Okay, I know. I know. I promised travel tips and tricks and stories. It's just hard because I work full time and only have about 2 weeks where I can travel a YEAR. Okay?! So I'm trying to be different and include my mental health journey in my traveling journey and stuff. I don't know when this challenge turned into a mood journal but here we are. So you can leave if you want but I hope you don't. I have interesting things to say… probably.
ANYWAYS….
I might have mentioned that I'm on this journey to find a photo my ex-boyfriend took of me sleeping in a tree trunk of one of the largest trees in the world. I don't know why I suddenly had a fascination with it but I do. I feel like it would be such a fun story to share but it doesn't work without the picture. So, last night when I was waiting on my fried chicken and talking with my friend, I found the old phone that I had during my last year of high school and throughout college.
If this photo would be anywhere, it would be on this phone. But then I got chicken and got side tract. I charged it throughout the night and I brought it to work with me this morning. Now, I'm already in such a better mood for numerous amount of reasons (it's Friday, it's payday, I get to leave work early, it's supposed to be super nice out this weekend. You name it, I'm excited about it) but looking through this phone is hilarious to me. But also it's eye-opening.
I'm seeing photos of myself from when I was 16-21. During this time, I had an eating disorder. I didnt know that is what I was going through until several years after the fact. But I hardly ate anything. I remember being told by my boyfriend that we would go out to eat after classes on Fridays so I shouldn't eat anything at the beginning of the week to “save on calories”. I remember that I would only eat one oreo for the whole week. Not an oreo a day for a week. I would split it up and eat pieces of the oreo each day for a week. One day I would eat half the cream, the next day I would eat the other half of the cream, then I would eat one cookie, then the last cookie. That would be the only thing I would eat THE ENTIRE WEEK until he took me to go get food on Friday night. Where I ate 3 tacos and drank a large Dr. Pepper.
So of course I dropped weight quickly and was a very unhealthy 120 pounds by the time we went to college. But I saw these photos of me during this period of time and said “man, I used to be so skinny.” I looked and saw my different outfits and how cute they were. I had so many more options as a skinny girl than I do now, 80 pounds heavier. But I still looked at myself and idolized that for a minute before thinking about what I went through.
Of course, I did find some of the pictures hilarious also. I didnt look like me, my smile, my face, my eyes, they looked dead. I also found a stash of old memes from the early 2010s that were top-tier hilarious at that time. That kicked me out of the moment.
I read through my text messages. Now, to the normal person who doesn't know anything about my past experience with my ex, these texts look normal. They look like he is asking me to help him and I go and help him. It looks like I'm being a crazy person for being upset after he asked me for help. But in reality, I remember being so mad. Because he was manipulating me and I didnt know how to go about it.
I found a conversation that I had with him that really defined my anger towards him. This was getting towards the end of the relationship where I knew he was treating me poorly but I couldn't gather the nerve to leave him. He left his homework binder at my house when we were at college. He asked me to bring it to him. I was working so I went on my 30-minute lunch break, went to my house, picked up this binder, drove across town, parked, and walked 15 minutes to the other side of the campus to bring it to him. I told him that I was there. Then I waited 40 minutes for him to meet me to pick it up. I ended up having to leave it with his roommate on the other side of campus. What could have been a 15 trip if he met me somewhere closer to me on campus, turned into an hour situation. He then got mad at me for not being there when he came to pick it up. Do you want to know what he was doing for the 40 minutes while I was waiting for him? He was out and about cheating on me.
He also called me “moose pants” as a fun nickname. Wanna know why? Because he thought I was fat. (remember, I had an eating disorder, I was 120 pounds and continuously losing more.) And he kept calling me fat.
Though it hurts me to see how much of a pushover spineless person I used to be, I think it's important to continue looking at where I used to be and where I came from. Without those experiences that I had to endure, I probably wouldn't be where I am today. Talk about confidence. I was stripped of all confidence at an impressionable age yet, here I am, still working on growth and confidence.
Thanks for taking a walk down memory lane with me.
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