have tried to be kind to myself and allow for setbacks and mistakes to be made and so, I am trying to slowly create this space where instead of just acting on the first impulse, I can take the time to think things through and be more aligned with my values and my goals in my reactions. I am working towards being present in my own body and staying unbothered. Anger is also a smoke screen and a thief; it clouds the judgment and robs one of clarity. It hides the true feeling under a cloud of righteous indignation or violence. People shy away because violence is uncomfortable, but sometimes, under shouting hide “I am scared,” “I am hurt,” “I am vulnerable,” “I am in pain,” “I am tired to keep trying and getting nowhere.” People shout and direct anger towards whatever. Bark loud enough and keep people away from what is behind it. Anger is a prison, and it makes people turn their backs. Imagine being starved for connection and being too afraid to let people in. It took time, but as I recognised the issue, accepted that it is all right to have the feeling and took everything as an opportunity to know myself better, to just observe myself with curiosity, I can now stop myself most times from going into this vicious cycle. I can ask myself what is going on here, and if it is the issue at hand that is upsetting me or if I am in a bad mood and the current person that I am focusing my anger on is just a target for something they didn’t do. Rather than taking things personally and patting myself on the back for being so righteous or feeling like I have a target on my back, and everybody is after me, I can say, Is it them or is it you being irritable because you haven’t slept last night or because something else is not working in your life? It is not a perfect system, and I am sure that there will still be plenty of situations where I will lose control, I will end up fighting, saying things I don’t mean and then I will feel the shame of it in the morning but, I am trying my best to understand, heal and be better than I was yesterday. The true goal is peace and balance, and I can only do that by accepting all the darkness that lies in me, naming it and releasing it, one demon at a time.

I was talking to my dad about his victory over cancer. He often expresses fear about it returning. I told him that everyone owes a death, and when it comes is not up to us. What matters is how we make the most of our time. I reminded him to think of those who didn’t get a second chance like he did. He changed the subject, likely thinking I wasn’t listening because I didn’t join him in his worries. I tried to validate his concerns but didn’t want him to use self-pity to pull me into a role of mothering him through potential sickness. I read a book called “The Thanatonauts” by Bernard Werber. It explores the afterlife. People put themselves into a coma using drips to explore beyond death. One image stuck with me: a cord that pulls you back to life. If it snaps, you can’t return. This feeling resonates when I think about suicide. The thought creeps in, pushing the boundaries of what seems possible. The first time I encountered this thought, I was 8 or 9. I looked into the abyss, contemplating how quickly everything could end. Everything hurt, and I felt trapped. I felt powerless. I allowed that thought to pass, shuddering at its presence. I couldn’t believe I had even considered it. I pushed it to the back of my mind and tried to move on. I later watched a documentary about people who attempted suicide and failed. They all said that as it happened, they regretted it. Their survival instincts kicked in, and they reached out for help. They realised they didn’t want their lives to end; they just wanted the pain to stop. This realization made me feel good about my decision to hold on. Time passes. Good times come, and bad times come. Nothing lasts forever. The idea of suicide lingered in my mind, but I managed to push it away. I made friends and could talk to them about my feelings. However, I still had dark periods when I wished to sleep for days, hoping I wouldn’t wake up. I could distract myself by listening to their stories, allowing me to escape my thoughts, if only temporarily. I tried to push everything down, hoping it would go away. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t. The next time these thoughts emerged, I was living alone. I stayed up at night, watching TV and crying. I missed sleep, feeling like my life wasn’t what I wanted. I thought I had tried everything, but it seemed everyone else knew the rules while I was left outside looking in. The pain weighed me down like lead. I felt perpetually lonely and stuck. One night, I watched a documentary about cancer patients discussing their declining health. They wished for more time. As I listened, I cried harder. I wasn’t crying out of empathy; I cried because they were losing their lives while mine felt painful and unending. How was that fair? I went to bed wishing to disappear, waking up disappointed that I was still here, while they would have given anything to be in my shoes. Just thinking that this too shall pass wasn’t enough this time. I clung to God, believing my grandad in Heaven was watching over me. I thought the Lord had a plan, and everything would have purpose and meaning. I began to believe happiness is a choice. I tried to smile, even when there was nothing to smile about. At work, I would smile, and while my brain didn’t understand why, it accepted it as a sign of happiness. This allowed me to feel okay for a while. I told someone this story, and when I mentioned my suicidal thoughts, they tried to convince me there was no God. I wondered why someone would try to take away my belief that kept me alive. It dawned on me that the topic of suicide is so overwhelming that people often change the subject instead of confronting it. Sometimes, things seem to go well, as if everything is falling into place. This was how I felt when I moved to the UK in July 2013. I thought I was getting everything I wanted. I was a happy, independent woman making a difference. But then I moved, leaving my friends and family behind. The media portrayed me as unwelcome, and every time I went out, I felt judged for not being British enough. I got a job, but while people talked about me, few engaged with me. I struggled to make friends and felt lost and alone. I started each day asking the Lord if I could get hit by a bus—not to be killed or maimed, but just enough to avoid going to work. I fought with my boyfriend, seeking solitude to sleep. I had no energy for anything. I had been a happy girl, but I turned into a depressed wreck. My boyfriend felt guilty for bringing me to this place. I could sense his guilt and pity. I tried to escape this mindset but found myself in the shower one evening, staring at my wrists. I thought about how easy it would be to end everything. But then I thought of him. I knew it would devastate him. Life sometimes throws you a bone, and mine came in the form of a job change. I met new people who valued me, and things improved. I found joy in simple moments, like standing in the sunshine and watching bunnies hop on the lawn. I realized happiness could be found in small things. I once attended a musical about suicide, sitting in the front row. I felt exposed, as if the performers were looking directly at me. Listening to their stories, I felt my own emotions trapped in my throat. I enjoyed the show immensely, as it resonated deeply with my experiences. Sometimes, I felt down but didn’t have the luxury to fall apart. I buried my feelings deep inside, fighting harder to keep myself together. I had days when I fell asleep before my head hit the pillow, not caring about food or changing clothes. I was just surviving. Intrusive thoughts began to plague me, images of how I could end it all. Initially, they were easy to dismiss, but they grew stronger until I found myself saying, “I could just die.” It was a simple statement, but it hid my struggles. I faced many challenges: a breakup, feeling alone, and uncertainty about my future. One night during lockdown, I walked past houses where people were having dinner. I felt invisible, thinking nobody would notice if I disappeared. In therapy, I began to talk about my feelings. It was difficult, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how my actions would affect my family and friends. I knew I couldn’t act on my thoughts. As I spiraled down, the people I cared about felt like burdens, holding me back. I couldn’t share my feelings with friends. When I mentioned it once, I saw panic in their eyes, realizing they had to choose their words carefully. I felt guilty for burdening them. I felt shameful, lonely, and scared. I wondered why this was happening to me. I thought about karma and how I must have done something terrible to deserve this. I believed I was hurting others and that they would be better off without me. This led me to seek help. During a therapy session, I cried the entire time, something I rarely did. I told my therapist I couldn’t do it alone anymore. She asked if I intended to hurt myself, and while I was still in control, I knew I needed help. We discussed antidepressants, agreeing they were a temporary crutch. I visited my GP and began treatment. The first step was a sudden calmness; my anxiety vanished. But the depression remained, dragging me down. I never thought I would miss anxiety, but I did. I knew the depression would come, and I had to hang on for about eight weeks for the medication to take full effect. I discovered I could multitask, crying for hours while still doing my job. I continued therapy, tracking my state of mind to identify triggers. People often suggested thinking positive thoughts to escape my state. As I walked, my mind would whisper, “You could just step in front of that car.” I felt sad waking up each morning, struggling to remember to drink water and eat. Telling someone in that state to think positively is like putting a smiley sticker on a car crash victim. In that moment, I felt shame and hyper-aware that others weren’t responsible for my feelings. What I needed was acceptance and connection. Talking to my friend Diana and my therapist allowed me to process my feelings. Having my dog, Bruno, and his friends helped immensely. Their joy in seeing me, regardless of my mood, brought happiness. Playing with them released oxytocin, reducing stress and lowering blood pressure. Walking with Bruno increased my physical activity and taught me to stay present. Getting better also meant letting go of the image of what my life should be. I often repeated, “This is not how things are meant to be.” Once I embraced that I couldn’t control everything, I started to relax. I focused on the present instead of what I thought my life should look like. I’m not saying these thoughts disappear completely; they return. When I reach a place of acceptance, it becomes automatic. It’s like being in an elevator with broken cables, plummeting down. Therapy helps me recognize this and fight back by reminding myself that my brain lies. I breathe deeply, calming my body, and then troubleshoot my thoughts. I focus on what outcome I want rather than the quickest escape. There is one truth in life: death comes for us all. We know where we start, but we never know when or how it will end. Some live in fear of this inevitable end, but that will not be me. When death arrives, it will feel like a friend finally coming for me. Until then, I hope to use my experiences to do something worthwhile. I want to enjoy the ride and create moments that light up my life, looking back with peace, joy, and pride. For now, I cherish happiness when it comes. I find joy in seeing Bruno do something funny, witnessing my friends marry, and being there for them in their happy and sad times. I will hold on because I am curious about how things will unfold. I will take control and be the maker of my destiny.

And so, the story begins. After years of numbness and uncertainty, I found myself in the middle of the desert. Alone, starved, hurt. With no sense of where I am and where I should be going. My body felt full of lead except my chest that was burning hot with agony. I was alive but it felt very much like I was dead and vultures were clawing and tearing at my flesh. A big part of me just wanted to give up. Let it all fall apart, let it all burn but laying down as it all crumbles down around me is a luxury that I could not afford. If I did that, what if I couldn’t get up anymore? There was nobody else that could come and help get things moving again. “All of the king’s horses and all the king’s men/ Couldn’t put Humpty together again.” Bruno was there and he was licking my face. He kept on checking up on me and making sure I was well. He kept on trying to find ways to make me feel better as he could sense how badly I was doing. Even more, he could sense a darkness inside me that was too scary even for him. He would run and then come back. I started to fear that he didn’t love me anymore and that at some point, he wouldn’t come back. I felt that I didn’t have a home anymore, that no matter where I went, there was nowhere to rest. He was my home, and it seemed that even he was slipping away from me. I shouted into the void, I released all of my thoughts and ideas, I trusted to send all of my deepest secrets and from beyond, words form on the screen. “Everything will be fine”,” It will take time,” “Poco a poco.” While there were fifteen hundred miles between us, I never felt closer to anybody else. Nobody else had my back and understood the same way, without any judgment. As I lay down in the dirt, taking stock of what was going on, too exhausted to think, I felt the helping hand pulling me up, helping me to dig myself from the black hole within which I lay. Always just a message away and letting me know that I might feel lonely, but I was not alone. This idea was so comforting, and I was so grateful to have this because I had always been alone. I had always had people leave and in this connection, I could fully relax. I had my two companions but still, I was wandering aimlessly. I was just entirely exhausted, and I had no sense of direction. I was fragile, just like a crab that sheds its shell and remains vulnerable to all elements, so I was walking in the desert, under the scorching sun, praying to the elements, fighting the storm inside. And one day a silhouette approached. I didn’t know what to expect at first but as it took shape, I saw a blonde woman with glasses, slightly resembling my mom, but as different from her as she could be, carrying an umbrella and a journal. She offered me a cup of tea and a tissue and invited me to tell her my story. She said she was a guide and that would help me get to where I needed to go. I didn’t quite know how that would happen, but I was happy for the company. Thus, we started to travel. The first stage of denial was short-lived. This was without a doubt happening. I needed time, but time was speeding up and no matter where I went, there was no chance for respite. Always feeling chased, always feeling out of place, always feeling vulnerable and exposed. One tries to hold onto the past as it is familiar and comforting but it all turned to sand slipping through my fingers, stolen by the wind. While still lost and still in pain, I now had three companions, and I was no longer alone. This was the first of my blessings. Maybe the most important one at all. While people did lend a hand from time to time, these three have been my companions throughout. The nights were filled with gazing at the stars and the wind howling “You are not enough,” “You will never be enough,” “You don’t deserve more,” and “You can’t do anything right.” Ripping bits of my flesh and keeping the pain alive. The moon was witness to my struggles, as I was looking back still wondering, looking for meaning. The days were full of mirages of things that could have been but never were, of fears that might come to pass. My guide had listened to my stories and as we were trying to decide on a direction, we also knew that I needed armour against the evils of the world. I went on quest after quest, gathered the pieces of armour and as I was more protected against the world and my wounds began to heal, I could see more and more blessings as they were coming in. I thought that I could not support myself, manage my life or make decisions and it turned out that I was beautifully wrong. Sure, my life was still an absolute ruin but, the days didn’t have the same intensity, and the bad times were slightly further apart each time. Best of all, I now had a direction and with a direction, I could get a strategy, and my guide could provide a map. With this in hand, I had a new sense of determination. This showed without a shadow of a doubt that I no longer inhabited the place where I started in my mind. Following the map, I got to this fortress. Behind big, creaky doors stood a palace full of empty, dusty halls covered in cobwebs. The chambers contained chests hiding secrets under heavy locks. As I went from room to room towards the heart of the palace, in the innermost chamber I found a mirror. In this mirror, I saw a woman. She seemed oddly familiar somehow but a stranger, nonetheless. Her features were undefined and ever-changing. I tried to look at her from different angles and catch a feature that can tell me who she is but the more I looked, the less I could see. I could sense the answer to this mystery will be the key to unlocking the next stage. I gathered clues, I tried to follow my guide, read all I could to get to the bottom of who this woman was. I have struggled immensely, and I have been troubled by the image of this woman taking shape. Slowly but surely, she did take shape, and I found that this woman that I seemed to know was me. The hard road that I travelled was always to find myself. I had given myself up in the hope that I would make my dreams come true and now I had found my way back. At first, I didn’t want to accept it, and I hated the woman in the mirror. I thought she was weak but no matter how much I would scream and insult her she just looked at me hurt and waited. My anger slowly began to fade, and I looked at her and recognised her for what she was; someone at her limits but, still trying her best. She had done what was needed and she had brought me so far. I began to feel sorry for her in the beginning and then I began to feel love and gratitude for her. I embraced her and I thanked her for being who she needed to be to keep us safe and, in that embrace, the mirror became a doorway. On through the looking glass, Alice went. Down the chessboard she will go to become a queen but, for the moment, I found myself in an oasis and this oasis, I found peace. My guide had given me the greatest gift of all. Finding myself was such a big piece of the puzzle I was trying to solve without even knowing what the final image was meant to look like. In this newfound peace, I could stop looking at what was not working and be grateful for what it was. I could be grateful for the road I have travelled. I could be grateful for the lessons I have learned. I could be grateful for the sun shining on my face, for the smell of the flowers as I walked by, the sounds of birds singing and even rain falling on my skin to wash away all the hurt. I could be grateful for the people in my life, and I wanted them to know that they are seen, valued, and loved. That their gestures, kind words, and good intentions made a huge difference and that I appreciated having them around me. That they are my angels on earth and that I see them for who they are. In giving them thanks, I could feel myself filling up with love and joy, calm and happiness. I knew that this was most likely not the end, but for the time being, I could rest. I could allow myself to let go and enjoy the life that I have created for myself.

I sometimes ask myself when it will end. When will I be fine? The more I work through the more I uncover. I understand that these patterns have taken years to create and cement, and I have run them time and time again. I get that these take a while to recognize as a pattern, to recognize how they integrate and what got me here. I understand that my mind will not want to leave my comfort zone, and my ego will try to scare me away from trying something new. I understand that once I become aware of this, it must be a conscious decision to move away from that pattern and that takes building my self-confidence more and understanding that while it is hard now, I am working for an end goal, and it will get better. I get all of that but when will it be done? It pretty much feels like running through a cornfield and as soon as you think you have reached the edge of it… surprise, there is more corn. So, no sense of where you are, how far you have come and how long there is to go but, now you are exhausted and probably all cut up from the corn leaves. Even further than that, one starts to question if this is real or not. Am I addicted to drama? Am I doing this as a way of attracting attention or are these real attempts to break the patterns? Is this guilt and me feeling like a burden again? I have watched my grandmother manipulate my dad by trying to say that she was feeling sick whenever she didn’t get what she wanted, asking for her pills because she either had heart palpitations or a splitting headache that he had caused. Even as a child, I could recognize the patterns she was following to the point where I would offer to bring her pills for her while the conversation was still running its course. I then watched my dad get sick and even though he is out of immediate danger, his entire personality is now revolving around the fact that he had been sick. Every time there is a chance, he will take you through the history of check-ups. He will bring it up in every conversation. He is opting out of what he doesn’t want to do because of it. He has added to the pressure of me getting married and having children, and told me that he wanted to see my children before he died. Again, he is out of danger and perfectly fine at present. This is what I have seen in my family, and then you add to the mix the fact that, as a child, I would get the most attention and exclusive attention from my mom when I was sick, while otherwise, I would have been cut off or emotionally rejected. So, am I using feeling depressed and anxious to get attention? Am I being manipulative and attention-seeking to draw people’s attention, so I perpetuate this state? I know that the brain is a liar, and emotions are not all to be believed, but out of them, which one is the true one? On the one side is shame for needing help, guilt for needing it in the first place, a firm belief that nobody owes me anything and I should be able to self-soothe but, the knowledge that it is toxic to self-isolate and cut people off to deal with emotions. In a state of crisis, all these opposing concepts come out and they take centre stage. When it comes to my issues and demons… “My name is Legion for we are many.” The strongest feeling of them is that I cannot fall apart, that whatever is going on, I must deal with it and keep going. I wish I could say that my overthinking, my ruminating, my back and forth is limited to certain topics but unfortunately, it extends to most areas of my life. Everything analysed, everything weighed and measured, everything dissected, and the motivations questioned. I am getting better with it as time passes. I have learned to calm down and just allow my emotions to surface in the way that they are formed. Catalogue them as I go along. I go walking for my anxiety and I have a good cry for my depression. Things will be tested again and again. The universe will send lessons and repeatedly check if the lesson has been learnt and if the pattern has been broken. Troubleshooting endlessly until the best solution is found. Sometimes I ask myself why me. Why do I have to learn all these things? How come people get to not work on themselves and still get what they want? All I ever wanted was to be seen. All I ever needed was a connection but the more I try the further it draws. Trying to escape the feeling of loneliness, reaching out only to project neediness and make people move away then feeling so exhausted that one does not have the strength to connect to the people that are trying to reach out to us. The irony of it all. I lucked out. I have beacons on my path. It is very Dante’s Inferno of me. I have my own Virgil guiding me on the path. I know that I am a little dramatic and I feel everything very intense, that is my sparkle so, one must look behind the words and find the meaning. All I need is someone to listen without judgment, give me perspective, and help me understand when I am being too hard on myself. The one thing I hate the most in this life is people who try to tell you what you want to hear. I find it such a futile exercise and I find it counterproductive. When someone just tells me what I want to hear I start thinking if they lied about this what else are they lying about? Here is where my Virgil, Diana, comes in. She calls me on my bullshit, and she tells me what I need to hear not what I want to hear. She keeps me accountable and on the right path. When there is a trigger event, it feels like everything crumbles, anxiety sets in, and the state of panic is up to the point where paranoia gets induced. Everything is bleak, something bad is going to happen and worse of all I feel like I am unable to handle or face what is about to come and it feels unsafe. It goes from “I got this” to “I am about to lose everything” in a flash. Before, I would just spiral endlessly, but now, I start by telling myself that it is fine, I am fine, and everything will be fine. I remind myself that I have handled things in the past and I will handle this again. I break things down into what I can control and what is out of my control, this helps me put a plan in place. I consider the event, and I break it down to see why it has affected me like this because it is something that will need to be handled once the immediate issue is resolved. I accept that this is a process, and I don’t have to get everything perfect from the first step. Small steps in the right direction are just as valuable as solving something in one go and setbacks are to be expected and they are fine, they are lessons. What Diana does in all of this is priceless to me. I can go to her, and I can tell her that I am scared, terrified even and not be judged. I can admit that I don’t know what I am doing. I can say that I feel like a failure. I can admit that I feel lonely and that I feel endlessly alone. I can admit that I know the right path, but I don’t want to take it just yet. I can be authentically me and be accepted. I am being seen for who I am and instead of shrinking away from it, she leans in. At times I don’t believe in myself, but she does, and that is enough to take me through most days. I cannot self-soothe by myself still so; I just need somebody to hold my hand through all of this. I am endlessly grateful that she is my friend. After each of these falls, I take a deep breath and look at where I am. I try to take responsibility for everything that I do and everything that I say. I take responsibility for my hand in getting me in that situation. And sometimes, I manage to surprise myself. I am at times too close to every situation, to every detail to see how I change, how I transform and then these things happen, and I take a step back and glance at the big picture. Then I can see it. I can see the change that I brought into my own life, that I am stronger, that I am further than I have been before. Do I have it all figured out? Far from it. Will I have it soon? Probably not. What I do come to realise though is that the cycles that I go through are not as lengthy as they used to be. The recovery times get shorter and shorter each time. The emotions are more in control. I can turn the situations around more efficiently and effectively. The hole that I have to dig myself out of is not as deep as it was the last time. I suppose I always thought that there be this “A-ha” moment, this silver bullet, this one piece of advice that would just make everything fall into place and I would just have this big revelation, and I would be cured. I come to understand now that it will always be with me, that it can never really be cured but it can be managed a lot better. I have come so far, I have achieved so much, I have come closer to the me that I was meant to be, and I have started to show up for myself in so many significant ways that I would have been scared to show up before. I don’t know where my destination lies but I know I will get there one day. I know that I will stumble, and I know that I will fall. I know that at times I will despair but, I know that I will weather the storm, and I will rise.