I am...

This is a reveal; an honest expose on who and where I am.

I am a 26 year old girl, who has an incredibly hard time accepting that I am, in fact, a 26 year old woman. In my mind I am still 23 years old and living a carefree, responsible-less life. When I think about the life I lead now it feels completely surreal. Like I am looking at my life happen before me. Watching on in wonder. My life is beautiful and wonderful, I am completely blessed and fulfilled, but I often feel detached. 

In my past life I have experienced many incredible things, and many damaging. I have fought to survive and I have come out the other side, always with a smile on my face. I am a survivor, I have survived great love and great loss. I have been mistreated, disrespected and discarded by my closest girl friend, time after and time. I felt rejected by family, a disappointment, an outcast. I have experienced tender care, and survived violent abuse. 

I have felt judged, criticised and un-liked for the majority of my life and as a result began to invert into myself. I had become accustomed to having people walk away from me, only talking to me when they needed something or when all their better options had run out. I allowed people, for years, to walk in and out of my life when it appeased them. Now, I put my effort into those who choose to put effort into me and am shocked every time when some one chooses to be my friend. Today, I have many great and wonderful girlfriends whom I cherish and love and adore more than they could possibly ever understand. Each time I walk away from seeing one of these girls I go home beaming, amazed that these beautiful girls are in my life.

My parents divorced when I was young. Both went on to marry new partners and both went on to lose those partners to cancer. This is not my story to tell, yet it has effected me in ways that I actually cannot begin to articulate. I don't feel like I am entitled to own any feelings when it comes to the loss of these people, yet I have many of them. I feel anger and sadness. I feel regret and I feel disappointment. But mostly I just feel like there is something missing. I have watched many people I love lose someone important to them and watching these people suffer has been impossibly hard. I have lived a life where I just want to help the people I love to not hurt anymore, but I cant do that. I always let them down, let myself down. 

Throughout my life I have loved many boys. Some of them have been kind and gentle, others have been disrespectful and reckless. One was emotionally abusive and irrationally controlling. I will forever love all of them, for each one of them taught me lessons. Lessons about boys, about love, about myself. But most importantly, each one of them taught me that they were just a moment in my life, a moment that was to come and go. They taught me that they were not for me and to wait for the one who is. Each one of them walked me along the path to find my one true love - Anthony.  

I am an awful housewife, choosing to sit on the floor amongst the mess and play and talk to my Daughter's. I chose to walk out the front door, closing it on that mess, and take an adventure in the big wide world. I feel guilty each and every time Anthony walks through the day and I have not cleaned the house, yet he would never say a single word. He is patient and understanding, supportive and kind. I feel like I let him down, daily. 

I have had trouble, for years, to feel. I suffer terrible panic attacks, often curled up on the bathroom floor unable to breathe and truly believing I am having a heart attack. I have suffered these attacks in silence. Until very recently, I have not said these words aloud to the people in my life. Why? Because I have never felt like I am entitled to feel. Because I have always believed I have had to be strong. Because I was embarrassed and ashamed. But, only weeks ago, I said aloud to Anthony; I think I may need help. 

Since saying those words aloud to him I have felt liberated and free. Free of the guilt, liberated from the blurred emotions. I have been getting help for the last few weeks and intend to continue for the weeks to come. 

I am a 26 year old woman who has had neither a hard or an easy life. I am a Mother to two children who I love dearly. I am in a loving and strong relationship. I have family. I have friends. Yet I suffer from depression, anxiety, major self esteem and am on the verge of a nervous break down. 

I struggled to hear these things about myself, for many reasons. Mostly I struggled because I do not feel like I should be struggling. I have never felt entitled to feel negatively about my life. I have talked myself out of grieving. Talked myself out of accepting that bad things have happened. Then when good things happened, I was still numb and so the cycle begun. 

Why I am I telling you all of this? I guess because I feel like I need to say it out loud to someone and I am not brave enough to say it to the people in my life. I guess because I feel like if I actually talk about it, some where, that it may help me to accept that I need to break down the facade I have learnt to put up. I know that my posts over the past few months have probably implied that I am suffering depression, but up until my first session, I had not been diagnosed and I was not truly aware. I struggle knowing that I am suffering when my life is full of such beauty and happiness. I feel hypocritical to be so happy, but to feel so numb. 

I am strong, I am a fighter. I have fought to survive some brutal things throughout my life and it is time for me to start owning my feelings, it is time for me to survive.