All over the place

I'm kind of in the middle part of the race at the moment, the initial burst at the start has since dwindled and the final sprint at the end is quite a way off, instead this is the long hard slog to just keep going.

I can't help but feel a little adrift at times and often cling to feelings, thoughts and even behaviours I had before to try to just maintain some sanity or grasp of what is going on. Of course then I feel that I'm slipping back to being the 'old' me and it almost seems that where I am now isn't so distant from what I was before which is obviously quite disturbing.

It's almost that I'm afraid that I won't be able to keep it up that I will just go back to being what I was, as if I don't have the ability or the right to be who I am to be female, to think, act, and feel like that.

Those feelings aren't really helped by the still, seemingly present, rational part of me that can look, quite objectively, at hands, hair, face, breasts, legs and everything else and see the flaws, the incongruities that make me realize that I am much less than I want to become (and will probably always be that way).

But despite everything that still drags me down I do sometime catch glimpses of what has changed and there are odd occasions when it's clear that I have changed. Maybe not physically that much but maybe in how I act and come across and maybe there has been a real change in my attitude and behaviour.

While I am obviously worried about slipping backwards if I do try and remember how I felt and acted before it's a little hard to recall and to recapture the memories and feelings. I use to be quite carefree (though I would maintain this is a euphemism for "naive" or "stupid") yet now I'm not exactly sad or depressed but what I have gone through has certainly striped away some of the rose-tint from my life.

It could be hormones, it could be actual mental changes or simply the experiences I have had, and continue to have, I'm not sure. I know that things I would have brushed off and ignored (or at least rationalised) now hurt, and sometimes deeply. And it's not always clear what hurts at first and what I've been feeling, there are times when it's taken me a while to figure it out.

I was trying to think of a way to sum up what I have been through and to triumphantly declare that I had got through it all and was still smiling. And this is true, but I guess there is more behind the smile now, and not all of it blissful ignorance.

[ Disclaimer: Yes, yet again this is self-indulgent garbage. There are people who are alot worse off than me by a very very very very long way. I'm not complaining I'm just trying to say how I feel in a rather impersonal, but hopefully honest, way ]