Judy2

@MuadDib yes, it was the first spiritual book i ever bought and read:) i don't remember the part about his thesis though! that's funny....thanks for bringing it up:) i am trying to be more relaxed and present:)

...had this post ready around noon, but somehow it didn't get uploaded, so i'll have to type it all again: wore my red dress again ran for 20min on the treadmill and enjoyed that felt a bit lighter and more hopeful after expressing some painful emotions in my other journal trying to be nice to myself and take good care of myself, trying to be in tune with myself some other points i forgot

i wonder if my dad is a narcissist or what defines his psychology. maybe not an overt one, but he might have some covert traits. his mind can be quite rigid and there's a lot of stress and tension in him, too. he can be caring, for sure. he can even be sincere...but sometimes, he's just really really rigid. i also wonder about my mum. she's definitely not as emotionally healthy as i thought her to be...but i can't quite pin-point it. she's so non-rigid that my dad can push her around quite easily...probably easily used and manipulated, cause she wants to please everybody and take care of everybody. she was always scared of not being a good mum, or being neglectful...so if anything, she tends to be a bit overbearing. i feel pain and i feel stressed around both of them....usually just want to put a whole lot of distance between myself and them.

randomly found myself thinking about the year 2080...i'll be 78 in that year. hopefully i'll be more relaxed about life then, have loving people around me, be impressed at how the world will have evolved, know who i am, don't spend every minute of every day second-guessing myself and my worth and if things are okay. maybe if i think more about the year 2080, i'll stop worrying about the things in the present, because they're usually not quite as significant as i believe them to be. i feel sadness and grief, that things aren't okay yet. that i spend so much time struggling and feeling anxious and wondering if i'll turn out okay, if i'll end up feeling good enough....makes me really sad, makes me cry. i feel tension and discomfort and stress (also because of dad, he's quite stressed this evening, i can totally feel it, and he is quite insensitive to how that is affecting me, tbh). we are going on that hike tomorrow and i had planned to keep myself together and not restrict (totally new for me, at a family event) and look forward to trying to fuel my body...but that's difficult to keep feeling positive about when i see how stressed out dad is and how rigid he is around packing our stuff (including our food) and that makes me feel kind of bad, like he makes it all ugly, and the urge is to counter that by a sort of hunger strike....it doesn't seem right to be the one suffering under his tension and let him make my food and the entire experience ugly, and to eat the food that he has made ugly with all his stress and tension regardless. that doesn't seem right. it's also the reasoning that made me stay underweight while living under his roof till i turned 18...and i'm trying to do better, trying to allow myself to be alive and fuel myself and enjoy that hike regardless...but DAMN that's HARD when i see how HE, HE, of all people, just makes everything so ugly and stressful. i hate it. how am i supposed to be cool and be that kind of girl who goes on hikes with family and feels good while doing it, when he's like that? how can i not resort to dysfunctional coping mechanisms when being around him is this ugly and stressful??? ouch. i'm in pain. i'm stressed. i'm suffering. it's already strsssful enough, being me. already sad and painful enough. he makes it all a thousand times harder, right now. *i'm probably a really bad person for talking about someone like that, behind their back. not sure.... it's emotional expression, so that's good. but it's also really nasty. i feel bad. he's too much, he's stessing me out.

briefly felt better for some time after working through these emotions, and i felt a bit more hopeful after that. but not feeling good about the fact that these past few days i've had really low energy (napped twice a day), procrastinated on working on my thesis/been unproductive all day long, and always been very bloated by the end of the day. it feels so hopeless because this has been an issue for years, so at this point i don't even dare hope that i can ever fix this....it seems hopeless.

i am hoping to get support with this and find a therapist who can work with me in the long-term, soon. and i am hoping, praying that this world can be good after all, and that i can make the discovery that i can have a beautiful body while having a healthy, intuitive, loving relationship with myself, my emotions, exercise, my body, and food. right now i'm scared that i can't...or i'm not sure, i don't know what's true. i'm scared, i feel alone. i feel very sad that so far, it has felt as though i'm only really beautiful when i actively mistreat myself. and that i lose points in rating when i look healthy, and even healthy people would confirm that i looked better when i was smaller. it should be possible, it should be right that i can be my most beautiful when i'm healthy...but i don't know if this is true, in this world...and that makes me really sad.

i feel sad about my body, i feel grief. i think it is true for me that dieting and forcing myself to restrict isn't right. i only just got my period back. i feel a little jealous of other women who can be healthy and have an effortless, healthy relationship with food while looking thin. i want my body to look different again, but i know it's not good for me to achieve this through deliberate restriction...cause that never felt sustainable, it never felt true for me. so it's a bit like i'm at God's mercy now, just trying to improve my relationship with food and i'll have to see where my body goes with that? it's scary, cause i don't know where it'll go. i'm scared, i feel sad, i feel bad about myself, i feel inferior. i feel stupid for giving up control over my body, when i could easily "fix" all body image concerns by restricting again. i know i feel good about my body when i restrict, but i don't feel good about life, i'm not healthy that way. so it's a little painful because being healthy is associated with so much distrust, so much powerlessness about "where my body wants to go" (i hate this expression, even) in terms of its set weight. i feel like healthy people don't understand this and will blame me for having limiting beliefs about my body weight...not sure. and i don't know if all this is just a limiting belief, or if it's the truth. it's painful to be going through this, it really is. ...i just know that i don't want to restrict anymore...so i guess the only way is to work on a healthy, intuitive relationship with my body and with food...and then see where that goes. which is just absolutely scary!!! cause again, what if "healthy"me is uglier than the ill, restricting version of me? it's frustrating and painful and sad because i know eating disordered me earlier this year was probably closer to the cultural ideal of thinness than current me is. (or maybe not bmi 16.sth me, ...but bmi 18.5 me definitely more so than bmi 20 me...) it makes me sad and i feel so alone with this struggle. again..."why do i always look my best when i'm dying on the inside?..." it hurts. hurts to see that i may just have to accept being uglier when i'm healthy. i'm not sure. but i think people found me prettier when i was just a few kilos underweight (or when i was at the lowest healthy bmi possible...apparently that is where our society's ideal lies)....i'm already too big now, already in such shape that people at the gym probably assume i'm there to lose weight, because look at me and look at my arms, and my face, and my belly!!... ...i feel sad. it's a struggle.

i acknowledge that i'm not happy with the way my body looks, and that i'd like it to be a little smaller again. at least a little closer to the socially accepted beauty standard of thinness. i acknowledge that i feel scared that i can't do anything about it, considering that thinking about restriction alone is enough to make my body and brain react quite strongly. i am worried that i will never figure this out, and always be blamed for my body and for not believing that i can change it. because i know that changing my body is possible, healthy people do it, too. healthy women end up with that beauty standard kind of thinness, too, and maintain it. i feel sad. i'm genuinely not sure if this is limiting beliefs holding me back, or if it's not healthy and my body just needs a tiny bit more fat than other women to be healthy. ...i'm not sure about this, don't know what to tell myself about this, don't know if i should justify my belly to myself by this logic (hormonal health and so forth)...or if i could be healthy (psychologically and physically, having a relaxed relationship with food) even with a few kilos less. maybe my weight will go down a little bit as my relationship with food improves, too...consider that...i mean things are constantly changing, my body's constantly changing...it's possible that my belly and arms will get smaller again...i'd like that. and i would prefer that to losing weight in a way that is based on unhealthy restriction and hating myself...cause i know that's not sustainable and would ultimately only make me feel trapped. it's just such a dilemma that i know i could make it happen, but i don't know if i could make it happen in a healthy way. and i want to be healthy and i know that for someone like me there's a risk involved with dieting...but if i could make it happen in a helathy way and don't attempt it and end up stuck complaining about my belly, and other healthy women do attempt it and get a flatter belly....people will totally consider me inferior for not losing weight again....don't know if this makes sense. it does make sense to me, from the perspective of someone who has had an eating disorder since the age of 13. ... i feel like my bloated belly is a culturally coded sign of inferiority. i don't know a single woman on this planet, i never see a single woman out on the streets, who ends up as bloated as i do by the end of the day. it's like other women are either too big so no one counts them towards this statistic anyway, or they have a flat belly 24/7. i don't know where i fall on this scale...i feel bad.

drove our car to the animal sanctuary and back saw pregnant goats, the cutest baby pigs ever!!!, meerkats, monkeys (also very cute), camels, lamas,... was out in physical space, outdoors, in nature [positive...but also mixed feelings on that...*] looking forward to seeing my brother on Saturday and hiking in the Swiss mountains:) [*it still feels odd, "being allowed" to go outdoors and move around through physical space. it wasn't just depression that kept me from doing that, it was also (and still is) a lot of fear and this sense that i'm not allowed to exist or be alive. and i still feel, often, that i am not fully allowed to be in physical space, move around freely...that still feels kind of forbidden even now. existence. cause it means that i am actually here, i actually exist and this is real, i'm here, in this scary, big world...and what is this scary, big world anyway, that i can just move through it, walk through space...seemingly never-ending space...it still feels so strange to me, still scary. ... but then, i already exist anyway, and won't be a better person for it if i spend my life miserable, indoors, complaining about the fact that i exist while feeling that i'm not allowed, and yet i can never quite get rid of myself...that won't do much for my self-worth either. so there's this transitory period now where i just gotta push myself a bit and just take it, take the life that i already got anyway...it's mine already. even though it still feels a little off, if not completely uncomfortable...ugh...stressful. being alive can also feel super uncomfortable because now i am EXTREMELY vulnerable, being fully here instead of dissociating and dwindling away. ouch. being alive is nice, but it also is so fucking vulnerable. so i totally get why part of me has wanted to avoid this for so long, probably still wants to on some level!....i feel a bit of pain, it feels painful to live, it feels WRONG] [it's a bit like a lose-lose, or like this dilemma, the grass is always greener on the other side...neither of these two options is really good. if i avoid life, i avoid the joy that comes with it - avoid all prospects to experience good things, but i also stay safe from all the bad stuff. and if i live, like i do now, which is new...i get to experience good things, freedom...but HELL am i VULNERABLE to all the bad stuff as well. and i think someone like me is probably extra-sensitive to all the "bad stuff", so there's that....i feel pain even just thinking or writing about it.]

expressing frustration/acknowledging some negative feelings: i don't like how noisy dad can be i don't like his clutter i don't like his loud voice i don't like that he's talking too much and that he sometimes stands too close to me i don't like how sometimes he gets too close to me and thinks it appropriate to tell me whether to wear socks or not, or whether the temperature requires me to wear a jacket. i don't like that sometimes he goes "yes, yes" in response to serious emotional topics of mine, which is perceived as dismissive and invalidating on my end. i don't like that he said something about the weekend where he "presumes me to participate" in another hike with him and my brother...cause that just makes me feel pressured and like he's taking away my choice, and he isn't even aware that this is the exact point why i explicitly brought it up again to tell him i still need to reflect on whether it's right for me...and he just countered that with "yeah i think it will be right for you" - i find this very upsetting, because he is insensitive to the emotional point i was trying to make in that moment. it's not actually about whether i come along or not, but the fact that he thinks he has a say in that - when he doesn't and it's up to me and i want to feel relaxed and know that i am free to decide what is right for me. ...makes me feel really pressured to see that he doesn't quite get this.

gratitudes today: today i am feeling a tiny, tiny bit more in tune with myself than yesterday i consciously planned on having a break and made an effort to meditate (and then nap lol) this afternoon i really enjoyed my hot shower at the gym earlier today i enjoyed running at the gym this evening, dad and i are going to drive to a kind of animal sanctuary and i hope that walking and being around animals is going to help me relax

English literature yes

...still not relaxed lol. i briefly considered making a new thread to ask about this. ...really not sure how to resolve this...i think i've already asked about it at least twice before. stress management sounds like such a simple issue to tackle. i wonder why it's not and why it's so complex and difficult to handle in my experience. it can't be that hard, it sounds like such a basic problem to have...

@Schizophonia it's like an undergraduate degree. master's would be postgraduate.

i'm probably putting in an unnecessary amount of time and energy in the most inefficient way possible, and still not getting half as far as someone with a more relaxed attitude would. not saying this to you in particular@Schizophonia it's only something i just realised

@Schizophonia no i'm not doing a PhD lol. it's just my bachelor's thesis...not as big a deal as i make it sound.

10 things i am grateful for this evening/in this moment/this hour: my window is open and the cool night air feels good i finished going through all my sticky notes in The Woman in White today (probably hundreds) i can see that i am trying to be good to myself i found a little postcard with a kitten on it to look at i really love my pink coat i love the picture above my desk: my brother and me...he's wearing his cowboy boots and a grey shirt, and i'm leaning against him in a cute black skirt, and my hair is really long and pretty, falling in soft waves. i am grateful that i have a safe, comfortable bed to sleep in at night i am grateful that my father tries to support me - i can see that he is trying i am grateful that i have two appointments with therapists coming up...so maybe if i am lucky, one of them will be a good fit and keep working with me. i am grateful for the existence of my friends. it feels good to have friends and to know that they'll be there, no matter what. i love my friends. 11: i really enjoyed the hot shower i took this evening, and i took it deliberately because i knew it would be an act of self-care. 12: i like the sensation when i hold my cheek against my shoulder and feel my own soft, warm skin 13: i like my toned muscles and that i can feel that i have been working out 14: i am glad that i went cycling this afternoon...it was a good idea and it's something i should do more often, because it makes me feel happy and alive. 15: maybe dad and i can come up with a plan for tomorrow night, as to have something nice to look forward to. going to the cinema or something, perhaps. maybe that will help me relax. 16: i enjoy being aware of different colours in my environment; taking some time to scan the weird physical-mind-space around me and to see what's going on in this bubble that i'm "trapped" in 17: i re-polished my nails and the deep, dark red feels nice 18: i am looking forward to going to the gym tomorrow morning. i am hoping to enjoy my workout. 19: i am hoping to receive a positive reply from my professor, and to get a little bit more time for my thesis, so that i can keep prioritising my emotional well-being, too. 20: i'll have nutritious food tomorrow that will leave me feeling satiated and well-nourished 21: i am hoping to re-discover a random song that i heard earlier today that i forgot the lyrics of

...i'm feeling stupid again. it feels odd and stupid that mental illness, trying to be mentally healthy, is taking on such a central role for me in life. not sure what else life should consist in, if not a journey towards mastering the self - but regardless, it feels stupid. i feel stupid for struggling; i feel ugly. perhaps there'd be a prettier, more profound way to struggle, still? cause it's always this beautiful struggle, but i'm the ugly, unworthy character right in the middle of it. i'm ugly, i'm broken, i'm flawed, i'm not good enough. everything is wrong with me. everything is going wrong, everything is off balance.

i still feel stressed and like something is wrong with me and i'm not good enough and everything is wrong. it's difficult not to buy into it...it's such old programming. i'm guessing i'm also very anxious that i might just wake up in a week or two and hate myself for having tried to be more kind to myself. i'm very distrustful, still. i don't believe yet that i'm truly trying to love myself and be strong now...i sort of expect that it's only a matter of time till something messy comes up, something too messy, and i'll fall right back into the old patterns. i'm very sceptical. i don't believe that i'm allowed to be nice to myself now, i don't believe that the voice that says "i got you now!" got me yet. but i got me. even now. i'm with myself, and i won't abandon myself. ...kind of making me emotional now. it's still all so much, and i still feel quite alone with this struggle. i would appreciate help and support. i deserve help and support, if i feel that i need it. either way, i got me. whatever happens, i got me. i reckon that's supposed to be comforting...not sure yet, but perhaps, yes.

silence, a break, relaxation, calm, quiet, peace of mind, satisfaction with the present moment, feeling grounded, content with what is, at peace i keep forgetting, but i am smart, so if i feel that i need the above to feel better - i can totally make that happen. a few reminders to myself what i can do more often in the following week to feel better: ground myself in my senses: sight: - when going about my day, i can try to notice colours in my visual field/make myself look for certain colours - find nice pictures to look at, for example kittens - when i'm outside for walks etc. it's nice to look at the sky, the fields, the trees... - when things are tidied up nicely [difficult, triggering..because Dad.] sound: - [don't know, sound is triggering] - music (already doing that) touch/physical sensation: - massage ball - stuffed animals - take a hot shower smell: - essential oils (thought i had some but can't find them anymore) - nice soap/lotion - flowers self-care: polish my nails daily movement/exercise (already doing that, but i can do it more consciously, feeling my body and knowing that it's good for me, that it is supposed to help my mind relax) pick out nice outfits be more mindful and genuine when i write my daily gratitudes...don't just write things down. write them because i feel them to be true. be more present with myself, in my body, with my emotions.

i have a very odd relationship with taking breaks. it frustrates me so much that i can't stop thinking about it right now. maybe i've also had too much caffeine today - i don't even notice anymore. i have the caffeine because i think it helps me be productive. it's good to be busy so that i have some structure to my day and know when to eat and when not to eat, but then psychologically that does this thing where i don't know how to legitimise having breaks unless it's for eating? or i genuinely don't know what else to do to help myself relax. i don't know! i'm already doing the walks and the cycling and the exercise...it's not doing anything. and food isn't really satisfying, it's not what i truly crave. i crave a break, i crave relaxation - and i'm feeling some desperation now because i have literally no idea how to get that. perhaps i should be glad that i figured things out up until this point...that i understand enough to see what's missing. but i still don't know how to manifest this thing that's missing (silence, a break, relaxation, calm, quiet, peace of mind, satisfaction with the present moment). i'm constantly in a rush...because i'm scared to be fully here. because when i'm fully here there are noisy neighbours or a noisy dad and a messy, chaotic, unaesthetic house. so what choice do i have but to try and run from that, but to distract myself? but to wait until all that is gone, and over, and i can breathe again...whenever that is supposed to happen. ...feeling really stressed and frustrated with myself....ugh.

feeling frustrated with the fact that i don't know how to regulate my stress levels. upset, angry.... the higher, loving self says it's even okay to be where i'm at. and it's okay that i don't know that, and that i don't have it all figured out yet, and that i'm still scared and stressed sometimes. - i'm finding that hard to accept, but i guess i don't have much choice in that; it is what it is.

i feel frustrated with the fact that i don't know how to make myself relax. even if i plan on doing certain things simply for the sake of relaxation, they tend to stress me out a lot.

..in part this is also because i believe that working on myself and learning to do things differently is supposed to be emotionally difficult and exhausting. it is, but at the same time it's also "just being present with myself"...and there shouldn't be anything difficult about that, about fully being with my emotions. but then, it is also true that learning to do things differently than before requires more mental energy and conscious effort, because there are so many pitfalls i need to navigate my way around. also, i got angry just now, thinking how mum tells me to just relax. it invalidates this whole emotional struggle, and i dislike that. it makes me hurt, to feel misunderstood in this regard. to think that she thinks she understands, when she doesn't even remotely see any of it.

...i think i need to get in the habit of watching trash tv or something...just to have a hobby that's deliberately useless, otherwise i'm just so stressed out trying to be productive 24/7... cause even socialising or going outside or meditating is done with the incentive of improving myself or "trying to get somewhere" other than right here. it's a bit paradoxical, trying to reconcile those two...difficult to strike the right balance between doing things that are good for me in the long term, and doing them just to feel good in the present moment. ideally, a thing will accomplish both, and maybe it even does...for example cycling today or running on the treadmill yesterday felt good, even in that moment. but there's still a sneaky thing going on with my mindset that is causing unnecessary stress with this. it's stressful, always trying to get somewhere. i don't need to get anywhere. but my head won't always believe it, so i keep feeling stressed, scared, anxious.