Tag: selfcare

I just don’t feel good enough

I just don’t feel good enough

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

One of the first things that they tell you when you say you want to be a radio presenter is that when the microphone light turns red, you just need to relax and be entirely yourself. Just be yourself! Except, after three years at university, I wasn’t exactly sure how to do that anymore.

I know that the trope for going to university is that you ‘find’ yourself, come out of your shell, and settle into the person that you’re going to be for most of your 20s. But whenever people have asked me how I found my degree, I tend to come back to them with a conflicted answer: on one hand, I insist that I had some really good times with some fabulous people because that’s true and I hate being negative, but frankly, overall my time at university left me with a tendency to retreat into my insecurities.

I want to say that it happened all of a sudden, but I didn’t wake up one morning and decide that I was going to wear outfits to cover my callipers, start to speak less in social situations, or suddenly feel the need for constant validation from my friends; it was a much more gradual process of feeling like I wasn’t enough for the people and situations I found myself surrounded by.

In some cases, it was specific things that individuals did which made me feel this way – both intentionally and unintentionally – but it was more the general vibe that didn’t suit me. For example, I went to a very normal state school in Bradford, but an aspect of that school that I’d never considered as being integral to how I thought about myself, was that it shared its premises and resources with a special needs school. So every day my fellow students and I walked past, spoke to, and sometimes shared classrooms with severely disabled children and therefore, became accustomed to seeing disability. Consequently, I might’ve had my shoes stared at every day, but subconsciously I didn’t feel unusual because I was never the only disabled kid around. I never thought about the importance of this at the time, but then when I went to a university where I struggled to access disabled parking spaces outside of the colleges or faculties, and where I only remember ever seeing two other visibly disabled students, the impact of that mixed secondary school environment on disabled and able-bodied people alike became startling.

Another area where I didn’t feel like I was enough was in my romantic relationship attempts and sometimes my friendships. To be honest, the theme of my romantic relationships has always been that either I’m not interested when they are or they’re not when I am, they’re in a relationship with someone else already and are just putting loads of tedium or confusion on me, or doing the classically non-committal ‘I like you, but let’s just sleep together’ thing – or we met on holiday and thus continuing anything is pointless. I have been known to shoot myself in the foot by prolonging pointless situations because of boredom or stubbornness as well. So a great combo all around then! But the not thinking I was enough for lads was definitely at its height at university; I knew I didn’t feel good about it, but I hadn’t realised the extent of the toll on my self-esteem until I went to a radio placement 15 minutes up the road in Newcastle and I was surprised to experience someone openly and unapologetically flirting with me. I remember walking away from that situation thinking ‘wow, I’m not actually unattractive then’.

But of all the types of insecurity I’ve felt in the last few years, it was the insecurity in friendships that cut me the deepest.

Honestly, it’s taken me months to come to terms with how beaten down I felt at university and how that had made me into someone who rarely ever felt secure in their relationships with anyone. I’ve always been a person who cares about others very deeply and intensely, I’m reliable and I try my best to be everything those close to me need. But no matter how hard you try, you can’t be everything all at once and it can be difficult to deal with the times when you fall short of that standard you’ve set for yourself. So there were many times over the last few years when I didn’t know what I was doing wrong or why I wasn’t enough for my friends, and this just pushed me further into myself.

Unfortunately, feeling like you’re not good enough is something all of us will experience at more than one point in our lives, no matter how hard we hit the self-care routines, and so the best treatment appears to be recognising when the nasty voice in your head is becoming way louder than it ever was before and doing things to shut it up again. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no guru when it comes to this kind of thing, but I think that I knew that my radgy internal voice had become too loud when I went travelling with one of my best friends and thanked her for being so considerate about my feet. She looked at me, surprised and offended that those words had even come out of my mouth, but it was a clear example of how I’d begun to feel like I had to apologise for everything that I am to try and appease my environment. Something you should never feel the need to do.

Since then, I graduated, so obviously I removed myself from the situation physically but it’s been more about rewiring my brain to trust my instincts, stop overthinking everything going on around me, and actively practise confidence again. And now, with the very normal occasional few blips of insecurity, I’m glad to say that I feel more myself than I have for years. I still have wonderful friends from university, and I wouldn’t want you to think that I never had any great times whilst I was there because that just wouldn’t be true, but I didn’t lose any sleep about my degree ending, put it that way.

You might think that that’s a shame and I suppose that it is, but sometimes life just doesn’t go the way you expect it to. That doesn’t make the change a failure or lack, it just is what it is. There’s plenty of fun still to be had in environments that won’t make me feel quite so self-conscious 80% of the time. And that sounds like a much stronger vibe to me.

I won’t be told

I won’t be told

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

When I was nearing the end of my school years and it was reaching the point where I had to decide what I was going to do after my A-Levels, I quickly came to the conclusion that I wanted to take a break from education and go see some of the world on my own.

As children, my brothers and I were always encouraged to learn as much as we could about societies – historical and contemporary – and to take every opportunity to explore, so the idea of travel was never particularly daunting to any of us I don’t think. When I told my parents that I wanted to do the whole solo travel gap year thing, they were hugely supportive, but my Spina Bifida did mean that the prospect of me traveling to, and knocking about on my own in a different country was a little more complicated than when my older brother did it a couple of years before me.

I started working and saving for my travels when I was 16, and as soon as I left school, I was working three jobs to fund all of my trips because I wanted the year before university to be entirely my own, and I didn’t want my parents to feel any pressure to financially support me through it when they had their own bills to pay, or their own holiday to save up for. More than this though, I wanted to show myself that I could look after my disability no matter where I was in the world, or what I was doing. I’d fought against it for years and had subsequently landed myself in a wheelchair for periods of time, so in my mid-teens, I’d had this niggling feeling that maybe I was going to have to limit myself because of my Spina Bifida after all. Maybe, everything my parents and family had taught me about me being able to do whatever I wanted to didn’t matter, because maybe that kind of thinking just wasn’t practical if you wear callipers.

But I’m nothing if not stubborn, so I put the niggling feeling to the test by sending myself off to four different countries on my own. And do you know what, we not only managed it, we THRIVED. I lived in the jungle, hours away from any hospital; in the middle of a bustling city where all the signs are written in a script completely different from my native tongue; in a tent on a tiny private island surrounded by the Pacific Ocean where I washed my dishes in the sea, and I worked 17-hour days in the mountains where I was, in fact, constantly on my feet.

Since then, I’ve continued to travel on my own to new and beautiful places when I can – most recently, going to visit my parents in Rio de Janeiro. But what I want to emphasise is that when I take these trips, I do somewhat risk the condition of my feet. Before I went on my gap year, I remember the face of the doctor who’d seen me through three operations and more blisters and infections than I’d ever care to count, and it was one of total support because she knows who I am aside from my disability and that I was going to do it, but it was also one of ‘oh my god, this could end really badly’. And to be frank, there were moments during those trips that it wasn’t looking great. I mean, in South Korea, I was sending photographs of my feet to this doctor at home asking if I had an infection, then sitting in A&E in Seoul, communicating the nuances of my disability to a (very lovely) doctor using my amateur Korean language abilities. (It’s one thing to know how to ask for two glasses of wine and two bowls of bibimbap, and entirely another to explain diminished sensation from the knee down on both legs and scars from multiple tendon transfers…). But we managed it, I didn’t have an infection, and I was fine. Then when I was in Ukraine, I ended up crying in my room one day because I couldn’t work; my skin was looking like it was about to get a blister because I’d been working like crazy without my normal medical treatment in 30-degree heat for two months. Not a shock, but infuriating nonetheless. My colleagues (friends) told me to calm down, and one of the lads carried me to the evening activity on his back to save me from walking for the evening. Again, I managed it, and I was fine.

If you read my medical notes and the long lists of all the times my disability has kicked off, then you would probably think that I should stay off of my feet as much as possible. That there are so many things I can’t or shouldn’t do. So many places that I can’t or shouldn’t go. You’d think that the second I leave my car in England and get on a plane to a country where I’m going to have to walk far more than I ever would normally, I’m making the odds of me ending up in hospital with a cannula in my arm far more likely than if I was to just stay at home, sit on my backside, and go work in a call centre or behind a desk forever. And you’d be correct. But I won’t be told.

The words on those pieces of paper define my disability according to its worst moments, but my life is not that. I’m not that. At least, not all of the time. Sometimes I am in hospital with an infection – I was at the start of this year – except those moments don’t happen very often and nothing terrible has ever happened to my feet whilst I’ve been travelling because I am careful. It’s not just about putting all the practical things in place to take care of my feet whilst I travel though, it’s about sincerely believing that I can do it – regardless of what my medical notes say. Yes, my stubbornness has me taking flucloxacillin sometimes because I’ve walked too much and given myself a blister that has gotten infected, but it also sent me to the other side of the world when I was 19.

I am not stupid, I do my best to take care of my disability, but I was never good with someone telling me that I can’t or I shouldn’t just because I have Spina Bifida. So, I’m cool with never running a marathon but just because I can’t do one thing doesn’t mean that every other human experience is completely inaccessible. I just might have to consider a few extra things.

I’m not normally this irritable…

I’m not normally this irritable…

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

It’s been a running joke in my life for the past six months that I’m the fool who’s working four jobs so I can afford to 1) live in this city, 2) enjoy living in this city, and 3) pursue the career I actually want to do. Obviously, I didn’t move down here expecting to be working in so many different places all of the time, but it became clear to me very quickly that that’s not entirely unusual for people who choose to live in London. I’d be coming in to work as a receptionist in a restaurant, saying I feel stressed out of my mind because I just finished a shift at a different job, only to have a pretty surprising amount of colleagues completely relate because they’d just done the same thing. And if they hadn’t already worked for hours in a different place, they were set to work double in the restaurant.

So, if you don’t have a cushty job with a big salary, or the safety net of inherited wealth, living in London is no easy task. Although, it does seem like even if you do have those things, the culture in this city is to work work work until your body and your mind can’t take it anymore…

Personally, I’ve no problem with grafting for what I want because my ambition and my stubbornness lead me to believe that if I work really hard for it, then I’ll get there; the jury is still out as to whether I’m deluded about that, but we’re doing well so far. However, the amount of work I was doing in the first few months of living in London ended with me having to spend five days in the hospital and feeling pretty highly strung most of the time. But I only acknowledged the extent of this after I’d been away from work for three weeks because of my operation, and I returned to my workplaces.

Needless to say, I love it every time I’m working at a radio station. Yes, I’m often behind the screen and helping with aspects of the production of shows but like most things in this country, the opportunity for progression in London and the ability to meet people you’d just never come across anywhere else makes every shift more exciting than the last. It’s a cliche, but you really have no idea of who you’re going to bump into in the lift, and how that can affect your life. Therefore, every radio shift I do reminds me that I’m exactly where I need to be for what I want to do, and it recharges me for when I then have to go to my other jobs.

At this point though, I don’t want it to seem like I’m showing up at my part-time jobs and hating my life for every second I’m there, because that’s not true. I sincerely love the people I work with and I’ve gained so much from now having experience in the service industry – in fact, I think that everyone should have a service industry job at some point in their lives, just to try and reduce the amount of heat we receive from customers because my GOD people can be awful. Regardless of the laughs I have with my colleagues though, working a silly amount of hours a week in a silly amount of places and being confronted by the public’s lack of manners and ignorance, started to regularly show me parts of my personality that I’m not a huge fan of. Most notably, the fact that I can be a bit of a passive-aggressive b*tch if my patience is tried.

Lol.

I know that my reflex is always to be a nice, open, smiley person, but I’m human and if you have (literally) hundreds of people in one day asking you the same thing; lots of them shouting at you because the environment is loud, and a pretty significant amount just being outright rude towards you, whilst you’re already running on fumes because you’ve worked non-stop for 6,7,8 days in a row, then you might start to answer people’s questions a little passive-aggressively. Or you might walk into the next job and have to stare at the ceiling in the toilets, trying not to cry, after your other boss asked you to work a few extra hours. It’s not surprising that I started to react to situations in this way, but the confrontation and the negativity aren’t me, so there came a point where I had to get rid of one job before those previously small parts of my personality grew into something more solid. And thus, I handed in my resignation for one of the part-time jobs. I’m sad to be leaving my colleagues, but I’ve secured enough radio shifts now to make up the money and I’m looking forward to feeling less irritated by the public.

Without a doubt, it’s a luxury to be able to leave a job the second you see that it’s making you into a person you don’t want to be, and I don’t want to publish this blog without acknowledging that. However, I’ve too often seen people in this country stay in a situation that they truly hate just because they think that it’s less hassle to stay. This goes back to what I was saying last week about change though, in that it’s based on the assumption that if you make a change then everything will be worse, but if it’s really so bad now then wouldn’t it be nice to try and find something better? Again, I know that not everyone is in the financial or circumstantial position to just up and leave their job because they hate it, but hating your job (and low-key hating your life) shouldn’t be as universally accepted as it seems to be in this country. It’s not always easy to do, but we do need to get better at prioritising our own happiness because this working-until-you-croak thing is no way to live.

So if you really and truly hate your job, then see if there’s anything you can do about that, because we spend an awful lot of time in the workplace and it’d be a shame for that time to be saturated in negativity.

Ch ch ch changes

Ch ch ch changes

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 2 Comments

If I’m trying to be my most pragmatic, sensible self, then I’d like to say that I’m not at all scared of change; in fact, I welcome all of the exciting new things that can come with switching things up. Buuuuuuutttttt, change isn’t always positive, nor are the outcomes ever fixed, so I think it’s better to explain how I’m experiencing change at the minute as it being like I’m sitting on a see-saw: one end has an overwhelming sense of excitement, whilst the other has an equally overwhelming feeling of terror. Which way it leans really depends on the day.

At the very start of this year, I’m not going to lie to you, sitting in a hospital gown with a cannula in my left arm had me leaning all the way over to terror, whereas, when I heard that I’d been given two Christmas shows on BBC Radio 1, you’d best believe the see-saw was so far towards excitement that it looked more like a slide. Then we were feeling a mixture of both when it came to coming back to London after my operation because I’m still having to bandage my foot every day but at least I’m back in the groove of pursuing a radio career. Oh, and I’m not sure if I mentioned it, but I now have parents who live in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil! You know…that really standard change for parents to make to their lives once all of their children have moved out? – I’m completely supportive and excited about that one, but it’d be silly to not include that in the paragraph listing the biggest changes in my life recently.

So then, if you’re an emotional stress head with control freak tendencies like me, how do you cope with so much change in such a short period of time?

Well, it’s definitely made easier by the fact that I’m a cup-half-full kind of a gal, so I do naturally move towards finding the positives in a situation. But I think that the main way I’m dealing with it is by viewing every recent change positively – even the traumatic emergency operation at the start of the year. At the time, I was terrified that my Spina Bifida was about to strip me of my independence just when I needed to be out there grafting for a radio career; that I was going to be sitting in my room alone, resenting my own body as I had to wait around for it to heal. And yes, we’re still not healed, we’re still bandaging every day, but by speaking openly about the operation, and by reframing the whole thing in my head as an accidental injury like a sprained ankle or broken arm, I feel so much less stressed about my foot than I have for a very long time. Furthermore, I’ve now experienced an operation in my adult life, so if something like that happens again, then it won’t be such a nasty shock to the system because at least I’ll remember what the process feels like.

This trust that I can continue to be independent whilst having problems with my feet and living in a city as big as London, also allowed me to only be happy for my parents when they made their move, rather than feeling like I was losing my biggest support network to South America. The fact is, that when you’ve had a physical disability since birth, there’s a period in your late teens and then early twenties where you have to inherit that disability from your parents because even though the Spina Bifida has always belonged to my body, the practicality of dealing with it didn’t really lie with me until I moved out, and even then, it’ll take years before I know all the details of my Spina Bifida the way my parents do. For example, the whole operation thing: I hadn’t done that since I was seven years old, so even though I’m a strong, articulate, independent 23-year-old woman, I had to call my Mum and Dad to ask them the answers to the questions the doctors were asking me about my own body. I have the scars, but I don’t know the technicalities behind why a doctor cut me there.

A lot is changing in my life right now, and in some contexts, I don’t entirely recognise myself. I don’t mean that in a bad way – in fact, I feel far more settled and happier now than I did in my final year of university – it’s just that there’s a lot going on and it sometimes takes my brain a second to keep up. Surrendering to a situation and not focusing on controlling things doesn’t come naturally to me, but coping with change becomes much easier if I do that, thus, going with the flow is the motto right now.

Loosey goosey bby, looOooOooseyy goOoseeyy.

No likey, no lighty

No likey, no lighty

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

When it comes to romantic relationships, I’ve always felt so sure of what I wanted in a partner. Granted, I’ve gone to and fro when it comes to the importance of each attribute depending on how old I was, where I was living, and what I was doing, but overall, since the age of about 16 I’ve felt certain that I knew exactly what I wanted when it came to romance. But, then I actually started going on dates.

My first ever date was a few months ago and when I tell you that I came away from that date feeling so overwhelmed and confused that I was physically shaking a little, that would not be an exaggeration. Honestly felt like I’d lost my virginity again, it was so intense.

Don’t worry, nothing bad happened on the date to make me so shaken – if anything, the lad was a little too into me, what with trying to kiss me 30 minutes in and talking about taking me to meet his parents shortly after that. Bit heavy. Though on some level, I didn’t really mind him being like that; the thing which threw me for a loop so much was the fact that he was being so publicly affectionate with me and saying all these things without having a milliliter of alcohol in his system and we were in broad daylight. Because when I then sat down to think about it later, I realised that the last time I got close to a lad like that was when I was 17. I’d become so painfully used to boys telling me that they were into me once it’d gotten dark, or once they were a bit drunk, or whilst they already had a girlfriend, or once they thought that they might get the chance to sleep with me, (or a combination of all four of those things), that the idea that somebody might want to kiss me at 12pm on a Tuesday afternoon after getting some lunch in town, then walk down the street holding my hand genuinely freaked me out. Which isn’t great, is it?

My first date didn’t end up amounting to much, however, because I soon got the impression that this lad wasn’t actually interested in getting to know me; he wanted to be in a relationship, but he wasn’t too bothered about being in a relationship with someone if you get what I mean. It didn’t end with any sort of animosity, it was just clear that I didn’t want what he was going for so I politely (and swiftly) called it off.

Then I thought hey, plenty of my friends keep telling me how they’ve had a great time on dates with people they met on Hinge, so let’s stop overthinking it and go on a Hinge date. This one was definitely better – significantly less intense and we had a very lovely time – he was a few years older than me, we went for food after I finished work, and I came away from it feeling pretty good. But as much as I had a really great time, I still wasn’t sure whether I liked him in that way.

I did that internal monologue where you think ‘well, we had a nice time, we’ve got quite a lot in common, he asked questions, I asked questions, he made me feel comfortable, he openly expressed interest in me, he’s a good looking lad, there’s absolutely no reason why I shouldn’t see him again. But I wouldn’t be too fussed if he didn’t text me. If I wouldn’t be bothered though, then does that mean that I’m not attracted to him? How could I know that from spending two hours with a stranger? I didn’t feel as physically attracted to him as I’ve felt to men before. But was it just lust with the times before? Would it be healthier for me to wait and see? He was really nice…’. (Also, he’s an acrobat and that sounded like a lot of fun ygm hey heyyy)

He didn’t text me anyway though (and I didn’t text him), so all that mental energy was a little wasted lol. But to be fair, now that almost two months have passed since that date, I know that I wasn’t into him – not really – I was just trying to second guess whether I’d be sabotaging myself by calling something off with a nice man, simply because I wasn’t head over heels after two hours of conversation.

But now that I’ve told you these tales about my first dates, let’s circle back to the first couple of paragraphs of this blog and ask: what is it that you look for in a romantic partner Betty? Well, stranger, for the very first time I can confidently say that I’ve got absolutely no idea, and yet, (also) for the first time, I’m actually not that bothered. Don’t get me wrong, it’d be nice to be in a relationship with someone and I think that I’m way overdue experiencing that part of life, but I’m now in the position where I don’t want to overthink all the details and create a narrative in my head that doesn’t exist so I end up disappointed when something that was never going to happen anyway doesn’t happen. It takes up too much mental space and it forces me to feel lonely when I’ve no reason to.

Broadly speaking, I want someone who truly knows and is interested in me – intellectually, physically, emotionally – and visa versa, but I’ve got no clue of what that looks like in reality. So, I guess mystery man will just have to show me once he finally decides to show up, ey? I’m not bothered unless he’s worth it though…no pressure then.

Xx

Kicking off the New Year with a BANG

Kicking off the New Year with a BANG

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

I was going to write my first blog of the year about being a Christmas presenter on BBC Radio 1, but I’m currently sitting in a hospital bed with a cannula in my left arm, and a hefty bandage on my foot. So…as much as being a Christmas presenter was an absolute adrenaline rush, and proof that that’s exactly what I want to do for many years to come, let’s talk about why I’m in the hospital gown first.

I put a lot of time, energy and effort every day into not letting my disability stop me from doing whatever I want to do. I monitor my condition the way I’ve been taught how, I’m careful, but mostly, I just don’t focus on it because it’s not the only thing that I am. But an unhelpful consequence of that is that sometimes my ability to get on with it means that people forget I’m disabled at all, or they at least assume that it really can’t be that bad. (I think I even convince myself of both of those things too on occasion…) The reality though, is that the condition of my feet can turn literally overnight – as it did on Saturday.

I’d had a teeny tiny bit of bleeding from my foot on Boxing Day, for absolutely no reason, but I was due to do my first Radio 1 show that morning so I bandaged it and refused to let it ruin my day. Then it didn’t bleed anymore for the next couple of days so I forgot about it. I was exhausted from working all the time, and the excitement of my radio shows, so I got the flu on Wednesday. I went to work Saturday night, had already checked my foot before my shift – it was fine – but then throughout the shift I started to feel really sick. Like, I fully thought I was going to pass out on multiple occasions. In the back of my head, I knew that the way I was feeling was how I’d felt when I’d had quite serious infections in my foot which had spread all the way up to the top of my leg, but that didn’t make any sense because I’d checked my foot three hours ago and it hadn’t even been a little bit red. (Mostly, I was willing what I knew to be true to not be.) So, I do the 8-hour shift, feel progressively worse, get home, boom: swollen and infected foot, cry myself to sleep, A&E the next morning, get told I need an operation to remove the infection, here we are day three in the hospital with antibiotics being pumped into my arm.

I’ve had operations before – six of them to be precise – but the only thing is, I don’t really remember them. The last one I’d had before yesterday morning’s was when I was seven years old, so yes, I’ve done this before, but also not really. What’s more, is yes, I’ve been in hospitals plenty and I’m no stranger to the A&E department or an infected foot, however, that doesn’t mean that I’m not frightened every time it happens. I mean, when I saw the state of my foot after my shift on New Year’s Eve, I literally said the words ‘I’m scared’ to my empty room in between my sobs before I fell asleep.

What’s strange, is that when I was little and I had my operations, I remember nurses and doctors telling me that I was ‘so brave’ even when I had tears streaming down my face. But I can tell you right now, yesterday morning when I felt the nurse wiping my tears as the anasthetic forced me to sleep, I didn’t feel very brave at all. Quite the opposite. And I think that the main problem I have with that word, is that it seems to imply some sort of choice, when the truth is that sometimes my foot just throws me to the bottom of a black pit, then terrifies and tortures me for a while. But the worst part is always that there’s no point in fighting; I have to voluntarily give in to everything that I hate, and I feel weak and small and none of it ever seems fair.

However, this time around I’ve made a point of silencing the voice in my head which tells me that I shouldn’t make a fuss, or complain, and I’ve told people what’s going on so that they can then support me. It’s not easy to do, because I think part of me assumes that sharing this intensely vulnerable part of my life will make people forget everything else they know about me and only see my disability, or they’ll think that I’m just being attention-seeking. Nonetheless, this Spina Bifida sh*t can be truly awful sometimes, and if I have to do it on my own I’ll crumble, so it might sound obvious, but it’s been a huge relief to see that if I actually tell people what’s going on, then I’ll get all the support I need. Plus, as traumatic as it is to be the one to live through it, it’s kind of nice to show people that I’m not exagerrating when I tell them that it can get bad – first-hand experience always comes in handy when you then ask friends about walking distances on a night out, for example.

So yes, hospital has not been fun lol. But I’ve done the operation, deep breaths have been taken, Disney films have been watched and plenty of love has been felt. Now let’s just round up the whole shebang by getting the bloody cannula out and my foot all healed so I can have some fun in 2023, shall we?

It’s the most wonderful time of the year?

It’s the most wonderful time of the year?

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

When I graduated from university in the summer of this year, there were so many ‘next steps’ to complete that I never felt like I took a second to sit down and think about what I want from this part of my life. I’d already spent months juggling problems with my feet and writing essays, a dissertation, completing exams, and feeling totally disenfranchised with my university environment, so once it finished, to be honest I was relieved. Instead of taking a break from planning the next thing though, I just redirected my brain to going on holiday with my friend, spending time with my family, and the logistics of moving to a city to pursue a career.

I know that my ability to be super organised, focused, and to work like an absolute pack horse often gives people the impression that I have everything figured out, and honestly, sometimes I trick myself into thinking the same thing. It’s only really been since I’ve moved into this part of my life – away from the safety and structure of family and educational institutions – that I’ve realised there are so many parts of life where I’ve got absolutely no clue.

But you know what I’m going to say here, right?…That it’s totally okay to have no idea what you’re doing! In fact, it’s part of the fun.

I’ll level with you here though, and say that ‘living in the moment’ and not fixating on the million and one things I need to do next are not ways of living that come naturally to me. I’m a hard worker, and I’m a cup-half-full kind of a gal, but I’m also potentially one of the most impatient people you’ll ever meet. As in, I can experience a huge success on Monday and by Thursday, I’m texting my friends saying that I’m bored. But this is a habit that I’m really trying to get out of, because I’ve been given enough pep talks by drunken middle-aged women in the smoking area of pubs, to know that if I keep being this way, then one day I’ll wake up with wrinkles and greying hair, wondering where half of my life went.

(Shout-out to that brand of Yorkshire woman by the way; long may you ladies bring the flavour to the night-out.)

Unfortunately, so many of us spend a hefty amount of our time getting worked up over feeling like we don’t have every aspect of our lives figured out. I’ve had countless conversations with people of all ages stressing because they think that they’re not at the point they ‘should’ be at, but what does ‘should’ even mean anyway? Who decides what each of us ‘should’ be doing? Surely, that’s just us getting lost in social conventions and comparisons, before asking ourselves what it is we want to be doing right now and whether there’s anything we need to change to get there.

Maybe what I’ve written this week doesn’t feel relatable to you right now, but this is the time of the year when we’ve got to be extra aware of how those around us are feeling. I won’t lie to you, I love Autumn into Winter, but as much as I love watching the leaves change colour and hearing firework displays in the distance, this is also the season when many of us start to feel cold, tired, and fed up. I also know that a large proportion of my readers are British, so it’s likely that you suffer from our nation’s inability to talk about these types of feelings without aggressively cringing, and I get you; this blog isn’t that deep or existential, and still, I found it difficult to write what I wanted to say. But the momentary cringing or the incoherent sentences are better than the middle-of-the-night solo breakdown. So, if you’re feeling some type of way right now, then swallow your pride and just call your friend to talk about whatever’s on your mind; you might not share everything whilst you chat, but odds are, at some point in the conversation you’ll have a laugh. And when has that not helped to calm you down or cheer you up?

Maybe don’t answer EVERY question…

Maybe don’t answer EVERY question…

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

I realised the other day that in the five years since I left school, I’ve spent a hefty amount of my time meeting and developing new relationships with people. I’ve travelled to lots of different places – both abroad and in Britain – and everywhere I’ve been I’ve come across people who I didn’t like, but more often than not, every new place brought me loads of new friends. In some cases, I even did a complete 180 in my opinion of someone as I acknowledged that your first impression of a person might not always be the best representation of what they’re actually like.

I’ve always been somebody who actively enjoys spending time with other people, however, even with this love for a ‘getting to know you’ conversation, I’ve noticed that in the past couple of years I’ve become far more cagey with a new group of people than I ever have been before. But to ensure that we’re all on the same page here, when I say ‘cagey’ I don’t mean that I’m rude or standoffish with people, it’s just that I’ve learned that it’s not always the best move to go into social situations as an entirely open book because by doing that, you don’t leave very much room to protect yourself.

When I was at school, I was the type of person who would tell anyone whatever they wanted to know about me: they could ask about my disability, my family, my fears, my aspirations, who I fancied, or literally anything else they could think of and I’d probably tell them the tale. In fact, I’d love telling the tale. This tendency towards openness and honesty isn’t something that I want to completely get rid of because without it we’d have no blog, and I also wouldn’t be myself, but there have been moments over the past few years when I realised just how exhausting it is to meet new people and answer all of these questions, only for many of those relationships to fizzle at some point. After all, once we’re out of school or university, most of us don’t have the time to maintain loads of friendships in between working and general living. So sometimes, it’s better to conserve your energy and not offload everything about yourself to whatever stranger you get along with for twenty minutes at a party, because repeatedly doing that in environments such as school, university, or a new job, really does take it out of you.

However, this newfound cageyness I’m talking about doesn’t just stem from the fact that it’s tired me out to be so honest, it’s also because I’ve sometimes been a little naive about who I can trust with the more vulnerable aspects of my personality. The fact is, that in order for any relationship to be fulfilling – be it platonic or romantic – there’s got to be an equal amount of effort put in by both sides, but if you’re like me then you might have had a few situations where you’ve realised that you’ve gotten upset because somebody hasn’t given you the same energy you were giving them, and even though that can be painful, were you maybe giving a little too much too quickly?..Then on the other side of this, have you potentially been the person in romantic relationships or friendships who has had somebody open up to you, and you haven’t respected their choice to do that in the way you should’ve?

I’ve probably done both, to be honest: I’ve definitely overshared and then been burnt by someone not caring as much as I thought they would, and I’m human, so I’ve undoubtedly been thought of as not being there for a person in the way they wanted me to be. Therefore, I’m not writing this blog because I think that there’s a perfect level of openness when forming relationships with new people – obvs, it’d be ideal for each of us to look into a crystal ball and know how much we can trust or rely on a person before we invest time into them, but that’d also take all the fun out of meeting and getting to know new people. So, I guess it’s about realising what works well for you in these situations.

For me, I was doing and giving way too much too quickly because I like knowing people really well (because I’m a freak and I find people very interesting), and I kind of figured that if I open up to someone then they’ll open up to me too, without respecting myself enough to acknowledge how exhausting it is to be that way. So, we’re not going to be a totally closed book, because human connection is one of the joys of everyone’s lives, we’re just going to be a liiiittle more selective about it to conserve energy and emotions. It’s all about give and take, and you’ve got to keep an eye on how much you’re letting people take versus how much they’re giving you.

It’s all just a bit too vanilla if you ask me

It’s all just a bit too vanilla if you ask me

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

This is going to feel quite strange to type, but my blog is nothing if not a reflection of what my friends and I have been saying to each other recently, so I’m just going to get straight to it: the ladies in my life are immensely sexually frustrated right now. Some have already fallen victim to their impulses by texting someone that they absolutely shouldn’t, but I hold out hope that by bringing attention to this problem on the blog, we can save some of my friends from that same unfortunate fate.

But before we dive into the details of the sexual frustration complaints I’ve been hearing from the gals, I’d first like to draw attention to the fact that a woman’s desire for sex is vastly underestimated by our society. I mean, most cis lads I’ve come across have assumed that their libido has always been way stronger than that of their cis female peers, but my god, I dare you to spend twenty minutes in a women’s bathroom on a Friday night, or eavesdrop on a group of lasses having a meal together, and then tell me the same thing. Women aren’t nearly as passive as we’ve been told we should be.

Western society has always had a tendency to think that women should feel apathetic towards sex unless there’s something wrong with them, in which case they’re totally obsessed with sex to the point of mania. So basically, either a woman isn’t really bothered about it, or she’s got a problem. This, along with all the other super helpful aspects of living in a patriarchy, has meant that women often feel like they shouldn’t talk about their sexual desires because if they do then they’re going to come across as a slut. However, there’s often a moment in female friendships where you and the woman you’re speaking to try to work out whether this is a safe environment for you to say exactly what you’re feeling, without judgment. It doesn’t always work out this way, but if you’re able to establish that type of trust as an aspect of your friendship, then you’d be lucky if you ever stop talking about sex and relationships with each other.

So, let’s get back to what the ladies have been saying recently then, shall we? Well, the general consensus isn’t that these young women aren’t getting attention from men – lots of them have dating apps where they’re messaging a few lads, or they’ve got some sort of work romance on the go. Their frustration, it seems to me, is coming from the fact that they’re not excited by any of it; the lads they’re meeting up with are lovely, and the conversations are nice, but they want passion. They want someone to give them a good old (consensual, of course) grab, kiss them up against a wall, stop tiptoeing around, and be told exactly what the lad’s thinking so they don’t have to keep guessing and can skip to the fun bit.

But finding this type of connection is difficult and incredibly rare – I’m still holding out for it too gals, don’t worry, I get you. And it’s tricky because when we complain about this heavy sense of boredom we’re all feeling at the minute with dating and sex, we can forget that sometimes we’re expecting lads to read our minds and make all the moves. Clearly, this is us enjoying an aspect of patriarchy that places the man as the one responsible for moving a heterosexual romantic relationship along, but it’s not entirely fair to expect that. However, I for one have made a lot of moves on lads and haven’t gotten much back so yes, it’d be nice to have one do the same for me at some point. And I’m sorry boys, but from the many many tales I’ve heard from young women, you’re actually a bit hopeless at reading signs…even when those signs have been the lass literally saying ‘I really like you, let’s do something’. At that point, you’ve got nothing to lose man, take a (not so risky) riskkkkk.

It goes without saying that romantic relationships are difficult, and navigating the early stages with someone that you don’t really know that well, trying to work out whether you’ve upset them or stressed them out can induce a lot of daily stress. Also, I know that I’m coming at this from the cis-female heterosexual perspective and hence it won’t be relatable for everyone; for example, I’m sure that men have plenty of frustrations they’d love to voice about dating young women as well. But just because something isn’t relatable to everyone, doesn’t mean that it isn’t relatable to anyone, and I’ve had far too many conversations with my female friends recently where we’ve been laughing/screaming/laughing about the lack of romantic passion in our lives.

So, to conclude, the ladies don’t want to date or have sex for the sake of it right now, they want something exciting; someone to be interested in them enough to make romance and sex fun for everyone involved. We’re just holding out for a bit more flavour.

Quick! Someone get the stress ball!

Quick! Someone get the stress ball!

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

As a member of the most stressed and depressed generation ever studied by science, I thought that I would take this week’s blog as an opportunity to explain how I deal with stress in my everyday life. The short answer: not very well.

Lol

Actually, to be fair, that’s not entirely true…but I don’t want to kick this off by giving you the impression that I’m always on top of my own stress levels, and that I know exactly how to regulate my feelings in order to avoid having breakdowns because I’m not and I don’t. Generally speaking, I’m what some might call a ‘stress-head’, or ‘overthinker’. I don’t deal well when I can’t be in control of situations – be they relating to work or romantic relationships, or anything in between – and I’ve been known to take on too much all at the same time, overloading myself until eventually I get burnt out, have a (minor) meltdown, then wake up the next day to do it all over again.

Knowing this about myself though, I still don’t believe that stress is an entirely negative emotion – as long as you’re self-aware enough to recognise when it’s overwhelming you. For example, ever since moving to London last month, I’ve been so stressed that I’ve lost weight and my period was ten days late. (I realise that these don’t sound like very dramatic consequences of stress, nonetheless, they are clear examples of a tangibly physical reaction to something going on in my head.) But even though pretty much every day since I’ve lived here has been punctuated by to-do lists and an endless amount of unknowns, I actually feel pretty good; I don’t feel stressed in the negative sense of the word.

Don’t get me wrong, the first week or so of living in this city was purely bad stress, but as I mentioned in a blog a few weeks ago, my parents helped me get out of that panic by urging me to take everything one thing at a time. This advice sounds so obvious, but if you’re an overthinker like me, then you’ll know that it’s far easier to think about the million and one things you need to do, or what could go wrong, all at once than it is to focus on just one thing for today. Honestly, I’m still not fully there yet, but this month has definitely been an exercise in recognising when I’m about to wind myself up, taking a breath, and then just not letting myself stress about the thing I was going to stress about.

I’m in a good position, however, given that a lot of my stress at the minute is based on things that I love. For example, finding ways to squeeze in writing blogs or going to radio stations might take a toll on my energy at a given moment, but I love doing it, so I don’t end the day feeling bitter about how tired I am. Still, even if you adore what’s making you stressed, that doesn’t mean that the mental exhaustion won’t eventually catch up with you, so it’s important that even if you feel fine, you do little things to keep an eye on yourself. I’m going to sound like one of those American yoga teachers right now, but think about the little things that you could do which could help you to focus on what you really want to do in the day. For instance, if there’s a time when my stress is going to show itself in me getting angry, then it’s going to be if I see that my room or my kitchen is unclean or untidy. So I keep my room and my kitchen neat; tidy home, tidy mind n that.

It might seem silly to talk about these things, but judging from social media, we’re way better at listing all the problems with ourselves than we are at helping each other to find some solutions. So, I’d like to reiterate that this has not been me saying ‘ooo look at me, I’m so self-aware that I never have a breakdown because of stress’, because I wouldn’t have a blog if I wasn’t an over-thinker and stress-head. But I’m trying my best to be better at not letting my mind just run, and trying is all we can do really innit.

If you are feeling a little strung-out at the minute though, top tips are: deep breath, lots of water, plenty of sleep, read a book before bed, listen to music, keep your room tidy, have a cry if you need to, and speak to someone who makes you laugh.