SELF SABOTAGE

 As old as it may seem I feel more comfortable writing on my blog than I do on Facebook. I think because most people on Facebook would not bother to click on a link to come and read this. I also know that my blog followers follow it precisely because they identify with what I write about and quite often we do or think or feel the same things.

I am in a situation that I just do not understand. John tells me that it is all to do with the stress of the house this year. We started the renovations back in March and it will not be finished now until Christmas. I certainly did not expect it to take that long.

I also had a great deal of success at dog shows and I really loved them. Not just because I was winning so well with Whitney but because I felt so good about myself and this was shown in the way that I dressed and the fact that I kept my weight at the right level for me for a period of a few years.

Now it seems I'm sabotaging myself. I have absolutely no idea why. Yesterday, we had friends come to visit which was really lovely. We went out for the day. Now my best friend has multiple sclerosis and yet she walked whilst I was in my wheelchair. You could see the pain that she was in and have much tired she was getting. Eventually I persuaded her to use one of my walking sticks. I'm not sure why even mentioning this. I can't see that this would have upset me in any way. Yet I chose, and there is no point me saying anything other than that, because I did choose, to eat bread last night for dinner. And of course I do not mean just plain ordinary bread I mean bread full of seeds and heavy and Brown. Now I allergic to these foods. Seriously so. Not only does it make me bloated. It makes me in flames and gives me diarrhoea. And I wake with a headache and feel truly terrible and miserable.

I have done this quite a lot in this last year.

On the positive side of things I have started to use my light box every morning. When I get up and I am having my coffee waiting for my drugs to work I sit in front of my computer and my lightbox is on and I am getting my 30 minutes of light therapy. The other positive thing of course is the fact that I'm going swimming almost daily. I don't want to but I am making myself do it. I very much enjoy the swim and I feel very pleased with myself once I have done it. And whilst physically the effect is not immediately good in that my gate is very wobbly and I am very likely to fall over and it takes me a long time to get to my dressing room and to change to come home I don't half feel good with myself.

And yet I find I'm still sabotaging myself by eating foods that I just cannot tolerate and which can cause me serious gut problems. My mother died because of this although as  I'm aware she was never treated.  like me like me she alternated between diarrhoea and constipation and eventually her bowel burst because of constipation and she died.

There is not much that I can do about my brain damage or my spondylosis other than take the medication. I find the medication works really rather well. Yes, it does really piss me off that I get so tired and cannot do everything that I would like to do in one day. I have to plan my days so that on a day that I bath and groom one dog I have not got anything else that I must do. That annoys me. It annoys me that going to a dog show in effect costs me four days. But anyway all of that I am quite used to and that is not what the problem is.

But I have no idea what the problem is. I just do not understand why I am making life more difficult for myself and why the man I became and was so happy with is now slowly becoming the man he used to be.

Was my epiphany false? Did I not really recover?

As I wrote the above something else came to mind. I also lost what to me were very dear friends. As it turns out they were not friends at all. I feel really bad about that and in fact I can feel the emotion in my voice as I type this (I can can no longer type so I use a voice dictation program.) the main reason I feel bad about it is because I feel so humiliated that I did not see what these people were really like a long time ago. Yes, I did have my doubts but I just thought of myself as being wicked and paranoid and I shut my doubts away. In many ways it was a huge relief once they showed their true colours because a great weight was lifted off me. I no longer felt wicked and sick for having doubts about them.

On top of this I have also had a few people become very nasty towards me for no reason that I can think of. Meaning that I have done nothing to them. In fact I have very little dealing with any of them. And much to my anger I feel hurt and upset by their behaviour.

Winning with Whitney had its downside which at the time I did not know about. I had heard people say that dog people could be very nasty and once I started winning I would find this out. But I never did. The only thing that happened was that a friend stopped being a friend the minute Whitley won her first CC. I was not devastated because I expected it. The way she continually tore other people down  warned me that this was not a friend because if she could do that to other people then she could do it to me.

I also became well-known and popular just because of the way that I dress. It came very much as a surprise to me. I did not plan it.  in fact as naive as it may seem it took me quite a long time to realise why I got such attention. I enjoyed it. Of course I did. I was a lonely child. I did not get attention apart from being bullied. So of course I very much liked what was happening at the dog shows.

So why the hell am I ruining it all for myself? I know that my weight gain is not disastrous but it is enough to make it not feasible to wear the clothes that I was wearing. It only takes a few pounds to make one's trousers too uncomfortable and I have put on a stone (14lb).

 So I have written all of this. I can see that this year has been stressful and it has been hurtful. And I have not even mentioned my wedding! And that is the most wonderful thing that happened this year. Yet until now I thought not to mention it.

I need to sort this out and sort it out quickly. I need to understand why the old Colin who feels bad and wicked and undeserving is suddenly back with a vengeance. I truly never thought I would see him again. That day when I realised that I had been abused because of who my abusers were and not because of who I was made such a huge difference to my life. It turned it from monochrome to Technicolor. Seriously. I would never have dressed the way that I now dress prior to that day.  I would not have had the nerve nor the stamina to turn up at each and every show even though being amongst so many people terrifies me. I know without a shred of doubt that I was not abused because of who I was, that I did not deserve it, that I did not ask for it, and there was nothing about me that asked for it. That has not changed. I still know in my heart that this is true. Yet why my behaving now is this I no longer thought that was true.

It has crossed my mind that this last few years have been really very very good. And this year with our wedding and the house renovations and having my first homebred champion made up should also have been very good but in fact I have to say that it has been awful. The wedding wasn't I will never forget the wedding I was so happy that day the happiest I have ever felt. But the rest of this year both before the wedding and after the wedding has been pretty much a nightmare.

I also find it very very difficult to deal with the fact that there are people out there who don't just not like me but actually want to harm me through gossip etc I just do not understand this I have never been a malicious person. Not ever. I have never wanted to hurt another person. Not even those people who abused me. All I ever wanted was for them to stop and for them to recognise what harm they were doing.  I just do not understand people who want to hurt.

I can see from what I have written that perhaps the self sabotaging behaviour is hardly surprising.  I don't know and I would welcome any thoughts on this.