Friday

So i guess this is the situation at the moment, i'm taking a break from uni, i'm supposed to go back in November, i don't have a place to live in November but i'm supposed to go back then, i'm unemployed, i've applied to claim benefits because i have a ton of debt that needs paying off but i'm not able to work, leaving the house is painful i really have to force myself to do it, staying indoors all day is painful, i want to get out doors and get my old life back, but i'm not too sure where its hiding. I'm still pushing people away, but less so, i have bouts and spurts where i have energy and wish i was around people but realise i must look quite a state at the moment and don't really want people to see me like this. I want to go running, i don't know why, i hate running, i get out of breath so quickly but it seems so appealing right now, i want to wake up at 4am and run but i go to bed at 10pm and have trouble pulling myself back out of it at 10am. I don't want to run during the day because i don't want to meet people, i'm ashamed to be back here, i'm ashamed to be in this state, but this is what its come to. I think i'm putting on weight but i don't know for sure, i've never weighed myself and have no reason to start now, but i have exercised in weeks and just about manage to feed myself even though i never feel hungry, i know i must be. I feel guilty from the moment i wake up till exhaustion lets me sleep, i feel guilty that i'm a burden on my mum, that i'm not out earning my own money and looking after myself, that people are worried about me, that i'm causing people distress, that i'm not good enough. I feel guilty that i'm not living up to my families expectations, even more that i'm not living up to God's .... though i'm not sure he exists right now, and more than that mine. I know i expect to much of myself and in doing that i set myself up for failure but whats the point in aiming low? I want to be the best that i can be, but i never achieve it, and knowing that makes me depressed. I miss my dad, i think about him more lately, i assume thats why i'm down, but i don't know for sure, i don't really know the reason. I'm living my life thinking - things will be better when .... but they never are, things are best when i'm looking forward to something, they never live up to my expectations. I think about dying a lot, i wonder if taking all of my pills at the same time would kill me but suspect it wouldn't, i'm sure i would throw them up before they did any serious harm, why would a doctor give a months worth of pills to someone they know is suicidal? I don't really want to do that but its reassuring that its an option, like i have some control left at least, if things got really bad then thats always there. I feel like a failure, people keep telling me i'm not and reminding me of the things i've done but it doesn't matter what people say, i'm not really listening anyway, i'm not the person i want to be. I haven't been happy in so long that i can't remember what it feels like. I'm living but ... i'm just getting through life, i'm plodding along it, i want to be doing backflips along it, enjoying every second, or at least one. Today is a 'one' day, a duvet day as my counsellor calls it, i'm glad i'm alone on one days but i'm not sure it's safe for me to be. I find it much easier to remember to take my pill on one days, i don't know that taking it helps but counting down the hours till i take it gives me hope that tomorrow wont be the same. I want to be busy, i want to be distracted, but i don't have the energy to do anything and i've been distracting myself for so long that i haven't dealt with the underlying cause here, i'm just putting it off and now i can't walk with the weight of it all any longer. I haven't spoken to Weston in so long, i feel so guilty for that, i know i'm making him upset but i can't face it, this just isn't real life, this is a strange little bubble of nothingness.

Monday

Today i cleaned, and cleaned, and cleaned. I needed something to distract my mind, to focus my energy on, i need to feel exhausted at the end of the day, thats how i know the day is finished, days where i don't feel exhausted have been wasted in my opinion. I cleaned things that no one ever bothers to clean, but that i notice are dirty, this is why i know no one will notice that i have been cleaning all day, i don't need the recognition, i just need to distract my mind. I had a internal list of things i could do today to keep myself busy but now i sit down to take a break i don't feel satistfied with what i've done, however much i do it wont ever be enough so make me feel satistfied, and it seemed quite clear at t he start of the day that doing this would. I think this is the same with how i feel about my life, i am thinking - i'll be happy once i've done this thing and once i've achieved this, then i'll feel good and satisfied with myself. But i sit down and look back on what i've done and realise that none of it made me feel happy, it didn't bring the satisfaction i thought it would, it just provided me with a distraction so i was okay for that small bit of life and ultimately it made me realise more things i had to do in order for me to feel okay about things. You don't realise how much there is to clean until you start doing it, then you notice 50 other things that need doing, thats what i feel like with life - i didn't realise that i needed to improve this thing until i started doing stuff and that wasn't factored into the bigger plan of how things were going to go. But its made me realise, i dont actually know how to be happy, i dont know what makes me happy and when im told to think of a happy time and take myself back to then .... i dont have one, and im not totally sure that thats just because i cant think of one right now because of the way im feeling, im not sure ive had one, how can i work my way towards something ive no experience of? I feel like there is this cycle of negativity, ive learnt to view things negatively with this sarcastic nature and i cant pull myself out of it so now i cant see the positive anymore, and im really scared i would pass this on to any kids i had, i've always wanted kids, lots of them, but i just couldnt be the reason someone felt like this. You have to wonder whats the point of a life thats just plodding along in this 'its just about okay' level of things, needing a million distractions in order to ward off something worse.

Saturday

Yesterday was a better day, today is not. Yesterday i drove to Cardiff and moved out of my house, i took all my books back to the library and went to see Sue to give her the doctors stuff, i accomplished something. Today i got up late and just started sorting out this room, i'm moving into Eliots old room because there is more space, its disgusting though so it needs a lot of cleaning before i can move anything in here. I was just starting to feel positive about it, about to get the hoover, ignoring the bigger implications of moving back in here, how i would feel once the mission of having something to do was over and my mum comes in and says we need to move the other wardrobe in here, Eliot will need more space than just the little room when he comes back at Easter. Mainly this upset me because it made me realise that i'm not in control of my own life anymore, i can't make my own decisions without them going through my mum or my counsellor first but it also got to me because i was never given lots of space when i came back during holidays, all of my stuff had to be packed up and stored under the bed so it wasn't taken and put in someones loft. Why did this topic have to be brought up now? What was the benefit in that? I already feel like i don't want to be here, i just wanted to create my own little space that i could have some control over, that i could keep nice and would be my resonsibility and no one else could interfere with but now it seems like ill be chucked out of it again as soon as Eliot comes back from uni, i don't want to be here so badly and now i've lost all motivation for my little project, i'm at a new level of low, i really thought that having my own space to be me and to be alone would make things better but .... it wont, there really isnt any solution to this, so whats the point?

Thursday

I think i only know the day of the week because i am writing it at the top of these posts, i guess i've become slightly out of touch with the real world. I got a message from Weston earlier apologising again for all of this, even though none of this is his fault and doesnt really have anything to do with him at all i guess, although i can see why he may think so, the timing was coincidental. It was more of an explosive compaction of assuming everything would be okay if i could just make it to Christmas, everything would be alright once i got to Christmas, but then i felt the same at Christmas and after Christmas it was worse ... there wasn't any deadline anymore, just, realife. Perhaps you can look forward to something too much, but it wasn't that either, it was resting all happiness on that moment.
My mum took me to see Julia the counsellor on Tuesday, i don't know if it helped, she said grief has 5 stages - denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. I'm not sure if this is just bull or whether i actually haven't started to grieve at all because i haven't been through any of these, somehow i seem to be at depression now having skipped a few steps even though i thought i was at acceptance a long time ago, how can it have taken me this long to start to grieve??
This doesn't seem like a very nice thing to be writing on here but the whole point of this thing is to get this stuff out so i'm not thinking them anymore so if reading any of this makes you upset then stop reading,
i'm still in this 'nothings working yet' stage of things, because - nothings working yet, i'm taking the drugs as they suggested and doing this counselling thing and all that jazz but i don't feel any different, i'm not at uni anymore so i don't feel like i'm going to have a heart attack every 5 seconds but i feel exactly the same, i can't see an end to this, its like i'm in a tunnel and the tunnel is life and its completely dark and you used to be able to see what was going on ahead a bit but its totally black now and i'm just stumbling along not knowing what's going on, i lie in bed each night and wish that i was dead, life is actually too painful to cope with and the thought of the future is even worse. Most people say that taking these drugs help them feel better about things, more able to cope with life and stuff ... they may as well be vitamin c tablets because nothings happend. Something has to change soon, i can't live life feeling like this

Wednesday

I don't really understand what's happened to me lately, if my brain were a computer the only way to describe it to the computer tech would be "i was trying to multi task a bit and i think it overloaded and now its refusing to work" to which the computer tech would ask how many things i was trying to cope with at one time and i would have to answer "Oh not many, i had 42 things running in the background, and was working on these 11 documents whilst looking at these sites ... yes i guess i do have quite a few tabs open, would you call 92 a lot? Oh and norton was scanning ... maybe its a problem with norton?". So i guess its not surprising. I think i need somewhere to mentally splurge all of the things buzzing around in my head, i guess this works better than a diary because when people ask me whats going on i can direct them to here .... its a bit awkward handing someone a diary and saying "here, get yourself up to speed"
This is probably going to be very 'I' centered, which i hate but ... maybe thats what i need right now, stop worrying about everything else and focus on me.
I haven't slept in at least a week, i've actually lost count of the days, well, when i say i haven't slept, obviously i'd be dead if i hadn't actually slept in that long, i haven't had a good nights sleep i should say, i haven't felt well rested, and i haven't been able to relax, although i don't think i've been able to relax in a long time, i'm not even totally sure i know how to relax, that seems like quite a basic thing to be able to do, how did i not learn this when i was a child? Right between learning to talk and learning to read - these two events where actually quite close together for me, there is still debate about whether my sister who is 18 months younger than me may have helped teach me to talk.
I go to bed at between 10 and 11pm, i lay there thinking for an hour or two, then i drift into this turbulant uncomfortable state, i wake up every hour and move about a bit, my pillow has never travelled so much, before this i was dreaming a lot, horrible, terrifying dreams but i was dreaming, now i am now asleep long enough to dream, at 4am i start to feel too hot, theres no reason for this, the heating isn't on and its still winter but after that i don't sleep, i lay there with my eyes shut willing myself to but i don't.
All of this takes up quite a lot of energy, when day finally arrives i'm exhausted already, making myself walk downstairs is a marathon, yet everyone, including myself, thinks i'm lazy, i berate myself for only accomplishing walking downstairs and getting washed in a day but i don't know how i managed to do this all in twenty minutes in the past. I've watched the family of birds in the bush outside of the window for an hour now, i can't focus on it, my mind phases in and out.
In the middle of all of this my friends keep asking how i'm doing, i takes about a week for me to get back to them, i'm normally totally on top of stuff like that, its easier to push people away, its not something i can deal with right now, but not hearing from them would make me feel more lonely, i think i'm waiting for them to give up, like those little wind up cars that you push backwards and they go towards you, but you get to a point where you push them too far away and they don't come back anymore.

Skydiving

A couple of weekends ago i went to a place called AirKix, indoor skydiving, a huge wind tunnel where you fall into the wind and you fly. It was Awesome, really awesome. The awesomeness wasn't so much the flying though, although that was a lot of fun (although slightly terrifying!) It was how clear my mind felt whilst i was doing it, i've had this feeling before, where one moment you have all of the worries of the world on your mind and then you can only possibly think of this one thing you are doing and its like thats all your brain has room for. It really puts your priorities into perspective. It happened when dad was having the heart attack and i was doing CPR, I didn't panic like everybody else, i knew what i had to do and thats all i could focus on at that moment in time, the rest of the world narrowed into this sort of tunnel vision almost. It happens everytime i have an important exam (not quite so useful in a driving exam where you need to be aware of all of your surroundings!) the adrenaline is pumping and your mind is perfectly clear, only bringing to the forfront the information you actually need at that point in time, if somebody had asked me what the capital of Australia was during that moment i wouldn't have been able to answer you. Although being able to see the bigger picture is important sometimes so you can do the right thing at the right time, sometimes you just don't need to know it, you don't need to worry about things you can't change right now and its much more useful to you to focus on the things that you are doing right now. I guess things are like that with God, we don't know the bigger picture, he doesn't give us that insight because it would be just too overwhelming for us to cope with, we get the here and now to focus on.

How did you get here?

Last week JD said hi, we spoke about Liam and he asked if i ever felt like one conversation could push someone over the edge into atheism forever. I feel like this with every conversation i have, i truly believe most people around me are one push from the eternal void of atheism, never to return. God trusts us not to make that push though otherwise we wouldn't be having the conversation, He has prepared us for this situation in every step we have taken up until this point. I started wondering how He had affected things and was actually quite shocked at how much He had prepared me for where i am today. Hilary and I used to play this game 'if ..... hadnt happened who would i be now?' where one person names an event in the others life and you have to figure out what the wave of difference would have been as a result of this, this post is pretty much me playing this game with God.

I am a second child, (yes God was planning stuff before i was even born) as such from the moment i was born i looked up to my older sister and wanted to copy what she did, as i got older i wanted to prove myself and beat what she could do. Amy started gooing to Sunday School when she was around nine, I dont know why she started going, my parents didnt take her, maybe one of her friends invited her along. She kept going every week until she moved to university. The rest of us were jealous and wanted to go to, eventally our parents caved in and let us all go, i hated it and soon started begging my parents to let me stay at home. On Sunday mornings we had to go to church parade with the brownies, we sat in a dank dark thousand year old church in out little brownie uniforms and marched a flag up the aisle, sang hymns which mostly we just said 'blah blah' to and tried to stay awake so Brown Owl didnt give us a sharp poke in the ribs, our dad would pick us up from church and take us to Sunday school, my class was a combination of two school year groups, i was the youngest of the five kids in my class, everyone elses parents were part of the Salvation Army Corps, i really didnt feel like i fit in, i didnt know any of the things that these kids had been brought up doing, i'd never had to find a passage in the Bible before, i didnt know that it wasnt really appropriate to wear my mums 'Brown Ale' apron when we did our easter play, i gave up, they were, and are, nice people, but it wasnt designed to let outsiders in. God had opened my eyes to the concept of church but made me realise this wasnt really how it should be done. I had been told God existed, so i believed it, i had no reason to question it, my parents didnt tell me otherwise.

From this brief period onwards i had no connection to the church, i'd left Sunday school, brownies and Guides and so had Sundays free. In secondary school God introduced me to a girl names Susy, she is a Christian, the only Christian in our class, we thought she was wierd but she ended up taken me on as a friend, Susy has influenced the type of Christian i have become and taught me some lessons along the way.

When we were 14 we had to choose which GSCEs we would study for, its actually quite a life directing point when you think about it, choosing your direction of study at such a young age, i chose the subjects i was interested in and Sociology (because Amy had studied it). Sociology was oversubscirbed. They gave me Religious studies instead. I was crushed, i was horrible at RS. When i started the course the next year though we had a young enthusiastic teacher called Miss Gill, we started studying philosophy and she made it interesting, i was hooked, i aced the GSCE and started the A level course in the subject, we started learning about Plato and Aquinas and i started debating against my classmates (if you dont know me well enough, i am quite a shy person, last century i was a million times more so, i wouldnt say boo to a goose let alone argue with someone about philosophy) and strangely my views werent always against God. I started wondering about philosophy and praying, i didnt think it would make any difference but it wouldnt cost me anything. Studying about philosophical ideas, from all perspectives and about all the different religions really drew me closer to God, i really dont think i would have accepted Him if i hadnt, because i simply dont make that sort of decision if i dont know enough about it and dont know all the information available. Many people think teaching children about all religions as well as the scientific theories is wrong and Christian children should go to Christian schools were they are only taught the 'Truths' but i strongly disagree, why segregate the few Christian children away from those in need of saving, maybe it will strengthen their ideas, whilst making them ignorant of the rest of the world, but whose salvation has it cost?

The later God directions you are probably familar with so i will be quick, if Dad hadnt have died i would have been content with England, i wouldnt have studied abroad, i wouldnt have met Jon and i wouldnt have started going to Church again, i wouldnt be saved and i would be encouraging Liam towards atheism when we discuss God, which is quite often, he is very curious. I only had one moment where i felt the Sunday school confusion when i went to Church this time round, one of the first times i met Kami she asked, in the middle of prayer if i remember rightly, "were you brought up in the church?" Now i sort of understand the question now but i really wasnt sure what she meant at the time or what was the 'correct' answer. What does being brought up in the church mean? I nodded because i figured id been to church a few times when i was eight and she seemed disappointed, i later found out she wasnt brought up in the church, i went away thinking ' .... was i brought up in the church?' My parents have never believed in God and never came to church or imposed any kind of belief system on us but somehow i did end up there. So Kami, i think to better answer your question -

i wasnt brought up in the church but i was brought up in God, my Father made sure of that