apparently doing a degree and is really bad at blogging. like, seriously. look at the dates. it's bad.

So, this is apparently becoming an annual thing. I feel like, even for someone as unorganized as me, one post a year is achievable, even if...

| five years |

So, this is apparently becoming an annual thing. I feel like, even for someone as unorganized as me, one post a year is achievable, even if there’s no rhyme or reason to them.
Here’s the thing, the only real reason I’m writing this post is because I’m too much of a coward to say it out loud. It’s been five years and it’s still difficult to talk about verbally and I couldn’t tell you why, only that it is.
My last proper relapse into self-harm was roughly five years ago this semester. I think it’s around September, honestly I kind of blocked it out so it really could be any time around now. But still. Five years.
I still have the scars. I still have the memories and the urges and the battles. It never goes away, not really.
But I made it.

As typical of this time of the year, my brain has gone into possible meltdown and instead of emphasizing what is good, it immediately thinks of what is bad. What is broken. I’m very good at focusing on what is going wrong currently in my life, magnifying every issue until I’m pretty sure that nothing is good and will ever be good again and I’m trudging along without any kind of aim. I will never achieve anything.
So I’m using this post to show myself that isn’t true. It can’t be. Because five years ago, when I decided enough was enough and I had too many lines up my arms showing me that bad times can never truly leave, I thought it was impossible. I thought any kind of normal life, any kind of real feeling, was impossible.

(depressed but still cute)

Losing a coping mechanism is destroying. You go through days drowning, except now someone has taken away your armbands and Jesus Christ it’s been so long since you didn’t have them that you’ve forgotten how to swim. Your lungs get more and more water inside, sloshing around, slowing your breathing until every breath hurts. Every day, you get a little fuller. Every day, your breathing gets a little slower. Until suddenly, it’s like you’ve been drained. Someone’s poked a hole in you and you’re finally leaking and the air is coming back and the water is fucking off. And you’re learning how to swim again. Instead of drowning, you remember how to float. So you float. And you’re not moving forwards, you’re not saving yourself really, not yet, but you’re floating. You’re managing. And then you start moving your arms. Slowly. It still hurts, you’re still rusty, not quite good enough to front crawl so you just doggy paddle, stopping every thirty seconds for breath. But eventually, eventually, you’ve swum so far that you can see the land, getting faster with every day. You can see safety, the place you thought didn’t even exist, and fucking hell you’ve done it. You can look back at that exact spot that you drowned in, you can see how empty it looks now without you there, screaming.
Recovery is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’m still doing it, like I said. Those urges don’t ever go away fully, they don’t ever truly shut the fuck up, no matter how much you try and drown them the way they used to with you. But you can muffle them. And the more they’re muffled, the slower they get, the quieter. And it’s easy to ignore them and get on with your life on land.

(15 and never quite mastered costume making)

Okay look, I’m an English student – metaphors are my thing. I’m not really sure how to display a point in other ways so just go with it.
But at one point, I really was drowning. Fifteen year old me hadn’t just forgotten how to swim, it was like she’d never learned and she’d forgotten how to talk and breathe and there was a general acceptance that this was life now. This IS life now. Nothing will change. Nothing will get better.
But that just isn’t true. Rough patches last however long they last, but they never last forever and the fact is that it’s been five years and I’m still here, still breathing, lungs only filled with a little bit of water. I’m alive, which fifteen year old me wouldn’t have comprehended. AND SO – if fifteen year old me can’t believe where I’m at now, then twenty year old me won’t believe where I’m at at twenty five and so forth and so forward. Just keep swimming and all that.
I survived the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life. I can survive anything. I can survive the memories I know is associated with so many of the scars, I can survive a deadline tomorrow (that I’m definitely not procrastinating by writing this), I can survive a degree and whatever else is thrown at me because the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do was entirely to do with me. I caused the problem, I realised the problem, and fuck it I fucking kicked that problem so hard it’s still bruised to this day, which means any problem other people present has nothing on me.

At least, that’s what I’m telling myself in order to get this essay written.


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