Right. It's time to 'fess up.
If you're a long time reader of CYH you may have realised that I've really not been myself this year. It's fairly easy to tell when I'm not feeling great. I stop posting pictures of myself. I stop posting altogether. I hide away. So, yes. I've not been feeling great. It's not something I want to discuss in any detail, suffice to say I don't really know what's happened to me this year. I seem to have lost myself. After C I promised myself that I would never let my happiness be defined by someone else.
And it worked. I got thin (ish) and happy. Happier than I'd ever been. That picture up there? Lady decadence? That's a Markus Lupfer dress and I bought it because ohthedecadence is my Twitter name. The phrase came about years ago, during a very drunken evening with friends. The word decadence entered our vernacular and we used it to excess. I became known as Decadent Helen. To me it meant happy, exuberant, joyous in the extreme. But I never really felt like that... not until last year.
Then I met a boy at the start of this year. And I kinda liked him. And, inevitably, it went tits up. There were subtle hints about it, if you knew what to look for. Here and here, for example. And definitely here, which was a direct quote from a conversation between me and S. Anyway, my confidence ended up getting crushed in a fairly horrific way and, for some reason, I just never really recovered from it. It brought up old issues from the past and they grew bigger than I could cope with, resulting in some not-so-great happenings.
I'm fairly ashamed to admit it, to be honest. I'm fairly ashamed to admit that I started to hate the way I looked. That I started to avoid looking in the mirror and certainly avoid taking photographs of myself. Towards the end of last year I actually loved the way I looked. Call me vain if you like but I did. I even felt... sexy. Which had never happened before. I felt confident and attractive and so happy. So I'm more than fairly ashamed that I let that get ruined and that I've let it affect me so badly. My state of mind has been pretty bad for the majority of this year and I'm not proud of that. Not at all. Self doubt is a terrible thing and, for me, when it creeps in it affects everything, resulting in some fairly erratic behaviour.
I just wanted to put this out there, really. To show that there is a very real reason why I've not been around so much and why the content of the blog has been disjointed at best. I rejoined Slimming World last night, in an effort to lose the monumental amount of weight that I've gained back due to the Extreme Sadness Anti-Diet (tm). I'm not sure if I've ever really posted on here about my issues with food. About the demons that have haunted me for the best part of 15 years. I don't think I have and I don't intend to now but, if you are interested, the whole warts 'n' all story can be found on my other blog. It doesn't make for pleasant reading, just to warn you.
I am on my way back, it just might take me a little while to get there. Until then, have some photographs of a girl who was learning to love the body she had...
