To all those out there...

Hello.

Hello to all you beautiful souls that are out there.

Hello to all those that are reading what I have to say, here in my little corner of the internet.

To those that have joined me recently, welcome, and while I know you guys came because of the nails, I’m hoping you’ll stick around for the rest of it as well.

While this blog has been rather nail heavy recently, it won’t be becoming a nail blog any time soon. This blog is a bit of an extension of my life, if all I’m showing is nails, it’s probably because I don’t have a lot else going on in my life at the moment. When that happens, my nail polish is my lifeline, it’s something to cling to while the rest of my life falls down in pieces around me. I delve a little more into that in this post.

But, for 3 days this past week, my nails were bare.

And that really showed how fall I’ve been falling.

I’ve been having a hard time recently. It started a couple of days after Christmas. Sometimes I get this feeling when I wake up. Like there is a pit in my stomach. A rock, a stone, a black hole. When I wake up like that, I know it’s going to be a bad day. I really fought the depression this time. I didn’t want to fall. I had a New Years Party to plan for, New Years nails to do, a holiday to pack for, a blog to run. For the first time in a long time, I really fought my depression. I took a long shower, washed my hair nicely, cleaned my nails, moisturised, even put on a face treatment. I really took care of myself. I really, really tried.

Not how I was feeling. Source here

But, in the end, it still left me feeling black and empty come my New Years party. While my friends were laughing and talking, I was curled up in a blanket trying not to cry. When midnight came, instead of celebrating, I was sobbing on a friend’s shoulder, trying to hold myself together. This wasn’t how I wanted 2014 to start! I wanted it to start well. With a happy, healthy me ready to embrace a new direction in life.

I couldn’t shake this rock either. A week down the track and I’m still feeling much the same. Empty. Not sad, exactly, but just empty. Like, even though I can communicate with people and be emotions on the surface, I’m still this big black hole inside. Very apathetic.

I just got to the point where even my nails didn’t matter. Even my polish can’t really help me. It can’t shift the rock this time. All it does is distract me from it.

I’m going on holiday tomorrow. Not for long, just a week, but I’m a bit scared. My family doesn’t really understand mental illness. My dad has just told me to ‘get happy’ and I think my mum, while supportive at the beginning, is a bit over it now. She did tell me once, during one very depressed episode, that ‘no one wants to be around you when you’re like this’. That is a direct quote – I have that phrase burned into my memory. While I doubt she meant it hurtfully, it was hurtful and only reinforced my beliefs (brought on by depression) that I was worthless and that everybody did hate me like this. The problem is, I know depressed people aren’t the most fun to be around, but I have accepted that that is something that people around me might have to deal with occasionally. But what if I can’t shake this rock? What if I’m apathetic the entire trip? Then what?

Imagine me underneath that. Source here

I considered not going. Mum suggested it, actually, but I didn’t think I could do that. The truth is, I don’t feel recovered enough that I believe I can feed myself adequately for a week by myself.

That’s why I haven’t been around recently. Because I feel rotten. It took a lot for me to even get all this out today but I felt I owed you guys an explanation for why a just disappeared without even completing the 12 Days of Christmas Nail Challenge (actually, I did do my New Years nails, but they are too much of a reminder of how I felt at the time, so I don’t think I will be posting them).

I have some old posts ready that I never posted, so I might schedule them for while I’m gone.

I don’t know what I did to make you want to stick around here, but whatever it is, I hope I can keep doing it, because I like my blog and I like that others like it too. Today, more than most, my blog’s name really does apply to me.

Until next time, take care of yourselves and I’ll be here, taking my life one tiny, enormously tiring step at a time.