and nothin hurts anymore i feel kinda free

 This Christmas i have reminded myself a couple of times that it is simply a day and i do not have to do everything in power to be seen to be witnessed, that i exist even if it's just me and my mum in the living room that we've spent twenty years in. and it helped. everything is different and coming home for christmas with n like we've always dreamed about - we got out and we choose when we come back - has been beautiful. i have nothing to run from and i know full well that life will continue to grow and develop and be beautiful and one day i won't be here, doing this christmas, with j & g on christmas eve in the same way. i think we will always come back to that christmas eve but i think sometime in the future my mum will be in a bigger, safer, warmer house. with high ceilings and big windows for light. and she'll have someone to love and appreciate her, who makes her howl with laughter and who drives her wherever she wants to go. who keeps her safe. and i'll come back to a bigger christmas, with a bigger family, with my own family. and it will be even more beautiful than this is. 

my hair is blonde and long, my skin is good because it treat it good, i'm a couple stones lighter and fit into some beautiful jeans again, some beautiful jumpsuits and dresses. i'm vaping too much, but i'm christmas warm sober and i'm dancing every day, moving my body and feeling it without judgement for the first time in maybe ever. 

i am so grateful for all of this. for my two homes, for my sobriety, for my mum saying i was the best she's ever seen me on christmas eve, that i laughed the most i ever have, even though normally i'm two sheets to the wind. i'm grateful for N, for M, for my girls. i'm grateful for all that's happened. i'm grateful for my car and my cat son. i'm grateful for all of it. for school and school friends. for all of it. 

Scraps

 party girl was a character, a fun, naughty, dangerous one. it stopped people seeing the real me. which drinking and using did too. the way a cold glass and a fag stopped my hands feeling empty, drugs and alchol stopped me feeling empty. i was a character. but a shadow, a real ghost of a girl, a pencil sketch outline of myself. 

i went to the piano works last night in the west end with myself. scraps of it, but scraps of my real self. i hold the scraps in my hands and offer them to the others. i can give you this little piece: this little piece of me loves paul simon, this little piece doesn't know what to do with her hands, this little piece didn't hear you the first time, this little piece isn't very sure of herself anymore. but they're real this time. there's something real this time. in the few hours i spent with my friends last night they got more of me than i used to give in a whole week. sober, you can see me now. 

Tornado country

 i've been here in my little room in my * home for 14 months now. i've lived and grown inside this little room although i forget it - in this room i've made it through a year at school, a lockdown (and a half), intense trauma work, i've got sober inside this room, i saw my 24 hour chip, my 90 days, my 148th (today!). i've held myself like a baby bird inside my bedroom.  

this term didn't go how i'd planned. i didn't do most of it (although perhaps this is an exaggeration). i was incredibly low, by the middle of the term even getting out of bed to wash my face filled me with this bone deep sense of dread. fear and dread was all over me. i barely made it to this last week we're having now. but the important thing is that i did make it. i'm on a new medication which seems to be doing the trick and i think all the work i missed is catch up-able. getting sober is the most uncomfortable thing i've ever done but it is undeniably the best thing i've ever done for myself. 

i spent a lot of mornings on the 134 bus scribbling away at chekhov work and voice work. trying to breathe, trying to cry, trying to stop crying. i spent a lot of time at AA meetings and in bed, firing off frantically apologetic emails to attendance. but in between that deep discomfort and the distrust i have now of keeping this stable-feeling, i learnt to be loved. i learned how to be supported. i learned how to be hugged by somebody when i'm crying. i learned how to hold a hand to my sternum. i learned how to remind myself that i am human (and i need to be loved... just like everybody else does...). i learned people don't hate what i hate about myself. that people like me. 

i want to write so much more but i won't, because i'll just dilute it. but this christmas i want to rest deeply. i want to have fun. i want to feel joy. i want to feel pretty and fun. i want to feel proud of myself, even if just for a few moments, and i want to make a massive fuck off 'what i've achieved' end of year list and celebrate myself for a monumentally hard but deeply rewarding and important and healing year. i always knew that 2020 was going to change everything, that it was going to be the beginning of a whole new life of luck and good things. and i was right. 

reading/read: 

• a crooked tree- una mannion
• the yellow wallpaper - charlotte perkins gillman

listening to: 

• tornado country - allison ponthier 
• shoot - tommy lefroy 
• just for me - pinkpantheress
• l to the og - kendall roy (unironically sorry)

canopies and drapes

 

i miss the 00's and early 10's blogger aesthetic. i miss the weird prose journal entries, the short abstract stories, the photographs on a digital camera with just the right photoshop action that you downloaded for free from outspoken-kate, piecing together the simplest forms of html for your girland, pizco, myspace layout, how that layout and your profile felt like the most perfect pieces of cultivated self. i miss the innocence of the online world being seperate, being right next door. i miss the seperation. i miss the surety of always remaining anonymous, of never seeing your real life friends pop up on livejournal or blogspot. i miss how the pictures were all faded, like a hazy memory although we were blogging what was happening to us right that very second. i miss how they really were like online diaries. i miss jenny lewis rar files and elliott smith zip files and the simplicity of discovering your first fiona apple song. i miss the innocence. i miss the simplicity. i miss the mystery and the honesty. how everybody wove their daily life into a story you wanted to be a part of. 

Lucky duck

 summer is fulfilling it's promises already. i am 19 days sober. i am tan and dark blonde. i am two weeks left of second term. i have two weeks off for a brief summer in london, then work back in my hometown with girls who are friends, doing something i love, with time to rest and slip back into the parallel life that lags a little behind, waiting for me. i have a life i am safe inside. i am at the school i never even dared dream of. i am living in pure validation. i am a month clean of bulimia. 

i am cosmic ordering, i am manifesting, i am prophesying. this summer will be a summer of love. it will be a summer of deep tans, blonder hair, coffee shop shifts, lay ins, flirations, sobriety and AA meetings. it will be a summer split between two places and the people i love. it will finally be the best of both worlds.

after a day spent in the sun, tonight i'll order pizza, write out a poem for my voice class tomorrow and lounge around. happy, sleepy, warm, content, lucky. so fucking lucky.

i let the darkness out

 week 5 of term 2 and i'm starting to feel the exhaustion creep in. it shows in skipping breakfast and ordering take out, it shows in binge drinking and hangovers and missed classes. it shows in executive dysfunction. i took a day off last week,i missed a couple classes. but i needed to. it doesn't mean i'm slipping, it doesn't mean my education is a risk. i just needed to. 

i went to my first AA meeting yesterday morning, i didn't speak up. i cried after. i was very lucky to have a girl to take me and to buy me a coffee afterwards and talk it through. today i ticked several things off my to-do list and left the others alone so i could nap, eat subway, binge watch You with my flatmates. i deserve kindness and i deserve love and i've been taken aback by it twice this week and i wonder if it's because should i truly see and realise how much love i deserve it would break my heart to see how little i have received and how little i have allowed myself to be open to. am i open to love? i'm unsure now. i have experienced so little gentleness, so little sweetness, which kills me because i was such a gentle, such a sweet little girl. 

the meeting suggested to me that there was untapped kindness out there for me, untapped love. and that it was okay for me to lean into it. but much like school, that's something i've avoided by my whole life. and now it's something i have to face. 

the art of starting over♡

♡ let the darkness, I let the darkness out ♡

I had the armor, I wore it much in the summer
But the arrow hit me right where the heart is

I guess I'm mastering the art of
Starting over, Starting over
New beginnings can be lonely
Thank God I got me to hold me

-You could find mе starvin' for attention most days
Amongst other things, God help me

Finally, get to do things my way

♡ Dear little me

I'm sorry that it took so long

But baby, you're free

. I've lost ten pounds in two weeks'

Cause I told me I shouldn't eat

I gained a new vice way more than twice

I've slept on bathroom floors

I'm an island, I'm alone, but I'm alive

-

Cashin' in my chips for forgiveness
Trading in my shame for perspective
Healing got me lookin' for freedom
Happiness it used to be fleeting
History was always repeating
Not anymore

Trading judgment for freedom
Found somethin' new to believe in
Somethin' inside of me screaming
"Don't be so hard on yourself"

♡

Now I'm in a good place
Took a while to feel this way
No longer have to save face
Reconciled with okay
And with a whole lot of work, whole lot of hurt, whole lot of grace
Now I'm in a good place

Spent my whole life chasin'
Chasin' just to end up turned around
Took me to dark placеs
Thought I'd never get out

contendedness

after class i went for a walk around * and got some fresh air. i had a bit of a weird moment that i'm sure all previously busy-to-desperately-get-out-of-brutal-living-situations and clings-to-social-interactions-to-ignore-the-creeping-darkness-within humans have experienced in lockdown - i feel like i'm wasting the day. i feel like i'm wasting away. i have nobody to witness me, so do i exist? and then after the walk, once i got back in bed and read for a while, i realised i was exhausted. now i don't believe in napping and only do so after surgery or COVID-19 last year or a brutal hangover in a desperate bid to get the vomiting to stop. and i was there in my peaceful room. doing what i need. reading 'trick mirror' and 'my brilliant friend' and also 'the debutante and other stories' and laying in my beautiful soft white bed and stretching out... i felt peaceful. i remembered that i'm learning. i'm in the midst of discovering. i'm also in the midst of a global pandemic. 

so i cut myself some slack and i climbed into my bed and i took that nap. and i woke up an hour and a half later and felt

content

kept all the flowers (again)

this year i am embarking on a self-worth journey. well. it started on a 'better relationship with myself' and then into 'self-care' then self worth and then lately i've been wondering if self-love is a better phrase because holy fuck i truly did not see, i didn't have the time to look inside my padded ribs to see that i am filled with such pure self-hate, so much self-loathing. it seeps out of my pores. it's agonising and off putting and i never realised before. it poisoned all the flowers on every floral print in every bed i've ever slept in.

chiron is in my first house. it's been a lifelong catch, i've been fighting myself a long time and i've been using the same fight choreography, the same techniques. they're so old. the bulimia has taken the enamel off my teeth, it's exhausted my body. i have drugged and drank myself into situations so nightmarish i still feel haunted. my entire body is laced with thick and fine criss-crossing scars. i have let men use me like a sex toy. i have tried it all. 

but i've never tried laying my weapons down and declaring a truce with my body. not peace just yet. but a truce could be possible. 

give me a scale that measures the weight of the world. subtract that from the shoulders. you'd find one motherfucking skinny girl.  - The Little Bukowski