With all the illness I have dealt with in the past six weeks, I have had a lot of time to sit and think about things. I’ve talked with doctors, talked with my husband and thought long and hard about the things that are important to me.

I have had a lot of revelations recently, which have lead me to see that my life is mostly directed by fear, a byproduct of the abuses I suffered as a child. I have learned to see my subconcious not as something working against me but as something that has worked hard for me over the years as my protector. Something that is not going to be convinced that I am safe with the say I am living my life now.

I have remembered that I am sensitive to stress and have a fairly low limit before it starts influencing my health. I have also come to see that the number on the scale is something I need in my life because I could ‘lose control’ without it.

I look at this blog and the archives, and I think about all the ups and downs over the years. If there is one thing I have taken from that, it’s that I never stop trying. I make mistakes by the dozen and have believed in false solutions, but I never stay on the ground for long.

But now it’s time to stop fighting.

Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t giving up. I have come to see, though, that my life has been about fear, fighting and survival for far too long. There isn’t nearly enough rest, relaxation and acceptance. I can talk to you all afternoon long about simple things to do to help lose weight. I know very little about how to let go of the things that helped me gain weight in the first place.

For years now, this blog has been about fighting the good fight to get healthy. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I still love to read blogs about those who are doing that. But for me? My time for fighting has come to a stop for now. Today I am taking deep breaths and changing the path I’m walking on.

I will still talk about the usual, most likely. Plus, I will still get on the scale – though I can’t tell you how often at the moment. But I will also be incorporating my new goals for my life, adding to them as I see fit and taking away when necessary. I will be working on creating a safe environment for myself in all ways and learning more about living and letting go rather than holding on and forever keeping in motion.

I hope the few loyal readers I have will stay with me because I do care about you and care what you think. I also hope you’ll enjoy the slight change in direction from here on out…

I can usually feel it within me from when I wake up. It’s like a little piece of chaos churning and thrashing around in my belly. It sits there, right under my rib cage, sometimes reaching up to snatch my breath away so I have to make the conscious decision to breathe deeply.

These are my ‘bad’ days.

Days are okay if they go unchallenged; a challenge being forced social contact, unexpected criticism, feeling threatened or a number of other triggers concious and unconcious. On the better days, I dive into the to-do list and manage to fight off the feelings with distraction. On worse days, I don’t go out of the house except for the back yard to have some fresh air and a cuddle with the dog.

The nights are worse. I can’t tell you why. I don’t know.

I can feel it in my eyes then, like tears wanting to well up but not starting just yet. I feel like I need to keep a grip, keep control, keep focused on anything that will distract me long enough to get through this day.

Sometimes I make it and that is that. Sometimes I don’t make it.

Sometimes when I don’t make it, the chaos explodes from my belly to the rest of my body and I quiver as the urge to rock back and forth is the only thing leaving me some comfort. I cry and try to remember to breathe but I usually don’t when someone isn’t there because it’s so hard to think of anything concrete when your mind is a tornado with debris. I cry and rock and shake, surrendering to the chaos that makes me feel like I just cannot handle even existing right now.

Then I exhaust myself. When my husband is there, he soothes me, tells me to breathe and tells me everything will be okay. I believe him because I need to believe him. I need to believe everything will be okay. When I am alone, I am too exhausted to even rock, taking away the one thing that made me feel even a sliver ‘okay’.

Either way, I am left exhausted and hollow, my brain mostly blank as I try to gain some semblance of normalcy.

And I never, never wonder when the chaos might come again. I survived it and that’s all that matters. If I thought about the next ‘might happen’, I don’t know what I’d crumble into.

*This post is a free write that I have done as an exercise to get through a panic attack. Being mindful of what you are doing and experiencing within a given moment is not only a powerful tool for health and wellness in a dietary regard but in a mental health one as well. This is by no means what everyone or even anyone else experiences with anxiety and panic attacks.*

On tonight’s Glee (keep in mind Australia is behind the US), the focus was on the Glee kids learning to accept they were ‘born this way’. They had to make t-shirts that said the things they were self-conscious about. Rachel had ‘Nose’ on hers, Curt had ‘Likes Boys’, so on and so forth.

When they were all dancing around the stage, revealing their shirts, I didn’t quite cry but I almost did.

You see, that stuff makes me cry because I want to be there but I feel like I can’t. Like I’ve said in previous posts, I think I’m a good person and I’m learning to care about myself. But love? Ack. I don’t think I could fit all of the things I don’t like about myself on one shirt.

But then I thought, “I’d put ‘love yourself shows make me cry’ on my shirt because it pretty much encompasses the problem right now. I’m learning. I’ll get there. But for right now, it’s still a big process.

Yet that wasn’t quite good enough. I still skirted around the main point, the main disappointment, the main source of shame and anxiety…

So what would my shirt really say?

This may be the t-shirt I made, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to wear it.

Time for change.