The Countdown.

 

Ten….

Nostalgia can often be the emotion I fear the most, particularly when it comes to certain times of the year. New Years eve is probably up there in the top spot.

Anxiety, regrets of the past, heartbreak, self hatred, rejection and again – fear – for as long as I have remembered, they have all huddled up together to make up one huge heated ball of nostalgic energy that sits with me as I pass through time through the end of one year to the beginning of the next.

Nine…

I was a teenager again, absolutely warpped up in the poisonous blanket of love. It was a love that breezed heavily through my life, through everything I touched, every cell that made up my innocent self. Do you remember your first love? How intense your feelings for one special person was, hyped up and magnified by the rebellious hormones flowing through your bloodstream, that one person you would risk your life for to save one last breath of theirs.

If only I knew what the real problem was back then – the intensity of having a disorder which controls you in a painful way that you could not possibly understand without the experience. How alone it made you feel how you was the only single person on the planet, in this lifetime who hurt to the extreme over something so trivial as loving someone who never loved you back. I was 13 when I first laid eyes on the boy who unknowingly pulled me in to ten years of hell. It was only when I got my diagnosis when the chains of torture began to release themselves and I was set free.

Eight…

I cut the pain away, everytime. I was sixteen all over again. What should have been a night full of joy, friends and laughter turned in to a self-pitying party for one, where the only thing I could do was to carve in to my body to release the terror that was inside me for reasons I never understood. Never had I felt part of a team, part of someone elses soul, a collective. I went in to the next year which was supposed to be something special, full of shame, as I had to hide what I’d done away and battle my identity all over again. Some things never change.

Seven… 

New year, new me, something I always aspired towards at this time of year. I will change, something will change for the better… Little did I know that it was me who had to do all the work, to look inside myself. Nor did I know that every single year will be even more traumatising than the latter. I always had high hopes, but that soon spiralled downwards every time I felt a flare of heated emotion.

Six…

Drink. Drugs. Anything to numb the unidentified horror that I felt burning inside my raw and battered heart. Vodka, wine, whiskey, cocaine, absinthe, raiding my parents med cabinates trying to find something – anything – to poison my blood stream and change my twisted state, but each crushed pill I ingested, inhaled, it just fed in to it. I was feeding this monster and it was getting more powerful by my unruly actions. My thoughts were unidentifiable; logic, vigilance, empathy – they had dissolved the more I lost my true self. I was killing her, I was killing the real me, and I couldn’t put a stop to what I was doing. Because it wasn’t my choice anymore, no. I had stopped breathing a long time ago.

Five…

New Years Eve, 2013. I looked in to her eyes in the mirror, her reflection gazing back at me. Who owned this pair that stared back? Who was she? This body felt so powerful, this sexual energy bubbling inside of me, breathing in my own aura and growing stronger, more sensual. These thoughts inside my head had targetted exactly what it wanted – what She wanted. She wanted him and she was going to stop at nothing until she had him held down tightly by the wrists, pinning his body down underneath her. She needed. A release, to explore – a heated state that cannot be put in to empty words. She just needed it as badly as she needed herself. She was her Wolf.

Four…

She took his key, ever so confidently and took him home, without any hesitation. She unlocked his door and pulled him in. Kissed him, it felt so good to kiss a different pair of lips for the first time in years. She looked in to his eyes, so sure of herself.

“Is this her Wolf you have unleashed tonight?”

She gave a sly smile in return, and leaned to his ear.

“The Wolf wants to tell you a little secret. She’s not wearing any underwear…”

And with those words lingering in the air she slid down her dress and proudly paraded her body in front of him. The Wolf always gets what she wants; even if she has to deviate to get it. She feels no shame, no regrets, and not a single thought in the back of her mind about the man of 6 years, the father of her child, she’d left at home.

Three…

Crash. Overdoses. Self-harm. Hallucinations. Hospital visits. Missed medications. Addict. Affair, after affair, after affair. More heartbreak, rejection, dismissed. Hatred, she had become someone who she or those around her barely recognised. She was ruining her life, and she loved every single second of it. Her choices weren’t her own anymore, they belonged to some vicious, cruel entity who had latched on and swallowed her whole, sucking the souls out of everyone around her. A tsumami of ever lasting waves, repeatedly devastating the lives of her loved ones again, and again, with each hit more tragic than the last….

Two….

A light. Angels, reaching out. A saviour. A glimpse of myself, who I used to be. A fighter. A diagnosis. A lifeline. Help, finally there was help. A continuous journey of pain, that didn’t have to be taken alone anymore. Choices.

A break up, homelessness, peniless. Family and friends lost, true family and friends who walked beside me. Helped me pick up the missing pieces of my long lost self, and put the real me back together. I had nothing. Blank space. Emptiness. But it was in that emptiness I finally found myself. A chance to grow – rebuild my life. I found my home, my independance. My daughter got her mother back. The hurt was still there but I had a choice, I knew I did not have to suffer alone.

One…

The clock struck midnight on the 1st of January 2015. From one moment to the next, nothing drastic happened. There was no devastating concequences. No hatred. No rejection. No painful nostalgia this time.

For the first time in forever, the only word I would describe what I felt at this moment in time, was simply, Peace.

And it was. A contentness within myself. This time I had made the right choice. No drugs to poison my system, no more drunken mess, bad decisions, my wolf was soundly sleeping. I stayed in, no more over-partying the pain away. There was love in my heart, and not the kind of love that hurt. It was a love that was calm, gentle and content. A love for myself, my true self that I never thought i’d ever feel. Nothing felt too much, nothing to the extreme. It was almost…easy.

I looked over to my left and saw The Boy staring back at me, smiling. It was the first New Years kiss that I have remembered in a long time. Probably because I had made the choice to stay in, sat down with myself and thought, “how do I really want to spend my evening..?”

Of all the things that have lead me to that moment, all the hurt that had been caused by my past actions, not only hurt to myself but to others around me. I was grateful for that final push that shattered my life as I knew it which made me find the real me again.

2015 won’t be an easy year for me. I will still hurt in my heart, my Wolf will still sound a faint cry in the distance, and depression will probably seep in at some points over the next 12 months. My anxiety will still pop by to choke me for fun, I will still have to take my medication. But I can start the new year holding this self-love in my hands and raise it up as my trophy to show I have battled through it all and, finally, I have found some sort of inner peace to hold on to.

 

Happy New Year x