My brothers girlfriend took her own life.

But everyone keeps on living.

She was never a person I would’ve assumed would take her own life. But how often do we see it coming? Someone is miserable but an expert at hiding it. Or we aren’t listening hard enough.

It made me think. How many happy women do I know? And I can’t name one.

I can’t.

I feel like Betty Draper in Mad Men. At least the first seasons. I have everything but still nothing. I should be happy but I’m not.

My sister is drowning in an angry relationship that is causing her to be extremely overweight and extremely snappy at people.

My mother is drinking too much to drown whatever daemons are plaguing her. She loves her husband but she’s torn between the different countries he lives in and never has time to just sit down and relax.

My friends are getting divorced, or becoming a family wife, resentfully taking care of everything, or unable to find their path. One is extremely unhappy with their work but unsatisfied with going back to school to finish her degree.

I don’t know happy women. But I though she was happy. Even if she wasn’t extremely happy, she was strong, beautiful and so smart. I never saw it coming. And I can read people. Obviously I saw she was sad but I underestimated how sad and now I feel so phony. I thought I was a good friend, and I just got it proven that I’m not. I can’t be there for those who I hold close. I can’t even be there for myself.

Forgiveness. Life would be easier if we only forgave ourselves.

Until a few years ago, the hardest thing I had to forgive myself was making stupid decisions about men. That was it. Forgive me for not going after the ones I wanted and forgive me for letting those I could care less about take advantage over me.

Forgiveness was easy back then.

The year my dad got sick was a busy year in my life. I have to forgive myself for not spending more time with my father. For letting him go through so much alone when I always wanted to be there for him but just couldn’t bare to see him fade away. I have forgive myself for all the harsh thoughts I had. Believing that if only he wanted to live, he could fight the cancer. The cancer that only took 3 months to end his life.

I have to forgive myself for letting myself get completely drawn into the world of alcohol after he passed. Forgive myself for blurring out the remainder of that year, for gaining 80 pounds over a span of 6 months and for wallowing. I have to let myself understand that it was OK to get depressed.

It’s hard to forgive oneself. It’s even harder to think someone who has passed would forgive you.

In the long run, I have to forgive myself for never taking care of my body. For letting it balloon up. Sometimes I give myself such a hard time for it, but in the end I just have to forgive myself.

Read all I’ve got to write about here.

Don’t we all know that it’s easier to find something we dislike about ourselves than to find something we truly like?

Well I found something, or actually my sweet Mr Man pointed out a quality about myself that I was unaware of and once pointed out I realized how much I loved it.

I’m extremely competent in reading people. I never thought about it before, but I can usually tell when someone is lying. I will not call them on it because more often than not it’s a tiny white lie, but sometimes it’s something big that will hurt me. Like my mother, sometimes she will say something encouraging but I can tell she wants to fill it out with something else.

It was usually just something I thought was my own insecurity, that I over-analysed, because that was what my mum used to say I did. Towards her, or my sister. But Mr Man pointed out how often I’d end up being right, and how often I had been spot on regarding people and circumstances. So now I don’t doubt it any more. I always was a killer at knowing which guys fancied my friends…

Read the whole list here.

This is not a good subject to discuss. This is where I could go on forever. I mean, I could list item after item both big and small. I’ll do my best to keep this short and concise. I’m unsure if I’m supposed to only list one item or all, something is singular, so I will write this post about the single biggest thing I hate about myself.

The inability to love myself.

It’s not that I hate myself, it’s not that I ruin my life. It is however a deep seething inability to love myself that make me constantly trip over my own good intentions.

I have wants, and needs. I want to lose weight, I hate the way I look. But I constantly manipulate myself into destroying the good work I do. I lost 50 pounds so I felt I was entitled to… stray from my diet. I never turned back to my narrow path and soon the 50 pounds with an additional 10 had fixated themselves all over my body.

I do that constantly. Try to fix what depresses me, and then I think but I deserve…and I end up destroying my good efforts.

I quit drinking and wasn’t even longing for a glass of wine, so I went out and had one with dinner, which was followed by another the night after. Soon enough I was back to my old alcoholic ways. Or I stayed away from sugar for a year and never really longed for it but everyone was praising it so it must be good, or maybe that cake tastes better, or everyone else is eating it…

Or what about the time I smoked so much pot I hardly ever left the house?

I don’t do mediocre. If I get hooked I decide to take it to extremes.

If something is going well, I decide to destroy it. I don’t mentally decide, lets destroy this good thing, I just think my efforts have entitled me to deviate from the plan. Each time I know the cost and what the result will be. Yet I convince myself this time will be different and I deviate.

Somehow I feel, this is because of my inability to truly love myself. If I truly loved myself I’d let me be happy, let me enjoy my successes and stop ruining things for myself.

This is something I need to work at, I just don’t know where to start. Once I’m happy again something inside me will say “you deserve” and when my other self try to keep me on the narrow path the evil me will heckle and say What are you afraid of, you’re strong now. You can do this and still continue on your narrow path. But I never can.

To see the full list of daily subjects go here!

Quitting drugs, and in my part, alcohol, is not as easy as people want you to believe it is.

Did I not have spell checker, you’d be exposed to some awful typing.

I sometimes think of all of those blogging mommies who claim to have been an addict one time or another, but I cannot recall them ever typing while they were deep into it. And I’m deep into it.

Sometimes I think, oh sweet darling don’t get home for another hour or two, that way you can only guess how much I actually drank, instead knowing for sure.

I know, I’m deep in. I know it so badly that I do my best to hide it from my partner. I think he knows of this site so I guess I’m doing poorly job of it. However, my last boyfriend was an enabler. He would eat and drink and smoke pot way worse than I would. He would encourage my addictions and draw me deeper within them. I would try to break free.

Now I try to fight for my right to drink. I know it sounds crazy but it’s my last refuge, it’s my last… addiction. I gave up all of the others, way down to sugar. And it’s driving me insane what else can I look forward to?

When you give up to everything, the one time you let yourself free, you will take the step one close further to addiction, to deprivation, to the bottomless pit that is darkness. Because you finally let yourself have something.

That is why I get drunk more often now, than I did before. Because I refuse myself, and I refuse myself everything. All the time.

Someday this will be the death of me, but right now I cling to hold on and how do I do this? By getting drunk….

* I don’t want to tell you how many type-o’s I had with this post, because that’s just sad, I’m that deep into this shit.

Fear is controlling and paralysing.

Our fears dictate our choices and motions. Every second step is decided before hand by our own ulterior motives, all controlled by fear.

I quit drinking for a month because I feared I was an alcoholic. When it wasn’t that hard to quit, I began drinking again. It is a reward, for having the energy to stay alive. It sounds negative and dangerous but I’m not suicidal, no matter how that sentence is construed. I learned a decade ago that I would never end my life deliberately, it does however not imply that I’m happy enough to stay alive.

I have someone who loves me that I love so much it hurts. I sometimes love myself, sometimes hate myself.

Probably bipolar, I sometimes just don’t have the energy to be all that I can be. Other days I think it will suffice if I’d work as a waitress for the rest of my life, happy just being me (like Phoebe in Friends), but I know it wont. I am too smart, with too much to offer and just not enough energy to give. Anything.

We are our own worse enemies and its when we look beyond our own view of ourselves, look through other peoples eyes, that we shine. I’m trying my hardest to just shine.

Now I can be such a sourpuss. I even think the way my face looks when I’m completely relaxed is mean and sour. I look like I just bit into a lemon.

My mum used to call me Little My when I was young. It’s a character from Moomin. She is grumpy and when she gets angry she bites. That pretty much summed me up as a child if I’m lead to believe my mother.

Apparently the grumpy face is something I was born with. And the attitude? Maybe something I grew into to, but I’m more on the grumpier side. I am a sourpuss.

Just recently, I was working with a festival. One of the highlights was the flee market area and I was in charge of renting out tables. When people called in to order a place or table and didn’t pay until the very ladt second (making me unsure if I should cancel their place) I got furious and promptly put them on the worst place, although the good ones still had empty slots. Why? Because I’m a sourpuss.

I would never show it to their faces, because I’m professional. But behind closed doors. I’m a sourpuss. Those who know me well, get to hear it well.

I’ve gone over a week without alcohol. I would be lying if I said I didn’t think about it, but it was easier than expected. Maybe all I needed was to decide. Really decide to give it up. Although I keep thinking, in a month I’ll be able to have a glass of wine. Just that one glass.

I read somewhere that if you can stop at one glass, what’s the point of having that one? I thought it was a stupid question, didn’t they drink wine because they loved the taste? Did they only drink to get the alcohol effect of it? I never really got that part anymore, the reaction. Mostly due to my built up resistance to alcohol but also due to my weight. Massive abundance of fat will do that.

I gave it all up. Sugars, actually all carbs, and then alcohol. I’m only on the first week but I’ve been here before, that’s why I know the headache is a side effect. A horrible side effect because I never get headache usually. The constant thirst is another. Sure I’d get thirsty when I was consuming alcohol but that was because I hardly ever drank any water. Now I’m drinking gallon after gallon and I’m never satisfied. I don’t have diabetes. I already checked.

I don’t want to walk through life hating my body anymore. I don’t want to be constantly tired and upset. I need to remember that when the cravings kick in. Remember that I want more out of life than food and alcohol. I want to be able to feel good about myself.