It Has To Hurt If Its To Heal.

Sometimes, in amongst the laughter, the games, the socialising and the fun, there are moments.

Quiet moments that make you catch your breath and drag you back to a pain you had long since forgotten.

Briefly, you're reminded that behind the smiles and the laughter is a world of trauma that you will never get over, but instead, have learned to live with and use as a driving force towards success.

Memories and guilt flood in like a raging tsunami, moving so quickly that they leave you disorientated and scared, fighting the urge to step backwards into the all too familiar comfort that comes with hiding in the dark. After all, you know the pain intimately, and within its black wings you know you are safe.

You know you can bury your torment, nobody will ask you to deal with it.

Hiding in the pitch black, cocooned and protected from all the possibilities of living as the irresistible pull of despair beckons you in, facing the reality of the healing process becomes too big to contemplate.

Its a reality for so many of us for many different reasons, but for those of us who have been the victims of abuse, its a reality that you have to learn to live with because it never completely dissipates. There are always going to be triggers but when you learn to control them rather than letting them control you, the difference is night and day.

Whatever age you are, the one thing I can guarantee you is that you will not reach your dotage without damage, and that can raise its ugly head in so many different ways.

The question is, how do you protect yourself from the inevitable devestation that comes as part of life? How do you learn to recognise the toxic environment that has the potential to destroy you, and if you find yourself in the thick of something you never saw coming, how do you get out?

My story is the same as millions of other men and women around the world.

Girl meets boy. Girl falls for boy. Girl ignores red flags from the very start because she is convinced she can change boy.

Boy moves in inspite of not being asked because girl was trying to help him out in a sticky situation.

Once those feet were well and truly planted, everything changed and the fallout was unimaginable.

I don't talk about this for sympathy. Far from it. I have washed my hands of that period of my life.

It took a lot of internal soul work to push through it, and there were times I didn't actually think I would make it, but here I am.

I talk about it openly because if there is just one person out there who can relate and who finds the courage to step away from something toxic because of it, then my work here is done.

As the people who know me can attest to, I have always been a huge romantic. I was the generation that grew up on Disney princesses being rescued from towers by knights on horses. We were fed the line that all you needed was love and life would be complete.

Our prince would come in waving his sword on a white charger and save us, for better or for worse, for richer or poorer, till death us do part.... hopefully not too quickly. (insert winky face here!)

Now, don't get me wrong.... I am still a huge believer in that knight riding in. I still believe in a love that will stand the test of time and everything that this world throws at it, but what I have realised is that its not fair to expect someone else to save you.

Its not fair to put the pressure of your own individual happiness on somebody else, and it is far from okay to blame them when your life doesn't go the way that you wanted it to go.

My life, up until around 3 years ago was chaotic. It was filled with drama, angst, complete shakespearian tragedy, and the result was a complete imbalance in everything I did, said, felt and experienced.

A huge part of that was me choosing the wrong people and putting myself into situations that were less than healthy.

I am by nature a saviour. I want to help everyone, even when it created huge mental health issues for me, and whilst my mental health deteriorated daily at the expense of keeping others happy, I lost myself more and more until one day, I looked in the mirror and saw a stranger in front of me.

I had completely lost everything that made me who I was. I didn't even know what 'me' looked like anymore.

I had become this tired, twisted, broken creature that didn't how to be, how to live, how to breath. I only knew that I was desperately unhappy. That everything in me was screaming for release but nobody could hear my frantic, panicked cries because I had buried them so deeply that the noise around me was deafening.

I knew that if I didn't take myself away from everything that was slowly seeping poison into my soul, it would kill me. The damage would be permanent and the fallout would destroy me.

For the first time in many years, I began to realise that I needed to choose me and although it took another 18 months of rebuilding before I left, I finally got to the point where choosing me became important enough to walk away from everything that was destroying me.

I walked away with nothing. I didn't care because all I knew was that anything was better than where I was. Anything was better than living in constant fear of a raised hand or a barrage of cruel words that cut deep into your soul and ripped away every last element of what made you feel worthy of love.

Years of living on high alert had left me with panic attacks, crippling anxiety and had convinced me that I was worthless. maybe even less than worthless, and for a long time that anxiety and debilitating grief convinced me that I would never be worth anything more than what I had experienced. How could anyone ever love me? How could I ever love myself when all I could see was a broken shell with nothing left but pain and despair?

My healing process began with a Japanese art form. Something I had never come across prior to this, and its introduction into my life was serendipitous. All of a sudden I was faced with the opportunity to physically create something beautiful from something broken.

Kintsugi became the physical manifestation of everything I was going through. For those of you who don't know, it is the art of creating something beautiful out of something smashed and broken.

The Japanese take something that seems to be damaged beyond repair, and using a gold powder, they create a bonding that brings those broken pieces back together and creates an incredible strength that was not there before. Something that may have been discarded suddenly becomes even more beautiful because of its imperfections.

What a wonderful metaphor this is for mental health and broken people. The very idea that in spite of everything that has tried to destroy us, we can create something even more beautiful from the chaos and the damage is at its very core not only inspiring but also incredibly lifechanging.

This started a journey that began a transformation I never anticipated.

For the first time in I don't know how long, I began to see glimpses of me coming back. Seconds of frivolity and excitement that I hadn't experienced for as long as I could remember.

The girl looking back in the mirror began to look less like a stranger and more like a warrior who was returning from a war that she had never expected to survive, but somehow, inspite of everything, she had.

The wounds were deep and the scars would never disappear completely, but in amongst all of that pain, there was a glimmer of something beautiful. Something divine. Something inspirational.

In the dark, there was just a tiny sliver of hope that broke up the blackness and cast a bright, white light upon everything that had seemed so desperately bleak.

My journey back to me had begun with a small broken dish, who would have thought it. The symbolism

behind that tiny object was breathtakingly powerful, and still resonates with me to this day.

My transformation isn't complete. It never will be. One thing I have learnt is that you are learning and growing every single day of your life. Self improvement is never complete.

You have to continue to choose you every day. You have to continue to remind yourself that you are worth so much more, and you have to learn how to love being on your own and not relying on someone else for your happiness.

Until you can do that, you shouldn't be with anyone else because your happiness will always be dependant on them and that is not fair for either of you.

I journeyed to hell to find myself again, but do you know what, when my feet hit the floor on a morning, the devil is the first person to say - shit, she's up, and I intend to live every single day of my life that way because too much has already been lost.

From me to you - You are worthy. You are loved.

You deserve happiness and if you do the work, you will find it. You just have to believe in yourself and the value that you have and bring to the world.

You are who you choose to be and ultimately, where you end up in life is down to you.

You have the potential to be amazing.

See it.

Feel it.

Hold it tight and don't let it go because the one thing you don't want on your death bed are regrets. Live every day like its your last, and when youfind honest to goodness true love musers, love with everything in you.

Love with your entire heart, mind and soul.

Feel everything that giving yourself entirely to someone else is.

Drop those walls and experience love in its entirety because I am telling you now, its worth it.

It won't always be pretty. It won't always be roses and chocolates, but when you find your human, the good times will make those few difficult moments worth every single tear.

From me to you - until next time xxxx