The best 10 months of my life.

Ten months is significant for me, it marks the double digits. It’s something I’ve not seen for the best part of three years and I am bursting with pride. This time I have mainly done it myself, with the occasional assistance from loved ones when I really needed it. I’m not going to write a post full of lies and say that it’s getting so much easier and how I never think of it, because from my previous two posts you can see that just isn’t true.

That being said though, it doesn’t mean that fighting isn’t worth it, because believe me – it so is! When you achieve your goals; whether that’s a day, a month, a year, the sheer high that you feel is so strong that you just want to keep going and going. It sometimes feels like time goes by so slowly – I swear at points it has felt more like 10 years than 10 months.

Over the past three years or so I’ve been trying to stop self-harming, I’ve relapsed a lot and at times I just wasn’t ready to give it up. With everything though, I think that there has to be a time when you recognise that you really need to stop and start to look after yourself. All the other times that I’d tried to stop I had relied heavily on other people, but then someone changed the way that I thought about it and helped me to see that I actually needed to start doing, and getting better for me.

Throughout my secondary school years, many teachers were very reluctant to help me – I understand why they were now looking back, but at the time it really left me feeling distraught. Then when I moved to college, there were people who genuinely wanted to help and listen to me – I had never had that before. To some extent I took advantage of this and told them too much and relied on them too heavily. Then November last year I confided in someone who said the exact same thing as my teachers had done at school. In that moment I was transported back to those heart-breaking times of isolation at school. At the same time though, something clicked inside my head. I knew that this person had not said it to be mean to me, or to hurt my feelings – I don’t think they even know how much they changed me.

Alongside this, I also knew that this year would be the last one at college and so I really needed to be able to make myself better. The amazing people that were helping me – well they wouldn’t be there forever, only I would be there for me in the long run.

That was last November, since then there have been some of my best moments with some of the best friends I could have ever found. In the past 10 months I have learnt that I have the potential to be both my best friend and worst enemy. Which one of them I choose to be is exactly that – a choice. It’s a choice that isn’t always easy, and sometimes I have to play devil’s advocate with myself. But my choice to be strong and to keep recovering is keeping me strong and making me strong enough to continue. There will always be days, moments, and periods of my time when I feel that hurting myself is the only option. But really, deep down, I know that it gets me nowhere. I have worked too bloody hard for me to turn around now.

No matter what happens though, the most important thing I’ve learnt over the past ten months is that I am the only important person in my life. To me, I will always be the only that matters. To everyone else I may just be another person in the world, but to me I am the whole world.