Hi everyone!

Today's post is going to be a little rambly and meandering and not have that much of a point to it. It's basically going to be a little insight into a bit of my life and if that's not really your cup of tea, then I understand and I will not hold a grudge if you don't want to read this one. But, if you do, then grab yourself a nice warm beverage and settle down for a while. :)

Did you know, that for someone that loves reading as much as I do, I don't actually do that much of it.

It's not because I don't have the time and it's not like I don't have any books to read. On average, I probably have about 5-6 unread books on my shelf at all times. Books that I bought because I really wanted to read them. And I don't buy books on a whim - I don't have the space to do that. If I buy a book, it's because I am absolutely, very sure I'm going to love it, because I have others from the same series and I feel the need to own the complete set or because it was only $2. Actually, it's because of that last reason that I ended up with a book called Murder, Mystery and Mayhem: Details of Hollywood's Most Gruesome Murders (what can I say? I'm a fan of murder mysteries and mysteries in general and it was only $2!).

But I'm getting off track.

I used to read a lot. Like, a lot. In primary school I had a deal with the school librarian. We were technically only allowed to borrow two books per week, but she let me take out four. And generally, I'd be back after two or three days to borrow more. That was all I used to do after school. I'd get home and I'd read. And read and read and read. We would also generally go to the public library once a month as well and I'd get out the maximum number of books there as well, which I think was about twelve. I'd generally read them all within two weeks as well.

Then when I got into high school I read less. I still read, but I had less time.

Source

I'd probably call myself a compulsive reader. I read everything. I have to. If there is writing, I must read it. I read the back of cereal boxes, my sisters' homework, even the instructions that come with things that don't need instructions (like shampoo - who needs instructions on how to use shampoo??). I am one of those annoying people that reads over the shoulders of other people on the train. I have no clue what's going on, and they nearly always read too slowly and sometimes they hold the book so I can only see one page and sometimes I'm just starting to get into it when they get off and I'm left alone again, with no clue what the book was even called. It's all very aggravating. And yet, I still do it. I do it when I'm not alone either. I'll be trying to hold a conversation with a friend and yet my eyes will keep drifting over to the book of the person next to me. It always makes me lose my train of thought.

Spider-Web Halloween Nail Art AKA I'm Not Dead and Have Crawled Out of my Hole for Halloween

Hi everyone,

I've got some very average nail art for you today, but you know, it's better than what I had before (which was nothing).

It's also my first set of Halloween nails for this year! Yay! Last year I kind of forgot about it and had a very late and somewhat half-hearted contribution, but this year is different. I have started early and have some many designs to do. If fact, I have way too many ideas than I have reasonable opportunities to paint my nails but whatever, I'll think of something.

Exercise Can Be Really Scary. No, Really. | Exercise Part 3

Hi lovelies,

Today I'm going to be wrapping up my series on exercise and I'm mostly going to be discussing my current thoughts on exercise and what/why (if any) I doing right now.

I'm really sorry that this is so late but it wasn't coming together and I kept working on it and it just wasn't working. But finally, finally, I got it done. :)

If you missed the first parts of this series, here's Part 1 and here's Part 2.

Okay, so onto exercise.

After my epitome about exercise and suddenly realising that continuing to exercise as I was was going to end up killing me, I gave up exercise and for the first 2-3 weeks, it was really, really hard. My anxiety skyrocketed and the amount of nervous energy I was expending felt like it tripled. Equally, it was incredibly hard to keep myself still. I would have to literally force myself to sit down and not walk and pace and move constantly in order to keep expending energy. It also didn't help that my mother was not 100% behind my decision to stop exercise all together. Obviously, she supported my decision to do so, but she is a firm believer in the 'exercise makes you happy and healthy' and I had spent an awful long time convincing her that exercise was something I did because it made me happy, not as a way to lose weight and she was pretty desperate to see me happy again. Also, she is fairly fatphobic and didn't want to see me recover in an 'unhealthy' way.

Source

But, despite all that, I stuck to it and continued to abstain from exercise. And, surprisingly, after about a month, all the anxiety just left. It obviously was not gone all together, but all the extra anxiety, the exercise-related anxiety I had been experiencing for so long, it all left. For a while then, I felt more at peace with exercise than I had in a long, long time.

Exercise Can Be Really Unhealthy. True Fact. | Exercise Part 2

Hi lovelies,

Today we are moving onto Part 2 of my exercise series. If you missed the first part, you can find it here.

This post covers my experiences with exercise during my eating disorder and talks a lot about what I was feeling and my reasons and rationale behind my decisions at that time. If you are triggered by discussions of disordered thoughts about exercise, maybe this post isn't for you. xxx

Last time I pretty much gave a run down of my early experiences with exercise and I finished up with me being happy and jolly while doing Tae Kwon Do. However, unfortunately, that wasn't going to last.

After I had been doing it for about 2-2.5years, things started to head downhill. At this point, I was heading into my eating disorder and was a very stressed person. At first, Tae Kwon Do was a lifesaver for me. I was somewhere I went, twice a week and escaped every other bit of my life. The people that I met there were amazing, amazing people and were completely different from anyone else in my life. There were very few, if any people my age (16-17 years) and so I spent my time with a couple of girls and a boy about 13-14 and a few older men and women (probably in their late 30s or early 40s). This was so extremely valuable to me because these were people with whom I had very little in common with in regards to everyday life. I don't really care what other people say, there is a world of difference between the everyday life of a 13 year old and that of a 16 year old. The fact that they both go to high school is fairly negligible.

And those that did go to school were at schools that were very different from mine. One girl went to the local public high school and was in a constant battle to pass her subjects so that she would be allowed to stay on the triathlon team. For me, this was world's away from my struggles, although equally challenging, and it was a relief to be around these people. People that didn't care about school in the way I did and people that were just lovely, lovely people.

Lost and Found

Hi lovelies,

Today's post is a long one and quite personal. I debated a lot over whether to post this or not because I felt, after writing it, that I was making a bit of a mountain out of a mole hill. Maybe I am. But it's my blog and I want to share this with you, even if it's not the best or most interesting thing I've written. But, on with the show....

It’s been hard for me to pin down my identity. Who am I? I know who I was. A couple of years ago I was sure – my identity was solid. Irrefutable. A done deal. But, identities change, they flow, they transition. One day you wake up and realise that you are not the same person you were 5 years ago. And that’s okay. It’s okay because you know who you are now. You’ve been changing so slowly into this new person that you didn’t realise that you had changed. It’s not until you realise what you are not, that you realise who you actually are.

My very first school picture. I was 6 at the time.

Everyone changes all throughout their lives. You change more so at some points than others. Through primary school and high school and university you go through major changes. You become a child, then a pre-teen, then a teenager and then an adult. Some changes are physical but the majority are non-quantitative. You mature emotionally. The structure of your relationships change. Your understanding of things in the world changes and your interests change. They fluctuate, they come and go. Some come and stay – like my love for the colour purple. Some come with a passion and leave with disgust – like my obsession with calling everything ‘random’ and having every second word being ‘like’. Some wax and wane, being really important at some times and not so at others – like my passion for really bad teenager-y supernatural TV shows (such as The Vampire Diaries and Teen Wolf). And some you lose along the way and never quite realise why you left them behind – like my love for always wearing the biggest, flashiest earrings I could find. For me, it’s those bits, the changing of interests and likes, that is the scariest bits about change. It’s when you wake up one morning and realise that the person that you were, that you loved and that you knew inside out, they are gone and the person that is now staring back at you from the mirror is a very different person entirely.

Self Care Help Package

Hello my darling lovelies,

I thought that this post was fairly timely to do, as I have emerged again from the cocoon of my own mind and am taking an interest in things around me once more. I've had a bit of a rough time recently, but fingers crossed the worst is over and things will be looking up.

However, I know that life won't always be going up for me, and I know I will crash down again - it's what happens when you deal with depression. So, what I thought I'd do is put together a little post on self-care and things that I find help me when I'm struggling. And, before you starting clicking the exit button, I'm not going to be telling you to 'get some sleep', 'go to the gym' or 'eat healthily'. Those tips are bogus, or at least, that's what I think. When I feel like crap, I don't want to be told to 'make myself a nice salad' or 'shake up my routine by surprising my spouse at the office'. Because I fail to see how eating a salad will make me not depressed and because I, along with a lot of people, don't have a spouse. I'm not joking, those were tips I found while doing some research.

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.

Some Science Behind Eating Disorders

Hi lovelies,

Lately, I've been feeling rather misunderstood. I feel often that I'm not taken very seriously by both my family and many people that I know. Recently, my mental stability has been teetering on the balance between 'Mostly Sane' and 'Fairly Unstable'. I feel a lot of this has had to do with the fact that my illness's that I struggle with are being undermined in their seriousness. While depression and anxiety are not too badly covered in today's society (although no where near as well as I'd like them to be covered), eating disorders are often and very badly understood. So I decided to pull together a little of the information I've learnt through my struggle with anorexia and maybe help you guys understand a little of the science behind these eating disorders - the actual brain chemistry.

People are often under the impression that eating disorders are a choice. That we choose to restrict, to purge and to over-exercise in the pursuit of our ‘perfect’ body. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve heard anorexia be called the ‘Rich White Girl’s Disease’. Not because a high percentage of anorexia sufferers happen to be white females from developed countries, but because it’s seen as a choice – a way to seek attention and gain recognition in our world.

Depression and Anti-Depressants

Hi lovelies,

This post is going to be a hard one and one that you may not want to read about. In staying true to my policy of being truthful, I am going to be tackling the topic of my depression and namely, my methods of dealing with it. (On a sidenote, did you see my alliterations in that sentence? So many ‘t’s!).

Mental health is an interesting topic for me. It was never discussed inside my house, I never knew anyone that had an issue with mental health and all I knew about it was what they taught us in year 10 health. That’s was, until I was plunged head-long into it in yr 11, aged 16, with depression, anxiety and anorexia. I discuss my anorexia here and most of you probably know I’m in recovery from it. My anxiety is far milder than the others and generally only becomes bad when the others are also bad but my depression – that’s something I don’t mention much.

Why I Paint My Nails

Hi lovelies

I’ve got a very long, long post and it’s a bit of a rant in some parts… Love to know what you guys think on the topic (comment box is just below!)

Being into manicures and nail painting and nail art is something that seems so superficial, isn’t it?

Think about it – it seems girly and frivolous. It’s just about the epitome of girliness. In generally, I don’t seem like a very girly-girl. I like the outdoors and I like nature. I like mud and the ocean surf. I think that hair-washing should be an option, not a necessity. I love my martial arts. I’m proud of my muscles and one of my greatest achievements in high school was beating my entire music class (consisting of mostly 17 year old boys) at arm wrestling. I don’t consider myself all that superficial. And yet, painting my nails is one of my favourite things to do.

Thinspiration

Trigger Warning! This is not a happy post. This is a very long post and may be triggering to those with an eating disorder. If unsure, please do not click the 'read more'. Don't torture yourself if you think it may be triggering. Just back away. Take care of yourself. xx

I have a confession.

Last night, I did something I’m not proud of. Something I knew was wrong. Something that was not going to make me feel better. In fact, it probably made me feel worse. But I did it anyway.

I googled thinspiration and I googled pro-ana. I spent a good hour and a half trawling through tumblrs, blogs and help sties dedicated to becoming thin and how to live with an eating disorder.

Why?

Because I was already feeling like shit and I wanted to torture myself.

How stupid.