Hello November || October Round Up and Monthly Goals

Blimey, how is it November already? I swear it only just turned October yesterday but here we are, with a mere 2 months left of this year! And quite frankly, thank god for that. 2016 hasn't been the best of years for anybody, and I can only hope either the world comes to an end on the 31st December, or 2017 is drastically different!

October was a weird month for me. I'd just moved up to London to live with my dad, and was still finding my feet and working out how to get along in this new little bubble. Or big bubble, if you will. London is just a little different to my old village! But I love it. I love the busy hustle and bustle of every day life, I love being able to walk ten minutes down the road to the train station, where there is a train basically every ten minutes to Victoria or London Bridge, I love being able to blend into a crowd and just walk along. Basically, I love every aspect of London life. I even love being able to moan about people and transport and everything else under the sun! I am a city dweller at heart, as much as I love the countryside. 

Now I've settled in and got back to blogging, and I'll be working most days from my dad's office (only way I actually get work done), I decided it was a good time to sit back with a nice cuppa, reflect on the past few months, and make some goals for the rest of the year. After all, making goals for yourself isn't just a new year thing! I highly believe (although never actually quite achieve) in constantly reflecting on your goals and adjusting them if need be, or making new ones if your life and it's direction changes. So go make yourself a nice hot drink, get comfy, and sit and reflect with me.

2016 has been a massive year of change for me. I started off in uni, left uni, started working in Starbucks again, was convinced I'd never leave, left, couldn't find a job I liked (more on that in a later blog post), and it's culminated in me moving to London to live with my dad. If I'm honest, it's left my brain in a complete muddle, and I've not had a clear focus or plan for a while. October was different. In October I started seeing a new counsellor, went back to slimming world, and began to decide what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Whilst that does terrify me, October felt cleansing, in a way. Definitely a much better month than the previous nine. Yes, that might have something to do with the fact that I am in love with autumn. And that it's time for cosy jumpers, hot chocolates, and Christmas cups. But I digress.

So without further ado, here are my November goals. Meet me back here in December and we'll discuss how far we got with November!

1. Focus on blogging, growing an audience, and developing my 'voice'

2. Explore at least two new places, and document the experience

3. Experiment with new foods and new flavours

4. Set aside at least ten minutes of 'me' time every day (screen free)

5. Skin care routine- find one that works and stick to it

6. Drink a litre of water everyday

7. Take at least one photo every day, try and get one that sums up that day

What are your current goals you're working towards?

Why You Should Go Interrailing || With Added Tips and Tricks

This might be a weird time of the year to start talking about and thinking about planning for summer next year. But it is actually the perfect time! It was about this time two years ago that myself and my friend Emily started seriously talking about, thinking about, and planning for our interrail trip around Europe in summer 2015. And boy, was it the best summer of our lives so far.

I know a lot of people who have gone travelling in places like Asia and Australia as their first big travelling adventures without their parents, and that's all well and good, and probably an amazing experience. However, if you are more like me and prone to a lot of anxiety, travelling around Europe is a nice 'dip your toes in and see what travelling is actually like' experience, without being hours away from help should everything go tits up. Which, if you've spent what felt like years of your life planning every detail, it shouldn't. And travelling via train with an interrail pass is surprisingly cost effective, and a lot less than multiple flights.

Europe itself is an absolutely incredible place to explore in it's own right, cram packed with culture, history, and delicious food. (Or McDonalds, if you're lazy and don't want to spend a fortune or try and communicate!). Emily and I decided to go for a month in between our A Levels ending, and university starting, and it was the busiest and best month I've ever spent. We decided to visit as many places as possible, which meant that we only spent two nights and a full day in each place, but got to take in so much more, and so many countries. In the end we visited Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Lienz, Venice, Verona, Innsbruck, Stuttgart, and Paris, as well as exploring London before we set off. And honestly, if you're travelling for the first time I actually recommend doing the flying tour of each place, as now we have a whole arsenal of countries we want to go back and explore in greater detail, but we still managed to see the main sights and then some of each place we stayed in.

Every one we met out in Europe was so friendly, and despite a few tears three days in, the time went so quickly and we had no hiccups! We did opt for private twin rooms rather than dorms, which did raise the price slightly, but we ended up spending no more than three thousand on trains, accommodation, food, and souvenirs. Lots and lots of souvenirs. We're very good at shopping.

All in all, interrail is amazing, and the fact that you can get one ticket that enables you to travel around so many countries in a month is just mind blowing. If you're debating going travelling, I definitely recommend trying interrailing, or at least looking into it. And with that in mind, here are some of my top tips and tricks for making your experience as smooth as possible! (I'm aiming these at people like Emily and I, who hate winging it and want things to be planned)

1. Don't leave everything to the last minute. We started looking into the trip and planning where we wanted to go and arguing about the route about this time, and then proceeded to start booking everything at the beginning of the year so that we knew we had accommodation and that was one less thing to worry about.

2. Do your research. Don't just settle for the first hostel/hotel you find. Utilise every booking resource you can, such as Hostel World, booking.com, Hostel Bookers, and many other websites so that you can find the right deal on the right place in the right location.  We probably spent the most time just researching different places to stay and comparing prices and locations, and bar the hostel in Amsterdam (an hours trek from the train station!) all of our accommodation was a stones throw from both the stations and the town centres, without costing the earth.

3. Plan your routes. Unless you really are a free spirit and want to go wherever the mood takes you, use the interrail website to plan your route. We ended up planning ours down to the exact times we would be getting on the trains, and it saved a lot of hassle.

4. Pay a little bit extra to reserve your seats. We didn't work this out until we were actually travelling, but if we had a long journey and wanted to make sure we could sit down and relax, we were straight down the train station information desks and paying around 5 euros each to reserve our seats. It was worth it for the peace of mind, and to rest our poor little leggies.

5. With that in mind, ensure the train you are taking does not require you to have a seat booked, as I know several of them do. You don't want to find out when the guard comes around. Get that knowledge in your head before you leave.

6. Don't be afraid to just point to a place on a map and go 'lets go there'. We did that several times when we needed to stop off somewhere on the way to a major city, and ended up discovering Innsbruck in Austria, which became one of our favourite places!

7. Have a wallet where you can put all the important stuff (interrail ticket, passport, seat reservations, timings, hostel bookings etc), arrange it in the order you will need it, and do not let that wallet go anywhere but in your personal bag that you keep close to you. It's a life saver, honestly.

8. Document your experience! Trust me, you're going to make memories you want to remember. Take pictures, keep a journal, keep tickets and receipts and everything and anything. Blog about your experience. Share those memories on social media. Don't (both) break your phone. In a years time, they will be some of the most precious things you own.

9. Utilise the interrail app. It can be used offline, so perfect when you're travelling, and has a feature where you can find train times etc, so if you're in a pickle and don't know when the next train is, it could just save your hide.

10. Get to important places in plenty of time. Give yourself time at the train stations to familiarise yourself with the layout, work out which one is your train and where it's going from, find that platform. Don't leave it to the last minute. It will make the experience much better, I promise.

'Dear Beth...' || A Letter To My 15 Year Old Self

 

Dear Beth,

We're 20 now,  and I'm glad to report that we've made it. We've survived against the odds, against your wishes. We're still here. And whilst I'm currently unemployed, battling numerous mental demons, and still struggling to get from day to day, I've learnt so much in the past five years. Valuable life lessons, some utter nonsense, and a lot about who we are. And I'm pleased to report that we're still friends with the 'Sofraternity', despite all being scattered across the country. 

Despite that, there's a lot I know now I wish I'd known when I was 15, and had the whole world spread out in front of me. Things I bitterly regret quitting, things I don't bitterly regret doing. So here's ten things I would love to go back and tell my 15 year old self. I don't regret the decisions I've made, but if any of these help someone else through the tough teenage years then by Jove I've done what I set out to do. 

1. Don't be afraid to let the world know your true personality. I know you're afraid people won't like you, but they will. And the truly valuable people in life will appreciate you for who you are.

2. Don't quit. Don't ever quit. Don't quit dance. Don't quit uni. Don't quit Starbucks. It's going to be hard. You're going to hate yourself a lot as you find yourself. But there are things you are good at, don't quit them. Talk to your family, lean on your friends, make it through.

3. Do quit. Quit that BTEC, quit talking to the therapists who just tell you to get a job, quit pretending to be something you're not.

4. Watch what you eat. Sure, binging on a ton of crap might feel good for five minutes, but you'll end up regretting it. Treat yourself like you'd treat someone else. Respect your body. (But don't restrict. That's just stupid)

5. You're not fat. Stand in front of that mirror, take a long hard look at your body. Admire all those imperfections that make you, you. Look at how dance has toned you, despite your big boned frame. Yes, next to most other dancers you're bigger. But you're not all built the same.

6. Revise. For gods sake, take your teachers advice and revise. You might hate it, you might have better things to be doing, but just revise. Get those results. You have the rest of your adult life to start doing the things you want to.

7. Treasure the friends you have. Don't stop talking to them because you think they hate you. They don't. None of them could ever hold a grudge.

8. Appreciate your family. Go on family days out, spend evenings in front of the TV with them, visit Dad as often as you can. They're a good bunch. Take their advice. But not all of it.

9. Keep dancing. Stay at Katherine Mitchell's, take as many classes as you can, commit yourself to it. You have a talent, a passion,  and the world will reward you for it.

10. Don't be afraid to make stupid mistakes. It's how we learn who we are, what we want to do, our place in society. Mistakes are good, don't shy away from them or be afraid to admit them.

What advice would you give your younger self?

Bethany 

Modelmydiet.com: Bit Of Fun Or Really Dangerous?

At first glance, modelmydiet.com looks like an innocuous website. A bit of fun, something to play around on, something to give you motivation when you're on a diet and striving to achieve the 'perfect' body. Side note, if you've got a body, it's perfect. Enough said.

But there is something so, so wrong with websites like this, and it's part of the reason why our society is so obsessed with body image, and achieving the 'perfect' body. The media is fixated on women's weight and tearing someone in the public eye apart if they have the slightest bit of fat showing. I mean, no wonder are women of all ages so worried about their weight, and so obsessive about looking right when everywhere they turn they are being sold on what the 'right' body looks like, and ways and means to achieve this. And sadly, this can mean sliding right down the slippery slope into an eating disorder.

Anorexia, bulimia, binge eating, orthorexia, all are dangerous and destructive in their own ways. I have experience with an eating disorder myself. For as long as I can remember I've not had a good relationship with food or my body, fueled partly by the dance world I was so immersed in for so long, but also by the media I am surrounded by every day. I would give anything to be thin, to walk down the street and know that society would accept me, not immediately judge me and dismiss me for being a fat girl. And yes, I am fat. I'm trying not to shy away from that word anymore, to pretend it's anything other than a word.

And that's why websites like modelmydiet.com are so goddamn dangerous. I went on to the website just to have a look, and immediately got sucked down the rabbit hole of seeing how much 'better' I would look 50lbs, 70lbs, 100lbs, 150lbs lighter than what I am currently. The ED thoughts began to come back- 'if you'd just stop eating, you could look like that'. 'Imagine what you could do if you weighed 100lbs'. 'Starve tomorrow, it's for the best'. 'You're fat, and no one will ever love you'.

Thoughts I've been trying to get rid of for years flooded straight back into my mind. Poisonous. Festering. It took all the willpower I had to shut off the website and remind myself of why I love and embrace body positivity, and why I'm trying so hard to recover. But if 13 year old Beth had gone onto that website, I dread to think what damage it would have done to me.

Model My Diet is dangerous. Model My Diet is just another facet of the dangerous world of the internet for young, impressionable people. Model My Diet should not exist.

Have you any experience with this website, or any other like it?

Bethany

The Best Things In Life Are Free

Otherwise titled, An Ode To My Friends. Or rather, one friend in particular. But I digress. Personally, I think friends are the lifeblood of this world. Don't get me wrong, family is great. But to overuse a cliche, you can't pick your family. You're stuck with the one you get given at birth, and lets be honest, it's a lottery. They can be amazing, completely shit, or somewhere in the middle. But friends on the other hand, you get to pick and choose who you keep close by and who you discard, the people who always pick you up and make you feel good, and (should they be a good friend) don't judge you for the messes you get yourself into. Whether it be alcohol related, relationship related, work related, money, pets, kids, whatever it may be, friends are always there with a laugh, a hug, and a nice big mug of tea.

And at the root of it, friends are absolutely free. And that's the best thing about friendship. You can be as broke as you like, but you'll still (with a bit of luck) have friends around to cheer you up. And yes, you might buy them presents or whatever, but at the very heart of it, there's no money exchange. You don't buy your friends, whatever your parents might joke when you're younger. (Anyone else's parents do that?)(Or other friends, for that matter)(It's an overused joke)

This post is dedicated to one of my friends in particular, and she is a fine example of why friends are so bloody damn great, and why I like to treasure my friends and keep them close to my bosom. Creepy, maybe, but I'm a limpet at heart. My friend Lulah, otherwise known as The Fresher Mum (find her on facebook, she's absolutely fab and her kids are the cutest), is one of life's golden people. As I explained in my post earlier this week, I've been struggling lately. And there's more to come on that later, but essentially, I've been feeling like shit and had been struggling with living alone, so Lulah, despite having kids and a husband and all manner of responsibilities (I'm convinced she's superwoman), offered for me to move in with her for a few weeks whilst I get my head back together, and I couldn't be more grateful. I mean seriously, how many people would do that for someone? I'd like to think everyone would, but we all know that's not true. And her kids are the best therapy, I swear. So that helps. But anyway, getting off track again. 

So this is my thank you to her, as I'm crap at explaining feelings in actual words, and a reminder to all you who may be reading this rambly late night post to treasure your friends and take a moment to be grateful. Friends are life's greatest joy and pain and everything in between, and I never want to be without them.

Love, Beth

xx

The Depression Diaries || 1/?

Oh man. Oh man oh man. I have been away for blogging for months (again). Yes, I'm never going to make anything of this blog if I don't actually post regularly. I know, I know. Trust me, I've given myself all the pep talks and kicks up the arse, but lets be honest, I haven't even finished the assignment that was due in two weeks ago. How I'm going to get through uni and get a good degree, I'm not entirely sure. But I digress.

Uni, if I'm honest, is the main reason why I haven't posted since September/October(?! How has it been that long?!), but the secondary reason is the little black cloud I seem to be permanently carrying around, that has flared up again recently and rendered me unable to live by myself, something I'm not entirely okay with because for so long I was looking forward to being able to live by myself, but you know what? Sometimes admitting that you can't do something, although it might be the hardest thing you've ever had to do and picking up that phone to tell someone feels impossible, it is okay. 

And that's something I've been coming to terms with over the past few weeks. In the past I was notorious for 'suffering in silence', and bottling up every emotion I felt until I exploded, and things got way messier than they would have done had I just stuck up my hand and gone "you know what, right now I am not okay."

And whilst it means I am now fielding multiple calls from concerned parents, surviving on a cocktail of prescription drugs, and living with a friend (I'm so sorry it came to this), it's going to be okay. And it might not have been had I not told someone. Talking is the most important tool in recovering, and that's something I'm slowly learning. Depression, whilst it is a little bitch, is often not something that you can overcome alone, as much as you might want to and as much as you wish you didn't have to rely on other people. There are people who care about you, and who do want to help you learn how to deal with that little black cloud. Help you to put up the umbrella, if you will, and stop it from raining down all the negative thoughts and feelings that absolutely, totally suck.

And so, as part of this whole coming to terms with the fact that half of the time my brain hates me, I've decided to start blogging about it, as one kind of release. And along the way, maybe it will help just one person start talking, or stop trying to suppress their feelings and admit to themselves that they are not okay. It's the first, and most important step, and it's time to stop pretending mental illness is not something that doesn't matter, or should be swept under the carpet.

Love from Beth

xx