I wish that I was more

Who am I?

If I ever do get a real blog (maybe in a couple of weeks, maybe in a month? we’ll see), then this would be my ‘about me’ page. Probably tumblr has one as well but I’m taking this exploring a blog thing one step at a time. And I already added an image to one of my previous posts so..

So who am I and what am I doing with this blog (and why should you be doing the same?)

Right, let’s skip on the who am i question and get to the interesting stuff. I’m 21, which means for me that I’m in the phase of my life where you have to unlearn all the ‘bad stuff’ your parents raised you with and you kind of have to raise yourself on all the stuff you wish they’d raised you with. I think for some people this happens automatically and probably at a younger age and for some people this doesnt happen at all. But I have wanted to do this (to change) for as long as I remember and it never really seemed to work. Now it is working and I guess I’m taking you all (that would be all the 0 (zero) people that follow this blog and the 0 people I’ve told about this blog) along for the journey. Both for me, because typing shit out makes them more real and makes the changes more real and because I’m learning a lot and I think other people might benefit from the lessons I’m learning.

So what’s the starting point? Like I said, I’m 21 and I just finished my bachelors in artificial intelligence. I spent my last semester in Spain and this is where I realised I couldnt continue living the way I was. I didn’t not only not want to keep living the way I was, but I genuinely couldnt. I think I have anxiety disorder and it’s been interfering with my life in many, many ways. But even if you do not have anxiety disorder, the same mechanisms that are making my life really hard are probably making your life a lot more difficult than it has to be. So in a way I should be grateful for my anxiety because it’s forcing me to explore these concepts that I otherwise wouldn’t have and maybe my life at the end of this journey will be better than Iif I hadn’t been given these obstacles in life. Yeah. Maybe someday I’ll actually believe that.

So anxiety is the big problem and then there are the sideproblems and coping mechanisms that initially, if you’re walking a similar path to mine, you might think are the things ruining your life and are also the things that you want to change so badly, but can’t seem to. You think that doesnt make sense, why can’t I just stop picking my face? Why can’t I stop binging on chocolate? But it’s because I didn’t factor in the underlying reason: the anxiety. So my coping mechanisms aren’t that original probably. Number 1 would be ‘distraction’. Whenever the anxiety kicks in, which ranges from 50% of the time to 100% of the time, I’ll feel stress and fear and I’ll try to distract myself from feeling that and my brain from thinking related thoughts by either looking at memes, scrolling on pinterest or watching series. I would spent literally every minute of my time I’m not doing something and thus occupying my brain on my phone/laptop. Now I’m not saying memes are bad or series are bad, or unhealthy food is bad (woo shocker), it’s all about your relationship with them. Number 2 is food. I am not lying when I say that I would think of food every couple of minutes. And that’s hard. Because it feels like your dieting your life away, every time you have to tell yourself no. Then there is the fact that you have limited self-control. So for example, you have to finish a project for uni. This project in itself is giving you anxiety, of course so you’ll get the desire to eat unhealthy food. Now you can either put your self-control in denying yourself food, or you can put your self-control in working onthe project, both are a lot harder than they should be and both are a lot harder than they are for most other people. Obviously, I chose working on the project, which meant I was always eating a lot of crap when I’m studying. C’est la vie. Number 3 is a bit more strange. I pick my face. I look for any unevenness and god forbid clogged pores and I scratch, pimp and tug on my skin until the unevenness is even and bleeding or the clogging oil is out of the pores. And bleeding. This means my face often looks like a warzone (at least to me) and it’s been one of the harder habits to kick and it’s also the one that makes the least sense to me. I’ve never really cared about appearances much, I wear comfortable clothing (usually from my current boyfriend, and I don’t mean just a cute oversize blouse. I’ll wear his pants and his already oversized sweaters etc. I just care about comfort, which I think is also partly to do with my anxiety), I don’t wear make-up and sometimes I’ll brush my hair. But there have been nights where I laid awake hating my face, wanting it to burn, simply because my skin is not ‘perfect’. Yeah, it doesn’t make sense to me either, but that’s how it often is with anxiety. 

Then, what I think lies at the core of my anxiety is fear of failure. And this one is different, because fear of failure I’ve had my entire life. Beating anxiety takes a lot of determination. Just like changing yourself does (not if you follow my amazing advice, that is, I truly believe that change isn’t that hard if only you know how). And I’ve always been able to refer to the person I was ‘before’, so back when I had a healthy relationship with food, I simply didn’t think about my skin at all and seeing my roommates around the house didn’t fill me with a sense of fear and impending danger. If I had been that way before than I could go back to it. I’m stubborn enough to think that if life can change me this way, I’ll change my way back (that’s not how it works, you become someone else, but more about that later). But it’s harder when there is no ‘before’. Because if someone hasn’t showed you that you can change then who are you to believe you can? Well fuck that, I’m me and that’s all I need, I truly believe I can change EVERYTHING and I will keep believing this until proven otherwise, but guess what, since I’ll keep trying until I die, you won’t be able to prove me otherwise. 

Fun fact on this matter actually is that not having this belief can truly, seriously be one of your biggest enemies of change. So apperently it’s a big deal to run a mile in under four minutes and nobody thought it could be done. Until one guy did it. So this ‘barrier’ that stood for decades get broken and less than fifty days later someone else breaks it too. And then a year later, 3 people also break it, in one and the same race. By now, thousands of people have broken that ‘barrier’. It’s not a barrier. It’s your thinking. So stop that. 

So I had Fear of Failure (FoF) all my life and then there were some circomestances (it was high school, big shocker) and then I developed anxiety disorder. I’ve been talking mostly about a lot of symptoms of this mental foe, but there is also of course, the social aspect. And that one is so, so hard. It’s not the worst side-effect for me. I have friends, I know how to make friends, I go out to parties etc. But it’s the one that’s most debilitating. No one can prepare you for this one. For thinking you are not ‘normal’, for never fitting in, for that to even become an option, then a self-fullfilling prophecy and then just a part of who you are. 

It’s also the hardest to change, because you can stop eating food and stop looking at your phone (this is completely the wrong way to go about change, but Im siumplifying) but you cant just ‘feel comfortable’ in social situations. You can’t just ‘increase your self-esteem’, you can’t just ‘set bounderies and feel good about it’. I mean I tried to do the things while ignoring the emotions thinking it would go away. AND THIS DOES NOT WORK. it made it all so much worse. So don’t beat yourself up for ‘isolating’ yourself. Sure, isolation without a solution is gonna make the problem worse and you should definetely still catch up with your close friends and do the things that are light-to-medium-exhausting. But just ‘getting out there’ isn’t gonna make your anxiety go away, it’s just gonna make it worse. That said. You need to actually address the problem if you are noticing that social situations have become harder for you. 

Okay, so this is me. This is where I am at right now. Finishing my bachelor thesis for uni was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, even though the stuff I actually had to do wasnt that hard, but I had to fight for every single word I wrote. I couldn’t have continued to my masters. My parents came to visit and I cried at a restaurant, finally telling them my problem and then I decided to take a year off and focus on getting my life back on track. I’m now four months into this year and there has been many, many changes and definetely not enough. You can read about them here if you want to.

Sidenote. I’m living at my parents, which has its own challenges of course. But it’s been really helpful for me, since I didn’t feel like I had a comfort zone anymore, and this place is the closest thing to a comfort zone and I think it had slowly become one. Well at least my room has. One thing that seems obvious when you want to ‘find yourself’ is to travel, but I don’t think that would have been the best decision for me. I’ll write about that some other time. 

There are so many times I have to stop to catch my breath. It happens anywhere at any time regardless of the situation. I'll be sitting in class and something reminds me of you, I'll look in the mirror and I notice I'm starting to look more like you. I cross my arms, lean to the left when I laugh, use your sayings, twirl my hair like you did. I stop breathing. I wish I could believe it when people say "it gets easier" but it can't get easier, growing up without a mum. I think of my siblings who are going through this alone. My stepdad who's suddenly a single parent. How throughout my whole life you were dying in front of us and we couldn't stop it. You always seemed invinsible to me, youd fall and get back up every time. Until you fell for the last time and I could see you wouldn't get back up. I knew it'd happen one day, but how is it possible that it was so early? It's like a timeline of bad news. The day you called to say you were constantly tired. The day you called crying because a friend asked if you were pregnant, when in fact your liver wasnt processing anything properly causing you to balloon out. The day you picked me up and your body looked like it was deteriorating. I remember the musky smell on your breath, how swollen your legs were, the spider veins on your face. Boxing day when you couldn't move from bed because your bones ached. The day you called to say your livers failing and how I couldn't stop crying, but you promised you'd be fine. The day you called from the hospital, unable to breathe or string a sentence together, how you kept losing conciousness and told me it was just side effects from medications, when in fact it was toxins in your brain, turning it to mush. That first night in ICU felt like it lasted forever. I learnt that day, that even when doctors say it's ok to leave, it's not really ok because you could take a turn for the worst at any second. This song hits me where it hurts, because it's exactly how it felt that first day,and every day afterward when I'd have to wait in the waiting room with a handful of other people, waiting breathlessly for the bad news to flood through. It got to the point where the hospital felt like home, I knew all the doctors, I had a card to get into ICU as if it was a key to my home. I thought I'd lost you that day. I kept thinking, "how selfish can you be? You've been a terrible daughter, why didn't you stop this? Why didn't you take the bottles away? Why didn't you visit more? There's still so much left I haven't told you". Day after day you slipped further away. You'd smack the doctors and scream, you'd tell them to give your hand back because you couldn't feel anything. That's all you could say for days. Yet you still recognised me. You'd only take medications from me, you'd only listen to me speak. One night you started laughing. You said "kerryn get a doctor, I need to pee" and I almost cried because it was the first words you'd spoken properly for a whole week. You turned around, your vitals were stable, you were improving. They estimated one year left. We looked into transplants, we stayed up late watching TV, we talked for hours, we ate together and Id wheel you around in the wheelchair until you learnt to walk again. You were my mum again and I was thankful for our second chance. Then you left again. Suddenly it was 6 months. New medications, new doctors, new diagnosis. Improvement then decline. You begun falling asleep in the middle of eating, talking, moving. You started slurring words again. Toxins returned, more medication, more waiting. Further improvement, you could walk, you could talk. It was a roller-coaster that never ended and left me violently ill every single turn. Then it really begun. "kerryn, I can't breathe, get a doctor" "mum I'm sure it's anxiety. You're stressed, you're not sleeping, meditate with me" Youre getting worse, your breathing is wheezy and shallow, I run to a doctor. New information - your lungs are swollen with fluid. You were suffocating. You begun new treatments, new medications, you could breathe a little better. Until, as it always seemed to go, your body had enough. While doctors tried to drain the fluid from your abdomen I was in charge of keeping you calm and distracting you. I'd done this so often already that month it was natural to me now, but this time you couldn't settle. Three hours of treatments, tears, screaming and lots of blood, a new doctor emerged into our shrouded curtained area. "Christine I'm going to have to tell you the hard news. No one else seems to be willing to tell you, but this is it. You're dying. You have advanced severe end stage cirrhosis. Your liver has given up and there's nothing we can do. I give you two weeks maximum, but I don't think you'll live past this next few days." I couldn't breathe and the room went silent and all of the sudden this sound came from my mouth and I didn't recognise it. I was screaming. How is it possible you go from one year to a few days in a matter of weeks?! How did this happen? I refused to believe it. You refused to allow it. We researched further, we fought harder. But I knew this was it and I think you knew it too. I called my family with the news, which no one believed. I was left as the information source and the strong hold and for the life of me I still haven't the slightest clue how I managed that. I had to tell my older brother that this was it. I had to tell my siblings that mummy wouldn't be around any more. I had to write your will and get it signed and sorted. I started sleeping in the hospital with you, until I was told I couldn't do that any more and had to go to my room. The day you died, you called me at 4.43am but I didn't hear it. I saw you that morning, and you said "kerryn this is it. I'm not going to make it through today" ----- I arranged the family. You couldn't speak. You couldn't breathe. You couldn't stay awake. We had to leave so the doctors could do tests, I stayed to watch. Morphine, medication, oxygen. Morphine, medication, oxygen. You couldn't hold your own head up. Slumped over your food table. It looked like you were very drunk, passing out all over yourself. They said this is it, time to say goodbye. We got you into the bed that you hadn't been able to lay in for weeks, and laid you back. I left the room and arranged my family. We came in. You stopped breathing. You were gone. ----- I don't remember my last words with you, I remember the tears we all shed. It didn't feel real. We sat with you in that room for hours, just talking to you and holding each other. Social workers came, gave me the information I needed, booklets and pages and self help guides. The family said their last goodbyes and we walked back into the ward, where it was as if the worst thing that could possibly happen didn't just occur, everyone else's lives went on. The doctors cried with us. I sat in the room while they did the final tests to see if there was any life left in you at all. I sat still and watched as the doctor respectfully spoke to you as if you were still here. "I'm just going to lift your head now Christine, sorry" He told me that seeing your unresponsive eyes will be the worst part but I couldn't look away. Until he opened your eyelid and I could see that you were gone. That's when I snapped. I held your hand one last time and went back into the world, holding the booklets and guides, holding my siblings close. And just like that, there was nothing but memories left. -- You were gone. And how can that be real, when I feel you around me every day? Where are you now? You never believed in an afterlife. "when I go, I want it to be over for good, none of this sticking around bullshit". This song causes me to catch my breath again and remember that first day in ICU with you. When you were with us still. I'd do anything to go back and fix all of this before it went bad, but could I have really fixed it or just postponed it? I like to think I could have stopped this. But I'll never know whether that is true or not.