Tuesday 25 March 2014

New Year - New ME

Well, not quite as we’re almost a third of the way into the year now and there has been no sign of my motivation.  It crept back quite quietly a few weeks back and has been quietly prodding and poking my determination awake.  I am now determined to do something positive about my appearance (long time readers of the blog know I have a lot of hang ups about how I look and in particular my weight).  I’ve always been fat, in my head this started when at about age 5 or 6 at primary school, one girl decided she’d call me fat at lunchtime.  I stopped eating my lunch for a bit and my ma wasn’t too happy with me.  It was not an eating disorder I hasten to add.  It was a response to having been called fat by a peer.  But the damage was done and that word has stayed with me for life.
I was a chubby kid, the kind of kid with ‘puppy fat’ that would go when I got older.  It didn’t.  I grew from a chubby kid to a tubbier teenager: PE was hell and the showers… well forget about it.  I was never really very feminine as a kid, or a teen.  I hated dresses and preferred jeans, cords, check shirts (thanks grunge) and the like.  Shopping was always hell, and I only ever went out of necessity.  I was a tubby girl but still had quite large boobs so still kind of looked in proportion.
Yet since that childhood lunch time, I always identified with being fat because I had to be, right?  My fellow classmate wouldn’t have said that to me unless it was true, right?  She wouldn’t have said it solely to hurt me?  I know full well she will have forgotten that lunchtime in the canteen of Holy Family infant school when she first identified me as fat, but I haven’t.  It was the first time I can remember that fat was used as an insult, and it’s a pretty powerful one too.  And one I still connect with, even when in 2005 I got to a size 12, a relatively ‘normal’ dress size and body shape… not for me it wasn’t.  being shorter of stature, I was still classed as obese – I had a bony arse for Jesus sake, but no… still obese… one person I remember saying to me ‘Yeah that’s great and everything but you could stand to lose a bit more, couldn’t you?’  and the phrase that goes through my head, said by more than one person on occasion ‘You’re too pretty to be that fat’.  To me, that says that says you can either be pretty OR you can be fat… you can’t be both, that’s not how it works.  You see it everywhere today, fat shaming of people, maybe women who have just had a child being hounded by the paparazzi as to why they haven’t got back to their pre baby shape, or a good looking guy relaxing on the beach with maybe a little paunch ‘[Insert Celeb Name Here] looks as though he has enjoyed his holiday a little TOO much’.
And when you try to do something positive and motivating, you can get shouted down about that too.  I started doing the Couch to 5K programme a couple of years ago (it was during that summer of Ireland’s woeful performance at the European championships).  David cajoled me into doing it and I really quite enjoyed it.  We’d run across Hearsall Common for as long as the programme ran for, and I felt wonderful.  I’d never been a runner ever, came last in my first ever school sports day running race, but here I was, being able to build up my running and my stamina and it felt incredible.  I was fearful of others for a while until one night a bloke called out of me ‘Fair play to you love, I should be doing that myself’.  I was on nodding terms with some of the joggers who regularly went for a run on the common.  It was going really well until one day some pricks in a car shouted fat abuse at me.  I tried ignoring it but it was too much to take; I was 6 years old again being called fat for no reason, being abused for no reason whatsoever.  I burst into tears and that ended my few months of Couch to 5K.  I was too scared to go back and do it again.  My wheels fell off my exercising wagon and that was it.
I realise this is just a big old load of rambles, but I’m trying to explain why I am how I am (I’m well aware I don’t actually have to explain myself to anyone).
So, after a trip to the GP this morning, I discovered that the NHS does a referral scheme to Slimming World – I was weighed and promptly referred.  Basically, you get 12 weeks of meetings for free…this is mega because I was actually going to join a slimming class next week when I get paid.  And my mojo is returning to put me through going back to the gym where, around the body beautifuls and the skinny girls on exercise bikes, I can try to fit in, get back on my treadmill and run like fuck…I’m going to try to run away from that memory from when I was 6, away from the car full of wankers shouting names at me but most importantly, I’m going to try to run into a newer, healthier, slimmer me.  I have NOT been pressured to do this, I feel its time to change and I feel healthier in my mind and motivated to do it.
Watch this space.
Darn tootin', pie. We can DO this.
Nb: This will NOT become a diet/exercise blog site.  I promise. 

Wednesday 5 March 2014

Remember me? I'm the one who had your baby's eyes.

Blimey.  It’s a while.  Tara’s blog of despair and anxiety.  Here’s more rambling on anyway…

So, as some of you know (mainly folk I have on Facebook) 2014 has not yet turned out to be The International Year of Tara Court as I predicted in my final blog post of 2013.  In fact, the first three weeks saw me plunged into more work based drama and despair.  The Union got involved and all kinds.  And I’m still not really free of it as there’s one issue that’s still rumbling on.  But do you know what I learned?  I learned not to care.  I learned to not give one single flying fuck about it all because, quite simply put, there’s more to life.  

Yeah I had meetings where I had been in floods of tears and had had to ask them to leave the room instead of just sitting and watch me break down. 

I’ve also had meetings where I’ve been berated for the most insignificant thing that if I told you, you’d go ‘What the fuck? Are you kidding?’ (to which I’d go ‘I know right.  Fucking STUPID’).  And all through it, my resolve was getting stronger and stronger until I’ve now got to the point where nothing really matters where this is concerned anymore.  If only I’d felt this way back at the start of my depressive episode in February of last year…to be able to laugh at the ridiculousness of some situations, but then I guess everything we go through in life we learn from.

I learned from that last depressive episode that I absolutely do deserve my place on this earth.  Yeah, I might still have self esteem issues and be hung up about how I look and my weight etc, but that’s what the human race do.  We’re never happy with how we are and are always seeking to look and change ourselves in some small way (dyeing our hair) or some big way (changing jobs, retraining, getting surgery because you’ve never liked your nose).  Sure, I’m not necessarily comfortable in my own skin, but I’m coming to terms with being comfortable with who I am.  And how I am.  And my funny ways that wind up the people I love.

It was said to me last week by someone that sometimes you have to hit rock bottom to claw your way back up, and in some respects this is quite true, although given that this was one ofthem who gave me a hard time over the past six months (the one who decided I didn’t need my psychology sessions anymore), I declined take it the way that this person had intended it.  But in my anxiety and despair, my suicidal feelings, the whole blackness of my condition, I’m hoping I’m clawing my way back up, cos I’m sure I hit rock bottom… I had to have…there can’t be anything more.