I missed my Third Birthday…

I started the blog 3 years ago, on 17th August 2008.

Started with a depression, a burgeoning running habit.

An ongoing lack of confidence in my own skin. Always vowing to go on a diet, and then slipping up. Exercising, sometimes for the love of it, mostly to obliterate calories. This blog was the forum for that struggle. On reflection, it was a bit sad. On the surface, though, I had it all – great job, married, nice home in good suburb.

Things started to change last year. I started to look at the reasons why I was overeating. Defences, mainly eating and shopping and shooting my mouth off, were chipped away and much more uncomfortable truths were exposed.

Another bout of depression, early this year. I started running again. I managed to recover from the depression, start a research career, become a consultant, a “boss”. I signed up for a marathon. Lots of quite big things, both achieved and planned. I approached these things with increasing intensity, trying to stifle the alarm bells ringing. The feeling that soon, my life would be over. That I had to make the most of it all now, because, in the future, I had to get used to feeling empty and unfulfilled.

The work and effort gave way to “Why? WHY???”

I think all of my readers know what came next.

Rather than just whinging about my weight and what size jeans I wore, I actually had to have a very good hard look at myself, my life. What role certain others played in that life.

The blog became much less of a forum for body image neurosis, and more about bigger and more disconcerting things. Some nice things, too. I realise it may make for more uncomfortable reading, and I thank everyone for bearing with me. It represents the tip of the iceberg. It is free therapy, in addition to the $$ spent on formal therapy! And you, my friends, are my mini-therapists.

The blog has helped me integrate my past traumas/depression into myself. It has charted my struggles and victories. It has helped me make some fantastic, very dear friends. I have had nearly 25000 hits (not all of them me), made nearly 500 posts, had over 1300 comments. Not one of them discouraging or nasty  – fingers crossed, this continues.

The running is still there, but the depression and eating/body image issues are not, at least, at the moment. I am near my lowest adult weight, and close to the arbitrary number I had set three years ago. However, now, the number matters much less. I feel comfortable and sexy in my own skin, I have control around food and have learned to love good food without abusing it. I have reconciled my love of food and wine with my need for physical health. I do not shop compulsively.

I have really learned that I cannot have enough of what I don’t want, and started figuring out what I actually want, and what really matters. Perhaps, for the first time ever, I feel like everything will be alright.

This is very liberating.

Happy third birthday, blog. May there be many more. Like a toddler, I am responding to base needs – eating, sleeping and crying when I need to (within reason), and learning to be nurtured. I am finding my spirit and independence and building it from the ground up.