A roller coaster of emotions...

Recently my boyfriend broke up with me. As horrible as the past 6 weeks have been, being the person I am I like to see each difficult situation as an opportunity to grow and learn something. This experience has definitely been a learning curve!

I want to share my experience with you because although its a very specific situation I think my coping techniques could be applied to many situations.

For the first 2 weeks I was....GREAT... ok bit of an exaggeration but I was ok. I knew I was likely to be upset, feel alone and beat myself up for it because I'd feel it was my fault and I must be a bad person. So first of all I acknowledged that. Then I decided to find a way of coping with that. I was nice to myself! I booked myself in for a deep tissue massage and treated myself. I let myself relax and be kind to myself instead of punishing myself with self hate.
My next technique was to surround myself by supportive people. I thought this would be hard but it was surprisingly easy... people wanted to be there for me! They wanted to spend time with me and take me out and make me feel better. This resulted in a very busy two weeks... it was great because it completely distracted me and made me feel cared about. I was surprised at how good I felt considering the situation. It also helped because a lot of these social situations involved food which made it a lot easier to eat. I didn't find that I suddenly wanted to lose weight and stop eating but naturally my appetite disappeared a lot. Situations where I kind of had to eat helped this.

After the first couple of weeks I think the whole thing hit me. I felt numb. I didn't know what to think or feel about the situation. I could feel myself secluding myself slightly more. This was a hard phase to deal with. I didn't know how I felt so I didn't know how to cope with it.

Luckily I quickly went from this phase to being very upset. I seemed fine and everyone thought I was doing such a great job of coping but I felt miserable. I just wanted to cry but I didn't want other people to know how I felt. I just wanted him to come home and started to wish time away. I started to lose enthusiasm for everything I enjoy. To deal with this I started reading a lot more. When I read I can completely escape to another world. My mind was taken away from the situation and the feelings went with it.

Next.. I got angry. I could understand why Matt had broken up with me but I had tried to contact him because he said he still wanted to be friends and he wasn't replying... this hurt the most... and still does as I still haven't had a reply! I didn't like being angry because I knew he had good intentions but then I realised I had every right to be angry and that was ok. I was able to put myself first and admit I'm worth more than this! I sent him a message telling him this and I've felt a lot better since then. Ive been going on a lot of dates which I think has been good for me (especially as it's always nice to have someone spoil you!)

Since we broke up I've constantly assessed how I feel and thought about how I could deal with those feelings instead of using food. It hasn't been easy but I'm still healthy and eating so it's worked!
Throughout the whole thing I've used my usual coping technique... writing. Such a good release!

I've kept myself surrounded by positive and supportive people and I finally feel like I'm getting to a good place. A place where at least for now I just want to be 21 and have a lot of fun... which is exactly what I'm doing!

So that's how I coped... hope it's useful in one way or another...

Love Jasmin

Perfectionism and Failure...

Hello hello hello wonderful people,

I realise in the past year I have been extremely bad at writing on here! So I apologise for that. It's been a busy year but I promise to do better from now on!

This post is about perfectionism and failure. I have to admit I am a perfectionist myself and always thought that had a lot to do with my eating disorder. I still think it does but then recently I became aware of another role my eating disorder had... it allowed me to fail. Let me explain...

Being a perfectionist is tiring! You constantly feel the need to be perfect, and seeing as perfect doesn't exist, you are continuously working towards an impossible goal. Your eating disorder fits in with this need to be perfect. But it also has the ability to destroy everything else in your life, making it harder to reach your goal of perfection.

I realised that when I felt I was failing in an area of my life I would struggle with my eating disorder more. First of all it allowed me to feel like at least I was achieving something... but it also gave me an excuse for why I was failing at other things. Being a perfectionist I was ashamed of feeling like a failure, whether it was at school, in my dance classes, in my friendships. But my eating disorder took away the bad feelings because I was able to blame it when I didn't meet my expectations. If I got a bad grade then it was my eating disorder's fault not mine. If I fell out with friends it was because my eating disorder was making me a bad person, not because I, myself was a bad person.

I was tired of trying to be perfect in every area of my life. It wasn't possible. But I couldn't admit to that so instead I found a reason to fail. I was so obsessed with my eating disorder I stopped caring about other areas from my life... it gave me a break.

I haven't realised this until recently. But if I had realised it sooner I would beg myself to see the irrationality in this thinking!
Yes the eating disorder does all of that but there are easier options!

Aim to accept life as it is. Life is not perfect and never will be. We cannot succeed all of the time at everything we do and that's ok. Instead of making excuses, embrace your imperfections, they make you individual, they make you human. Learn to break away from your perfectionism, set yourself goals to help you do this. For example, when I wrote notes in class they would always be pretty messy because I was writing quickly. I couldn't stand to see messy notes so I would then waste time re-writing them all so that they were neat. It was something I didn't need to do. So I set myself the goal of not doing that anymore. It was just a small thing but things like that reinforce to your brain that we don't have to be perfect!
The more you can accept yourself, imperfections and all, the less need you will have to find excuses to fail. You will have less need for your eating disorder.

Love you all.... happy EDAW!
Jasmin xxxx

Hey Everyone!

Sorry it's been so long since I've been on here. Just to remind everyone... Eating Disorder Awareness Week starts tomorrow!

Love Jasmin