There are many ways in which my self hatred has manifested throughout my life, not least in my inability to view myself as worthy enough to spend my own money on. I have rarely spent money on myself.
A couple of years ago, I started treating myself a little with the odd massage and finally started having my haircut regularly in ever increasingly wild styles. I was spending money on myself.
Then came the pants conversation. My husband will only buy swanky pants, at around £6 a pair. I would only buy 5 packs of pants from Primark at approximately £2 a pack and with around 0p of good quality material. On an occasion where I was forced to be in TK Maxx while hubs looked for pants (and bamboo socks because he’s a pretentious prick), I found myself in the lingerie aisle looking at knickers. I found a nice pack of Laura Ashley pants for £15. £5 a pair. Steep. And then I found another pair of beautiful silk fitted short pants. £8 a pair. Oooooh.
Why did I view my genitals as unworthy of joy? Silk or lace, anything better than the horrifying scratchy pretend Primark cotton made for a Women’s shape that doesn’t even exist in the Western world. Why did my hips not deserve to be encased in figure hugging floral patterns? Why did my hungry stomach and voluptuous bum not deserve to be caressed by the best material? Why did I not deserve to feel beautiful?
So I bought them. And the next time hubs dragged me to the hell hole that is TKMaxx, I bought some more. Recently, I threw away all of the Primark pants after a weekend watching Marie Kondo. They did not bring me joy. My fitted, figure hugging Laura Ashley pants did though. My shapely silk pants did. My snug shorts did. My floral, lace trimmed full figure lingerie did. And as I began to feel joy, not just in wearing these beautiful items but in buying them too, I began to feel more beautiful in my own skin. And in my own pants.
It started a cascade of loving myself enough to spend my own money on myself. Of viewing myself as worthy enough to be of monetary value. I bought a new Northface goretex jacket last week. I’ve been umming and ahhhing about this coat for weeks. Done. I went to the hairdressers. More of my own money deservedly spent on myself. And then I tried to order some new walking boots. My bank decided I had had enough treating for one day and declined my card before I received a call from the fraud squad. Treating myself was so unusual, my bank thought I was a fraudster.
I’ll phone my bank, reassure them that I am not a fraudster and I am actually just treating myself. To things I need. But still, I’m buying what I actually want and not the cheapest object can find. Then, I will be booking myself into a spa for my birthday. Floatation therapy, full body massage, facial. I might even treat myself to a manicure AND a pedicure.
Because I am worth it. I deserve to have what I want. And after 10 months of saving money and paying off debts, why shouldn’t I celebrate myself as my birthday approaches?! Almost 34. Married, (part) home-owner, dog Mum, Mother of Cats, lecturer, student. I wasn’t any of these things a few years ago and look how quickly things change. Almost 34. I don’t know where my younger self thought I might be at 34. I doubt she even believed in the ability to be happy, relatively mentally stable, confident, content. And yet here we are. She certainly wouldn’t believe that I would be almost 11 months sober as I celebrate my 34th birthday next month. She wouldn’t have thought she would be worthy enough to deserve nice things.
She is though.

Last night, I walked to a poetry event on my own, stood on stage and performed some of my work for the first time. Prior to leaving the house, there was a moment where I started to try and talk myself out of going, my little inner prick telling me that my work is shit and nobody wants to hear it. And I shut the little fucker down.

Because whether I judge my work to be shit or not is absolutely not the point here. The point was to a) attend an event alone, b) get over my harrowing stage fright and c) practice performing some of my work before I stand on a stage at the Arts Centre and open a show in a few weeks.
I would not have been able to do any of this last year. My anxiety was at its peak and drinking to overcome it fed back in to the self-sabotaging cycle. My self-esteem, never exactly described as flying high, was at an all time low. I had recently started a new job and the other job that I loved was going down hill. Hubs was ill and lost his job, I was travelling for work, working two jobs with full time hours for the first time in over a year and life became overwhelming.

I didn’t practice self care then. I was still under the impression that life had to be a series of constant achievements. I now know that it doesn’t, life only has to be lived.

Recently, I have been focused on my thought processes and my weight being signposts for my sober success and I have missed other developments that are directly linked.

Like my new found confidence. Or the self-esteem I have developed for the first time in my life. Or the level of contentment I feel at all times (apart from when I’m teaching Construction GCSE English and revert to being filled with impatience, frustration and irritability). Or how comfortable I am to be alone at home all weekend working on projects, lesson planning, writing. Or how much I value the joyful space my husband and I are creating in our home. Or how little I cry. Or how infrequently I lose my temper. Or how often I see beauty in the world.

I’ve had a couple of conversations recently about how everything just suddenly seems to have clicked into place. I’ve been chasing the feeling of being an adult for my entire adult life and sometimes I feel as though I am somewhere close to being an actual, partial functioning adult. I thought it was just something that happened to you with age but it isn’t, it’s another thing we have to really work at.

My life has changed immeasurably since I stopped drinking. For the first time in my life, I know who I am. I know what I want. And I know how to get it. I am financially secure. I am becoming more qualified. I love my job. I fucking adore my husband. I have new friendships that fill me with joy. More established friendships that almost seem to have recovered from the minefield of my sobriety. I’ve got a fucking dog. A dog! How adult is that?!

Self-development, progression, growth takes time to come to fruition. They don’t suddenly appear over night with a gold star and an adulting certificate. It takes hard work, effort, perseverance to change who you are, to be who you have always wanted to be. It takes sacrifice, tenacity and sometimes pain to question everything about yourself, to figure out what you want and who you are. It is not easy and it is likely that you will lose some of the people around you. But here’s the kicker…

It’s a small price to pay to be happy in yourself.

Recently, I’ve started reining my final addiction in. Food. Oh food, I love you so much.

I’ve never really seen food as the same kind of addiction as booze, drugs, cigarettes or sex (all intrinsically linked in my little addictive mind and sometimes all four at once. Wait, five. Food was involved too.) as it has never caused the same kind of damage to my physical or mental health. Or my life. I’ve never had a relationship breakdown because of food. Not to my knowledge anyway. Although Hubs and I were close once when I ate the last of the Ben and Jerry’s.

Since being diagnosed with degenerative scoliosis, my health has been at the forefront of my mind. My eating patterns around boredom, sadness, frustration no longer serve me. After all, the more weight I am carrying, the more difficulties I’m going to have with my spine. One day in the future, I might need major surgery and in that scenario, I need to know I am at my fittest and healthiest to ensure a higher success rate.

I’m now back down to my pre-Christmas weight loss having lost 6lbs in the last two weeks. I’m two stone down since May last year. Last week, I compared my measurements to those taken at the start of my recovery journey. I’ve lost 2.5 inches off my boobs (I tried to explain this to hubs as 2.5 inches of back fat so he didn’t have some kind of heart attack). I’ve lost 4.5 inches from my waist. I’ve lost 5 inches from my beer belly. 2 inches from my legs. An inch from my arms. And all of this without getting my diet under Control. Because let me tell you, if there is one thing I am good at, it’s replacing one addiction with another. And food, glorious food, what a fun time it has been.

Imagine what I could achieve though if I actually put my mind to it?! So put my mind to it I will. I started using the Noom app a couple of weeks ago, to track my food, and have seen my fruit and veg intake increase dramatically. I’ll also be starting Slimming World today for a little more accountability.

Over the next six weeks, I would like to lose at least half a stone, taking me under 14 stone for the first time in about 4 years. I’m really aiming for a stone (or close to), achievable at a 2lb a week weight loss. I’m already choosing healthier options when I eat out and I even skipped dessert at the weekend.

So D-day it is. Chub Club starts tonight. I’ve never been to a Slimming World group before. I tend to avoid group activities with a heavy female bias due to my incandescent rage and desire to kill. I mean my social anxiety and sensory processing difficulties. Obviously.

I’m not sure what to expect. And, for a change, I’m not going in with ridiculously high expectations of befriending every person in the room and losing six stone in a week. It will probably take me months to speak to other members of the group and that’s OK. I’m becoming more comfortable with my introversion as I get older. And weaker. Less able to fend off the pack.

If there’s one thing I have learned from my recovery, it is that these things take time. I might not hit my target weight by Summer but then I don’t really know what my target weight is. I want to be fitter, faster, stronger. I want to reign in my last emotional response to a stimulus while I’m still actively working on managing my emotions and thought processes. I want to have fun, try something new, explore a side of myself that I didn’t know existed. A side that is calm and controlled. A side that doesn’t reach for whatever it can shove in its greedy little mouth to make the pain stop. A side that is mature enough to overcome the pain and finally lay it to rest.

So here goes. For any of you folx who do go to slimming clubs, what top tips do you have for me before my first session?

I hadn’t really thought about grief and sobriety until yesterday. It just never came up. Historically, grief would have seen me reaching for the bottle. “Celebrating” the memory of a person when in fact it would merely be an attempt to drown my sorrows, literally. To drink enough to stop thinking about the feelings I have spent my life running from.

Yesterday was tough. Uninvited thoughts scurried through my mind and for the first time in my sobriety, I really had to work on altering those thought patterns. Instead of remembering a hospital bed, a priest, a last breath; I acknowledged those thoughts and brought happier thoughts to mind. Childhood holidays, Christmases, football games, days out.

I still cried. Quite a bit actually. I can feel the familiar pain behind my nose now as I try to hold back tears. A huge part of recovery is about allowing yourself to feel. We run so much from our feelings that as adults, we have to learn how to manage them, often for the first time. Recently, I’ve been thinking about how I do this.

1. Give yourself permission to feel.

You are allowed to be sad or angry or frustrated. You’re allowed to feel negative emotions. We can’t always be happy, that’s not possible. Cry. Feel the pain. Acknowledge it. Cry some more.

2. Write it down.

Write down what you’re feeling and get real. Be honest. I wrote a piece this week that raged at a situation. It started off nicely while I was thinking about the qualities I want to exhibit. I was thoughtful, kind, compassionate. But as my anger and sadness flooded the page, my diplomacy went out of the window. I raged, I swore, I shouted. And then I saved the letter I will never send and will stumble upon it at some time in the future, read through it and think, “fucking hell Kiki.”

3. Why?

Think about why you feel that way. Really think about it. I went to an event last weekend that talked about leaning in to people who hurt you. Having removed multiple toxic relationships from my life over the last few years, I found this difficult to work through. I’m still thinking about it now. Why do I find this so difficult? What is this telling me about myself? How can I work through this? Challenge your thought processes.

4. Alter your thought processes.

This is the tough one. I have had to learn how to recognise toxic or negative thoughts and deliberately change those thought processes. The more I practise this, the easier it gets. For example; yesterday painful thoughts of death invaded my mind unbidden. I acknowledged these thoughts briefly before replacing them with memories of better times. Or any time my inner prick tells me that I’m not good enough, I physically laugh. “Hah! Have you met me?”

5. Channel your creativity.

Whether it’s writing, poetry, painting, singing, music making or just printing some pictures and framing them; honour your feelings creatively.

One of my heroes, Frida Kahlo, once said, “I tried to drown my sorrows, but the bastards learned to swim.” We can drown (or smother) our feelings with alcohol, drugs, food, sex but ultimately, the feelings still exist and temporary fixes only add more to the mix. More shame, more guilt, more sadness. The only way to truly heal is to work your arse off at it. Use every resource at your disposal, Google how to manage grief, read every book on the subject you can find, listen to every podcast.

Grief isn’t just an emotion centred around the death of a loved one, it can be any loss. The loss of a friendship, the loss of a relationship, the loss of a family. Grief can be centred around PTSD, childhood abuses, adult abuses. Learning how to recognise different emotions, to allow yourself to feel them, is one of the greatest tools at your disposal. Teach yourself how to use it.

Thanks for joining me!

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

Leo Tolstoy

This is a new blog page for me after eight months blogging at https://mycathasacne.blogspot.com. So why the change?

I set up My Cat Has Acne as a blog about mental health a couple of years ago and I didn’t know what to call it. It became My Cat Has Acne after, well, after one of my cats was diagnosed with acne. Yes, cat acne does exist.

When I quit drinking on May 17th 2018, I started using the site to log my journey. I didn’t expect to make it past a few weeks and yet here I am, over eight months later and still on my journey.

So to celebrate, I’m treating myself to a shiny new blog that is dedicated to my sobriety and lots of other things that have come up since I quit drinking. Anxiety, depression, PMDD and Degenerative Scoliosis. Poetry. Spoken word. Finances. Health. Education. Happiness. And much, much more.

So thank you for stopping by, for reading my babbling and for searching a random selection of conditions that may have led you here. It’s an honour to get to know you, to hear your stories and to share mine with you.

Thank you.