Hello everyone and welcome to my blog! I hope you are all well!
Today I am going to be talking about something that I actually didn’t plan on talking about. But, I’ve had a rough couple of weeks with my own mental state and I never, ever, ever address this. I suppress a lot of my self-doubt, anxieties and stresses for two reasons:
1). Negativity is contagious, and I don’t want to affect other people.
2). I don’t feel like my issues are worth talking about and I feel selfish and ungrateful.
These two are not true and are damaging beliefs. I am not being selfish for struggling mentally. I am being selfish if I don’t talk about whatever it is that is troubling me and seeking help and support.
I suffered from bullying throughout all my school life. It damaged my self-esteem and my confidence, I self-harmed for about three years (five years clean) and caused me to suffer from panic attacks. As I’ve gotten older, the panic attacks have gotten worse and I’m really feeling the consequences of having low self-esteem.
For the past few weeks I have really felt this negativity. It’s dragging me down and having a big impact on my life. I go through phases where I feel really positive, and then I crash back down again. I’ve crashed, and now that I’m building myself back up again and feeling a bit better I really wanted to take the opportunity to address things that I haven’t done the past few weeks.
It may sound silly but I’ve felt like a massive failure. I feel like I’ve failed myself and my partner (who is hugely supportive, by the way). I feel mediocre, I feel like I’m not meant for success, I feel like I will forever be the person who gets pushed to the back of the crowd. It seemed that no matter how hard I worked, and how hard I pushed, things weren’t falling into place and I was getting very little results. I felt like giving up, and I was slowly losing hope and faith for myself.
I worked hard to push the bullying to one side and to grow from that, and in doing so I’ve placed a huge pressure on myself to reach these high standards that I have created. When I feel this ‘darkness’ that possesses my thought process, I feel like I’ve failed myself and that all of my hard work was for nothing.
I am now in a place where I can tell myself that it wasn’t for nothing. It’s a lesson. It gives me a chance to evaluate the situation I was in, sometimes writing it down can help, and look at it from an outsider’s perspective where I can think of ways to make sure that it doesn’t happen again, or to the same extent.
Always remember that it is okay for the struggles to break you. It’s okay for it to all get too much. But do not forget about one thing: yourself. It’s easy to allow events and people in your life to take higher priority, but don’t forget that you are the highest priority. You are worth feeling healthy, you are worth feeling amazing, and you are worth the kindness and love that you should give yourself.
Now that the Summer is over, and we are coming into a new academic year, I am vowing to give more time to be kind and loving to myself. I will be looking into self-love tips and how to tackle the negativity, self-doubt and anxiety that can take control of me.
I’d love to know what your self-care/love tips are! I hope this helps someone out there who relates to it, but this has also been a massive release for me as I do hold these feelings in.
Thank you so much for reading!
Love always, Jodie xx