Mini T's Mini Meltdown (This is NOT a delicious recipe)

I went to a horror movie convention the other weekend in Birmingham.  It was brilliant, met up with friends and made some new ones, including Michael Myers himself, the actor Tony Moran.  It’s true, we’re FB pals, HE friend requested me. I taught him the word minge.  Fairly proud of that. 

 

Anyway, I got some photos with some Nightmare on Elm Street stars, Rod Lane from NOES 1 (Jsu Garcia) and Roland Kincaid from NOES 3 (Ken Sagoes) (paid for) and some pals took some snaps of us too.  And then I saw the photos, and I could have wept.  I look utterly horrendous in every single one.  I’m the size of a juvenile elephant, my face looks utterly ridiculous, I have about five chins and that weird top lip disappearing smile that always makes my teeth look more prominent than they are.  This is why I haven’t posted any of the pics up.  Even the ones I’ve paid for.  Even the one of me with Jsu Garcia AND Ken Sagoes (a photo op I’ll never get again) because of how I look.

 

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have major hang ups about my appearance, most noticeably my weight and then my actual physical appearance.  I thought I’d come to terms with the fact that I could look pretty at times, and hell, I even wore a bikini and posted it on the internet…I think that was more the prosecco though than me.  These photos from the horror con kicked off something in my brain which, coupled with a few other things, caused me to have a bit of a meltdown over the last weekend.

 

Anxiety had kicked me around on Friday and Saturday, culminating in me dropping out of a well overdue night out with my gal pals.  I couldn’t have coped with all the photos, the trying to make myself look presentable enough to be seen out with these women, my best friends, who are all goddesses in their own way.  In my brain, sometimes, I feel I don’t fit in with them.  And it’s something I can’t quite put my finger on.  It’s nothing they’ve ever said or done, it’s purely me and my own stupid brain.  So I ducked out of our night out because I knew I wouldn’t be able to cope with me ruining every photograph.  And I stayed in, with the cats for company.  Weirdly, as the time passed, and I knew I didn’t have to go out, my anxiety eased off a little.  Just a little though, it’s still here, kicking the crap out of me.

 

Writing about how I’m feeling is one of my main coping mechanisms.  It’s cathartic.  And I might overshare at times, but I’d rather do that than have all my feelings and emotions bottled up, ready to unexpectedly spill.  Folk call me brave for writing, I’m not.  I’m just sharing experiences I’ve had, that others might have had, so that maybe one other person can read it and know that other people get anxiety and depression. 

 

I’ve always been an advocate for speaking about my mental health; and I will continue to be.  I’m aware that others feel they can’t speak about it which is sad.  This is a conversation that we need to have, we need it to grow above just a hubbub; it needs to be a loud and angry conversation.  Mental health services are getting slashed by the government (and previous governments).  Mental health charities and other charity helplines are getting inundated with referrals, letters, emails, telephone calls from people suffering because there’s no mental health service near them, or that it’s been so slashed to the bone, they can’t get an appointment.

 

It’s not shameful to have a mental health issue.  We need to feel comfortable to speak about it.

 

 

 

Tears for Paris

I don’t know if I have the right to feel how I am feeling.  I was there, yes, but not close to where the attacks took place.  We were in Les Halles when everything kicked off.  In an Irish pub (story of my life) I got a BBC news alert telling me there had been a shooting in Paris.  David and I sort of shrugged it off as maybe a lone gunman or whatever.  We even joked that no-one would be in touch to see if we were okay cos it was Friday night and everyone was out getting wrecked.  Watching the Ireland/Bosnia match (terrible fog, even worse game), I went to post on Facebook that the owner had given me free Guinness due to my Irish heritage only to discover  my phone had died.  I thought nothing of it, happens all the time.  I sat and watched the game, eating my Taytos and drinking my Guinness.  David was watching the France/Germany game.  We had a bit of an argument about stopping out for ‘just one more’ (those who know me know full well it’s never ‘just one more’).  David wanted to go back nearer to our hotel in Montrouge as we weren’t too familiar with the centre of Paris he’d feel safer nearer to where we were staying.  We got the Metro and popped into a restaurant/café/bar nearer to our hotel for a last drink.  Both phones were now dead, so we had to resort to talking to one another… Imagine that.

 

Glancing at the TV in the bar, the news was on.  Everything looked a hell of a lot worse that we could have imagined, there were scenes from the France/Germany game, and a number that seemed to be rising all the time.  We drank up as quickly as we could, and briskly walked back to the hotel, passing several police cars and ambulances, their sirens wailing in the dark night.  We arrived to the hotel, plugged in our phones where they both promptly exploded with texts, emails, Facebook messages and voicemails, one in particular from my mother sounding severely distressed shouting in the background to my dad ‘She isn’t picking up her phone…’  We checked the BBC news website to see the full atrocity that had been committed in Paris that night, people out celebrating, just having a Friday out at a restaurant or a football match, or a gig attacked for no good reason.  Murder and rampage; Panic on the streets of Paris.  Obviously we got in touch with everyone and let them know we were okay.  Hundreds of people, people I don’t even know that well, just concerned that we were alive and safe.  It was overwhelming and we felt guilty for having that little joke earlier on.  I spoke to my dad and I’ve never heard so much relief in a single person’s voice.  Turns out he, along with Tom and Fran and others had phoned the bar we had been at to check we were okay.  We watched the French news in complete shock.  There was a state of emergency in France.  We were due to travel home on Saturday, what if we couldn’t? 

 

Well, as you all know, we got back safe and sound having spent the ENTIRE day at Charles De Gaulle airport (just as boring as you think it would be).  We’d intended spending our last day in Paris seeing things we hadn’t seen like the Arc de Triomphe and walking down the Champs-Élysées but it seemed safer to just go straight to CDG.  An uneventful tube ride from Heathrow to Euston and then a cab from Coventry station to Pie Bash and things seemed right and okay with the world again.  But I think that with the adrenaline of getting out of Paris and back home to Coventry had got me through, because on Sunday evening, the tears started and they’ve been on and off ever since.

 

The tears are a mixture of sadness, fear, rage and guilt.  Sadness because of the sheer loss of human life and devastation to so many families and to Paris herself; the fear has literally just hit me over the past few days; anger manifests itself in the question of why the fuck did these cunts think it was okay to attack and kill innocents?  And the guilt?  The guilt is that I lived but many others didn’t.  There should be 129 more living breathing beautiful humans on this planet but there aren’t because murderous cunts stole their lives.

 

It’s been odd seeing the reactions to what happened in Paris on Friday 13th: such sympathy and solidarity with the French populous, the simple act of changing one’s Facebook profile picture so it is the colour of the tricolore has been derided by many as slacktivism but fuck that, people have a fucking choice to change their FB photo just like those who didn’t change theirs (myself included) also had that choice.  It’s a sign of solidarity so take your derision and shove it right up your arse.  I am also very much aware of other atrocities that took and continue to take place and I am able to feel sadness for all of those things.  I am expressing myself about Paris because I was there, so it kinda hit me a little harder.

 

I’m not entirely sure what the point of this blog piece is, truth be told.  Probably catharsis, most likely.  I started back at work today and was dreading it because I was expecting the third degree about the whole thing; I was in tears last night when I was trying to go to sleep because I didn’t want to have to talk about it to anyone at work.  Thankfully, save for one person*, they’ve all been fine when I said I didn’t want to talk about.

 

I just can’t help but feel though that it isn’t right for me to cry, to have this grief or whatever it is.  I wasn’t directly affected, other than being in the city when it happened… I don’t know… I didn’t lose anyone, I didn’t get shot at, I wasn’t near an explosion… why do I feel this way?  It can’t just be because I’m a caring individual, David is a caring person and he hasn’t reacted this way… it’s caused me to take a break from one of my volunteering posts because if I’m in this state, I can’t think about being there for someone else completely.

 

This is the end…I’ve sort of tailed off… my mind isn’t in its usual (just about) working order.  Oh, and may thanks to Carl for the call this morning…I’m sorry you had to hear me cry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Me: I don’t want to talk about it

Them: Oh why, how close were you to it all?

Me: Not that close but…Excuse me *rushes to bathroom to cry*

 

 

Hello blogger, my old friend

Hi.  Me again.  I know I only ever write when I’m upset or something catastrophic has happened to me and for that I’m sorry, but I’ve got to get this out.

I hit 36 in May of this year.  I’m getting on (in dog years, I’d be dead).  As every media outlet seems to delight in telling me, I’m not getting any younger, so I should probably start a family or something.  Well dear readers, I’ve tried (not like the Immaculate Conception, obvs) actually, I should probably say WE’VE tried, and nothing is happening.  And it’s probably all my fault.

I’m morbidly obese, according to the BMI scale.  And I’m shocking trying to do anything about it.  Sure, we both try to eat healthier, but as with everything, that falls off during the month until we’re just eating junk and crap and getting takeaways instead of cooking.  And each time, I beat myself up, each time, I fall back there.  And I’m not an emotional eater; if anything I’m an emotional starver.

To add to things, I can’t exercise at the moment due to a stupid trip down the stairs that’s fucked my hip up (I can’t tell you how excited I am to have a man jam a steroid injection into my hip joint – but I don’t know when that’s going to happen – could be a fortnight, could be November).  So my movements are very restricted, walking can be agony at times, so treadmill running (which I actually enjoy) is way out of the question.

So being a fatty isn’t conducive to conception, it certainly also means that IVF isn’t an option either.  I’m so desperate to lose weight AND have a child that it’s all I can think about.  If I wasn’t such a great big fucking fat mess, then we’d be swimming in kids now, probably.  I’ve even enquired about a gastric bypass so that I can’t eat the world.  My circle of close friends, bar one, have at least one child.  I’ve jokingly said to my friend who has four that should she pop out another, could she just let me have it instead?  It’s easy to try to laugh it off; it isn’t so easy to hide the pain and the tears regarding a situation that is ultimately probably my own making.

I know I probably shouldn’t be whinging on about how I’m fat, I’m well aware it’s my own fault, it’s just losing weight isn’t easy, especially when you suffer with depression, low self-esteem and that nagging feeling that you’re an embarrassment to your friends and loved ones due to your size.  I grew up with the mind-set that fat cannot be attractive, although there are hundreds of THOUSANDS of exceptions to this rule.  I found myself perusing ‘pro ana’ sites as I browsed for which VLCD was best.  And that frightens me, but then again,  I’ve felt like a failure for not being able to develop an eating disorder for fucks sake – how screwed in the head am I?  Like that is how any normal person thinks.  I’ve downloaded a ‘virtual gastric band’ hypnosis app, knowing that it’ll just be mumbo jumbo bollocks and won’t help me a jot (still going to try though, I have to). 

I suppose this is heading, ultimately, to the fact that I am just terrified that I am never going to have a child of my own, I’m never going to give birth, hold nine months’ worth of work, blood, cells, love; nine months’ worth of David and me mixed together into a teeny tiny mewling pink ball of new human.  I know there’s adoption which is something that we’ve discussed in the past, but to me, right at this moment in time, I want to feel how being pregnant feels, the tiredness, the puke, the ankle swelling, the constant need for weeing, the contractions, all of it.

If I start dieting now, I don’t know how long it will take for me to get to a weight where I can actually realistically conceive, assisted or not.  I’m scared I’ll be too old; I’ll be 40 or over.  But Christ knows, I have to do it, I have to try.

 

Try harder, you stupid critter.

Wheeeeeeeeeeee..........CRASH (exploding bomb sound effect)

Edit:  This has now been resolved.  My psychologist has sorted this out for me.  I still stand by writing this post, I was NOT being over dramatic - a form of treatment that has been helping me cope was threatened with being taken away.  In these times where mental health issues are more accepted into society, funding and services for mental health patients are being slashed.  It's disgraceful.

To Whom It May Concern:

Following a particularly difficult and emotional psychology session today, you felt the need to drop a bomb on me.  I shouldn’t be having psychology sessions any more, I should have been thrown out to my GP surgery (who really only deal with IAPTS and we all know how helpful THEY are).  You told me that I was only supposed to have been supported by you for six sessions… Many apologies for my being more nuts than I first thought.  Six sessions had only just started to establish a relationship between myself and my psychologist… each of my sessions delves deep into the part of me that hates me, the part that undermines me, the part that gives me suicidal ideas – the part of me that gave me suicidal ideas at the start of this month.  I’ve been dealing with her for about 30 or so years so six hour and a half sessions didn’t even TOUCH that…

So I sat there today, as you told me, advising me you understand what I’m going through because you’ve been through it before – bullshit.  You have been through your experience, and I am going through mine.  I sat and tried to not cry, and succeeded until I left you, then sloped off to the toilets and let it out.

Mental illness can’t be cured instantly.  It’s a constant work in progress – at the start of the six sessions, I thought I’d be fixed – how wrong I was.  I’m more damaged than I first thought, and now to think I might not be able to work with my therapist again seems unbearable at this moment in time.  I don’t value myself, although I am learning to thanks to him…if his help is withdrawn, I could deteriorate – I have issues with feelings of rejection, I know it won’t be his fault but I will feel rejected if our sessions stop right now. 

It seems that someone, somewhere should’ve informed me that it was only six sessions and then adios whether you’re fixed or not, but they did not.  And now the time and the cost of my mental health is being called into question.  I can’t help being damaged, but I know someone who can help me get fixed.

Yours hopelessly,

Mini T