#thoughtdiary

So something I’ve always struggled with is trying to actually prioritise caring for myself over other people. I never really realised it was THAT much of a problem till recently, having reached the point where I realised I hadn’t eaten dinner for several months, afraid that even entering the kitchen in my flat would disrupt my flatmates’ evenings. The fact that that’s an improvement on how I was concerns me.

There’s things in my life I’d change obviously, people I miss, things I wouldn’t say, stuff I wouldn’t do, isn’t there for anyone? But at the end of the day, I’m happy.

Life is a struggle sometimes, I won’t deny that. The struggle is different for everyone of course but everybody has a struggle. Whether it’s overcoming trauma, struggling to even get out of bed each day or even just trying to live their best lives, everybody has something they’re working through.

That’s something that’s taken me awhile to understand. I believed for a long time that I was broken, that I didn’t have the right to feel the way I did because, whilst I’d gone through some shit, it wasn’t as bad as other people had experienced. If people had lived through that and were still managing to live normal lives then why couldn’t I? What right did I have to cry or to not eat or to cut myself off from the world?

I realise now that was the wrong way to look at it but it’s still hard not to drift back into that mindset - every time I see the people who went through it with me, or the girl who tried to drag me down, and I see how happy they seem to be, I’m back. But it’s an illusion really, I only see what they project to the world, to the people that aren’t their closest confidantes. I imagine I appear much the same way. But even if it isn’t? Even if they’re living happily ever after? It doesn’t lessen what I’m going through. It doesn’t make me broken and it doesn’t make me wrong.

I have a lot of people to thank for it all, for the better place I’m beginning to be in. My family. My friends, whether they know the details or not, whether we still speak or not. My (now ex 🎉) counsellors, and the brilliant people who pushed me to see them in the first place. Myself I guess, for pushing through.

I don’t post my own thoughts on here. I try to maintain the perfect public image that I keep everywhere else, which is stupid considering how few people will read this, and how even fewer actually know me but still, it’s a matter of principle. Despite that, I sit here. Having just been discharged from counselling, at a good place at last. Having realised through recent events how short and how precious life is. And I know that keeping some kind of record of my thoughts at this precise moment is what I need to do, even if it’ll soon be buried under all my random reposts, perhaps particularly because of that.