About Me

Contrary to what this blog may suggest, I’m not just obsessed with men, alcohol and self harm.

I have a loving and secure family. I have a lot of great friends (and a few shit ones!) to whom I’m loyal and protective. I had a delightfully middleclass upbringing, and love my dog to pieces. I’m a maths student with high grades. A bar supervisor at the weekends. I took a gap year and travelled round the world. I volunteer a lot, both abroad and at home, and I’m very involved at my student union.

However

I am also very bad at expressing my emotions. And my emotions can get pretty extreeme. From about 10 I thought that there was something I should be doing to punish and better myself. I began to diet, at worrying levels. I would be on about 700 carefully counted calories a day, whereas my partner in crime, best friend HP, would say she was on about 400. I would also do ridiculous amounts of exercise, sit ups being my favourite, I would do hundereds a day.

From the age of about 13, I realised that I could no longer hide this from my family. The last thing I ever want to do is hurt my parents, and so I began to eat normally. Even with a solid family and a good group of friends, I struggled to feel accepted at school. I don’t know why I first did it, but I began to self-harm, with bic razor blades removed from the plastic casing.

I always felt ignored at home, even though my parents were very loving. When I reached 14 or 15, my younger sister began playing up. My dad and her would have vicious arguments, often resulting in them hitting each other, while I just sat in my room listening to the fights. I soon learnt that showing anger was a negative thing, as my mum would tell them both off in a calm way, and chastise my father for letting his emotions get the better of him. I hid.

I began to take my pain and anger out on my dolls, biting off the heads of my barbies, and burning their skin with nail polish remover. I was angry at them for how perfect they always seemed. I would meet up with this woman who ran a youth group I attended for one on one seshions. Nothing special, just chats in starbucks. I felt she truely understood the burdens I felt of not being a problem for my parents, and having to hold my friends together. (HP was still eating badly, and her and our other best friend DTT also self harmed. DTT has a very abusive family and is always hit and bullied at home. So I felt I needed to put a brave face on for them). Again I was internalising my problems to avoid others from feeling pain.

By the time I finally got to university, I was seriously abusing alcohol. I would (and still do) drink in excess of 20 units whenever the oppotunity arrised(for example out at clubs). Once drunk, I would get paranoid about friends and others, I would cry histerically, and hit people, even my closest male friends would recieve blows to the face on a frequent basis. I would lock myself in toilets and break glass, eating it and cutting myself. Smear the blood on the walls to shock the next user, and watch the blood drip down my legs once I went back out to the dancefloors of clubs.

I also got very sick at the beggining of university, I got glandular fever, and it caused me to be incredibly tired and depressed for the majority of first year. I would spend about 20hours a day in my bed a day during the first term, and although I felt more awake during the spring, I just didn’t see the point of life.

I began to see a counseller, who helped me begin to understand that the way I thought about things wasn’t the same as other people. Instead of coming up with logical explanations, I would run away with the worst possible senario everytime. She started me on CBT. I also learnt that harming myself does not communicate how I feel to the outside world. How could they understand what this or that cut represented, or what I meant when I bit or hit my friends? Unfortunatly I had to stop attending sessions at the end of first year. And I’ve been stuggling alone ever since. I think that the amount I self-harm has decreased exponentially, but I am making worse and worse decisions about men.

One of my other weeknesses is men, who are described & dated in the “About Men” page. All I’ll say here is I don’t makegood decisions, I never think about consequence, and so I’ve become increasingly ridiculous with who I sleep with and why.

Last year, at the end of second year, one of my closest friends AA from university committed suicide. I returned to this jumbly blog to try to vent some of my feelings.  Hopefully I am going to be writing a lot more here, and create something that would be interesting for both me and the reader.

Also, I would love if people started commenting – I know you’re reading because I can see the stats!

Rachel