Feeling Like a Fraud

Hello poppets,

How on earth are you all doing?

Ooo another blog post on the new website. How exciting! Im so happy to hear you’re all enjoying the new website and all its features!

Here on the littlestlady.com we have touched on some pretty raw and honest subjects. My Bullying story, my experience with OCD, consent and even suicide but today is something quite different and something i feel i need to be sharing with you.

Today I’m talking to you real feelings, real emotions and something thats been on my mind for a little while.

You may have seen me talk either on social media captions or blog post about my feelings of disbelief that I’m still here. This weird feeling of ‘how’ and ‘why’ and such strong feelings of gratitude towards my life and still being here. But I’ve also had strong feelings of something else lately..

Starting with statistics. Did you know in the US atleast 5 children die everyday at the hands of abuse. 3.6 million referrals are made to child protection agencies. Infact a report of child abuse is made every 10 seconds and thats the ones that actually get reported.

Statistically i should have come out of my abuse with a lot more than just OCD and PTSD. Statistically i should be addicted to some sort of substance. Infact,statistically i shouldn’t still be here.

No, honestly. From the moment of coming out of my main abusers care i was constantly asked how i did it. How id managed to stay alive and how id managed to fight her off like some sort of heroic princess slaying a dragon. Instead i just replied with ‘I don’t know’

I truly dont know how i managed to keep myself here. I don’t know why my suicide attempts remained just attempts. I don’t know why i chose not to drink at some really key points in my life. I don’t know why i didn’t choose drugs when at times in my life i was surrounded by them. I don’t know why i wasn’t left with more mental health difficulties than i was and i don’t know why i chose recovery.

Until i got into the mental health/advocating community more and talking to people like Mark Freeman i was feeling like a complete fraud. Maybe fraud isn’t the right word but i was left feeling like the person i am can’t be real, my feelings couldn’t be right and how my life was wasn’t true. My life shouldn’t of ended up like this. In fact, how my abuser ended up is more ‘normal’ than how my life turned out. To recover and be comfortable with abuse is not the ‘norm’.

Don’t get me wrong, i saw and knew of people that had recovered from various mental health difficulties as thats why i chose to go down the path of recovery that i did but i guess those people sort of move on with their lives. Sort of like a ‘thank goodness thats all over’ sort of a situation. People get their own families, follow their dreams, become a teacher,a builder a carpenter, you get the gist. What I’m trying to get at is there not many people talking about being ‘recovered’ healing from abuse and living a happy life despite mental health difficulties.

Honestly i can’t remember the last time i felt that true anxiety that I use to have. I don’t know the last time I felt fear like I use to and I don’t know the last time my head stopped me doing something. I sit here and think “oh come on i must of had it at some point” and i scrape and scratch at my brain trying to find something. People mention something about my mum or about my abuse and after i answer i think to myself “Why doesn’t that hurt to talk about?” and i try to answer that question but i can’t.

Ive gone from not being able to talk at all. No seriously, at certain stages in my life i COMPLETELY stopped talking. I was terrified id let something slip with my abuse. That id let out the wrong thing and be punished for it. I now speak to large groups of people every day. In fact my goals are to be a motivational speaker but how the heck has that happened?

The things i do in my life today are so different to where I’ve come from and Id started to question everything to the point of me feeling like i shouldn’t be doing my blog unless i had something debilitating my life or i was picking at my abusers and Id also started to feel like maybe i had something and didn’t realise it or that maybe my head was covering things up and i was just simply coping well with what has happened in my life.

The reality is i worked my bottom off to get where i am and i needed to sit down and remember that for myself. This wasn’t an easy process and though i feel i am quite young to have ‘recovered’ from 1 to 21 is quite a chunk of life to be ‘recovering’

I searched down into the depths of my childhood abuse, my sexual abuse and both of my assaults. I brought every bit of me up from 1 to 21 and Laid it all out on the table. All that horrible yucky stuff that happened that i never would of imagined myself talking about.

My recovery from OCD was incredibly difficult and a constant battle against me and my mind. I had to learn about OCD as a whole and then learn about why it had manifested itself in me. I then had to constantly watch my behaviours sit with all those horrible raw emotions and process them and look at them and learn from them.

With my PTSD and Anxiety i had to look and learn about night terrors. I had to learn about dreams and how they work. All those sounds that sent fear into me i had to learn about why and i had to sit and listen to them until they weren’t scary anymore.

I talk about my recovery a lot. Infact all day everyday. But i think because i just skim over the topic and encourage others to go for it i forget how hard i really worked back then. I know it was hard, but i can’t feel those feelings anymore to remember just how hard it was.

There is parts of my life that i wont ever understand how i managed to get through but I’ve learnt i shouldn’t be questioning how i am now because i worked damn hard to get here which is also okay to say. I want to continue teaching that recovery is possible. Its good to talk about mental health and abuse but its also good to talk about those who have recovered from those things.

Mark freeman (One day il shut up about how wonderful he is) made a really great comment on twitter
“Depression is real. The fact we can prevent it and recover from it doesn’t make it fake. Knowing how to swim doesn’t mean others don’t drown”

Golly, i dont want to be the ‘norm’ and i don’t want to be another statistic. I don’t want to be covering up that i recovered from mental health difficulties and healed from my abuse because its not the ‘norm’. I want to show why abuse happens to help people heal and recover from abuse and i want to express what helped me get to the point I’m at today.

This post to me is of great value. This post says more than any other post that recovery is possible. (Even if you do start doubting it all after, whoops!) I don’t want people to look at my blog and think ‘oh theres no way I can do that’ I want people to look at it and think ‘IM GOING TO GO FOR IT TOO!’

Life is so wonderful and we can learn so much from it. This for me was a huge learning curve and I love how much im constantly learning especially when it stems from my blog.

Please note :
This is by no means against the mental health community who i love dearly. I believe in sharing the dark and debilitating side of mental health. This post is simply talking about encouraging others to share their lives during and after recovery