Give yourself permission to let go of the stuff that holds you back.

(Background by: bloomingrosexeniia@deviantart)

I have been having an eye opening past few days that have really been making me think about the decisions that have to be made in my life in order for me to be able to move forwards with myself and look towards the future. One thing I know I need to do is to learn to give myself permission to let go of the things in the past that still continue to hold me back. I, like most, have been through a lot of things in my life and a lot of them still sit with me, still hold onto me like ghosts that won't let me go. I know I need to throw them off if I ever want to move forward but that's easier said than done.

There are a lot of things that you will go through in life that will affect you and will be very difficult to get rid of but the things that you are holding onto are preventing you from living the life you deserve to live. I'm not talking about just past experiences, past mistakes, but relationships too that you're holding onto, clutching at for dear life when they are doing nothing but hurting you. If there are people in your life who don't care about you, who bring you down, you are absolutely allowed to let them go.

There gets a point in life where you need to be selfish. There is nothing wrong with being selfish sometimes. That word is shamed and put down to mean that if you think about yourself for once that it's bad but it's absolutely not. Sometimes you do need to put yourself first and think about your own needs and there's nothing wrong with that. I think we get caught up in catering to other people that we forget that we are worthy of and deserving of nurturing and sometimes only we can cater to our own needs and nurture ourselves. At the end of the day we count on ourselves to create our own happiness and if we are holding on to experiences, mistakes and relationships that simply hold us back and pull us down we are never going to live happy lives. There's nothing wrong with wanting to pursue our own happiness. Looking after ourselves doesn't mean we stop looking after others and we can absolutely find a balance between the two and staying in relationships with people who hurt us is not a healthy balance.

Sometimes you need to sit down and really think about the things in your life that is holding you back. Are there relationships you have at the moment where the person seems to do nothing but pull you down and insult you? Does a person in your life only talk to you when they need something, only associate you because it benefits them? Do you find yourself stopping yourself from doing things that make you happy because you are thinking about times in the past when things have gone wrong? Are anxieties about your past stopping you from progressing to your future? Now is the time to think about those things and give yourself permission to move past them. Sometimes you may need professional help to move through past issues and this is absolutely ok, go and seek that help that you need. If there are people in your life that you need to let go of, you can begin making steps to gradually distance yourself from those people and get out of those relationships. Sometimes this may be a relationship that is more serious such as family or partners, in which case this could be an opportunity to sit down with those people and talk about the problems you are having with them. If they aren't willing to change then it's best for you to cut ties with them, but I have found that, more often than not, those people care enough about you to want to change and just didn't know that their behaviours had been an issue for you.

So here it is, here is your time to change your life and cater to your needs. Here's your opportunity to allow yourself to move forward, to work through whatever issues are keeping you connected to things and people that prevent you from living your life. You deserve happiness, you deserve to surround yourself with people who care about you, you deserve to have the future you want. Don't ever forget that.

Skye

x

Stop normalising your negative self talk.

The past couple of days were a difficult time for me. My body image was never particularly good, I've been through horrible eating disorders that have had me destroying my body to a point that I was at deaths door and yet couldn't see that it was a problem because I was still in the normal BMI range; anyone who suffers from a "real" eating disorder is emaciated right? I'd done such a good job at hiding it from the people around me that I had hidden it from myself too. Purging 6x a day on average was something I'd done for so long that I thought it was a completely normal practice, even though my teeth were falling out, my hair came out in clumps and I was weak, dizzy and disorientated every day. I think that is a big problem for a lot of people, not just those of us who suffer from eating disorders, finding normality in our self abusive behaviours, one of the main ones being our negative self-talk.

Once you begin to see your negative behaviours as normal they begin to get deep seated inside yourself to the point that they become very hard to shift because they become a part of you. I know one of the biggest issues on my road to recovery with my eating disorder was finding out who I was without the disorder. I was diagnosed at 17 with Bulimia but had had these issues for a long time prior, for the entirety of my teenage years and spilling into my childhood as well; though these things were odd behaviours they were still things that eventually developed into a full blown eating disorder. The part of my life that should have been reserved for self development was taken over by the development of an eating disorder. I felt that all I was was the negative self-talk voice in my head.

Negative self talk is something that I have been plagued by as long as I can remember, even in other aspects of myself than the eating disorder. I'm a real perfectionist and even though I absolutely love writing stories and being creative my perfectionist voice kicks in and tells me that because it's not "perfect" it's not good enough. But what is perfect really? When negative self talk comes in one thing that really makes me think is "would I say this to my best friend?" Would I say that my best friends work is sub par or that it looks stupid? Would I stand in front of my best friend and call her fat etc? I would never do that. I think all my friends are gorgeous, talented and intelligent people in their own special ways but then I say these horrible things to myself. Shouldn't I be my own best friend?

Of course you should be your own best friend! The people in your life enrich it for sure but you are the creator of your own world and your own happiness and you have to be with yourself for your entire life. You are the main person in your life. At the end of it all you have to find happiness in yourself and appreciate yourself and all the things you can do. You are a superstar and the only one of you that there is. You are good enough. You are worthy and that negative self talk needs to go.

Stop normalising your negative self talk. It's not doing you any favours. Whenever you find yourself giving yourself negative self talk you need to stop and think. You need to stop what you're doing and really evaluate what you are saying to yourself. Sit with that feeling for a moment and then start thinking about the reasons why you are saying these things to yourself. For example, when I start thinking about how something is happening because I'm too fat I have to sit down and think about what is really the problem and most of the time I realise that it really isn't because I'm "too fat". We need to take back our inner dialogue and reclaim the parts of our brain that are our own worst enemies and fill them with cleansing light. Positive affirmations, meditation, journalling all the things that you did each day that were achievements or positive or whatever; anything that will make us fill our brains back up with self-love.

Our society conditions us to hate ourselves. There are multi-billion pound industries based on making us feel like crap, based on feeding into the negative self image that we are building up over the years of our life. Our society feeds on us feeling bad about ourselves and we need to stand up for them. Don't feel guilty about complimenting yourself. If your ass looks good in those jeans, own that! If you paint a gorgeous picture, own that! If your acheivement is to get out of bed on a morning where you really really would rather hide under those covers and wallow in your self pity then fucking OWN that! When good things happen you are allowed to feel proud. You are allowed to love the skin you're in. You're allowed to look at your body and appreciate all the things it does for you on a daily basis and, god forbid, love it. Stop normalising negative self talk, it isn't normal, it's toxic and you don't need it in your life anymore. You deserve to be your own best friend so own it. Own yourself. Own your life.