Learning to love yourself

The temptation to start this blog with ‘I love myself, I want you to love me…’ was almost overwhelming.  However, it should start like this.  A while ago a friend of mine said ‘I can’t believe how much better sex is with someone that you love’.  I must have looked at her incredulously, cause then she said ‘Am I the only one that doesn’t know this?’.  To which I replied, yep.  But she is a lot younger than me so maybe people her age don’t know that.  So here is moment where I think that I may have just cottoned on to something that others have known for a long time.

I am learning to love myself.  It’s hard.  Maybe hard is not the right word, maybe challenging is a better word.  It’s well known that I am rubbish at taking a compliment.  And I guess that most people I know would never say that I had a problem with being confident or speaking to people.  Well they would be wrong.  Very wrong.

The thing is that I like myself, but I am very rough on myself.  I don’t particularly like the body that I am housed in and have tried every trick in the book to lose weight off this frame.  I have recently discovered that it is going to be pretty hard now that I have a wee disease called endometriosis.  The cure for this is permanently having to have hormones of some kind going on, so this means that my body will really struggle to lose weight.  So I can either completely starve or I can do the best I can and learn to accept that I will always be a bit larger than normal.  There are two alternatives.  One is pregnancy, and the other is being in indescribable amounts of pain constantly.  One is not feasible right now and the other is just too daunting to think about.  I guess that I am just upset because I really wanted to loose weight and look amazing for going home this year and for my sisters wedding.  But I am beginning to think, that despite my very best efforts that it might be case of this is as good as it gets and that you know what, it could be worse.  I am currently relatively healthy and after the last few years I have learnt how precious this is.  I can walk and run if I want.  I am not disabled and if the worst thing that I have to complain about is that I carry a bit more and that I have curves, then maybe I should just learn to love it.  So that is what I have been trying to do.  That is not to say that I don’t hit the gym hard, but with my current working environment which involves twelve hour days this is getting impossible.  I try to eat healthy as well but when you are eating lunch on the bus between meetings at 2pm, you kinda have to take whatever Pret has left and be grateful as you shove it in as fast as you can.  And I totally eat my feelings.  I can see on a stressful afternoon that I chow down my snacks, be they fruit or snack a jacks at a record rate.  So I am learning to love my curves and I guess everyone else will just have to love them too.  At least I have a beautiful cleavage to make it better.

But that is not to say that I don’t have some attributes that even I am aware of.  I mentioned above that I have issues speaking to people.  Now once you have removed your jaw from the floor let me explain.  Once I have met you and figured out where you fit in and how to relate to you, I will chat your ears off about anything and everything.  But until I have figured you out, I will be polite and if I don’t really know what to do with you, I will kinda blank you.  I don’t mean to do it, I just don’t know how to relate to you.  Maybe everyone is like this?  I am scared a little of new people and how they will relate to me and what they will think.  A lot of that has to do with the whole body thing, but a lot of has to do with wanting to be liked.  Lately though, as lot has been made out of my personality.  My boss said to me this morning, at an early meeting, after a crazy late night working last night, you are still smiling though and that is a great skill.  My best Cate told me last week that if more people laughed at the world I did that the world might be a better place.  Hmmm, I really took that one to heart.  I guess that I have figured out that if you can get people looking at your face, your smile and your laugh that they might forgive the curviness below.  I am aware that I am good at putting people at ease, even if internally, I am going mad thinking about what they might be thinking of me and desperately hoping not to say the wrong thing.

Since earlier this year, when there were a few horrific alcohol incidents – they are for sure going to be the subject of another blog - I have cut back a lot.  This is because it is excruciating to live through the next week.  After a particularly heavy night out, I will spend the next week or so beating myself up.  Badly.  I will analyse every word that was said, every dance move that was done and I will not look favourably on myself.  The thing is that none of this means anything to anyone else.  I was discussing a particularly bad incident with a friend and she was flabbergasted at what I was saying.  On the night in question she thought that I was hilarious, a lot of fun and could not understand why I was upset.  She was astounded that I was so hard on myself and was not impressed when I began to be a bit sensible about how I drank.  The words ‘Last nights fun Nic would be drinking with us now’ at 10am on a Sunday morning came back at me.  We laughed it off, but it made me see that maybe I am not the screw up that I think that I am.  I am still conscious about the mistakes drunk Nic makes, but am actively trying to get over this.

Anyway that is an insight into the slightly insane world of Nic.  I am starting to succeed a lot in the whole loving myself thing.  Either that or I have reached an age where I think, if you don’t like it, you can just go away.  Still I don’t think that you will see me as one of those old ladies that wears bikinis anytime soon.  And neither will you see me give up on the whole weight loss thing either, despite the fact that it seems a bit hopeless, I have a feeling that it would be worse if I gave up.  I still enjoy a few drinks, but its been a while since I have been put in a taxi that has been paid for twice, once by the person who put me in it and again by me when I got home and I think that is for the best!

The pesky other arm

I watched a movie called Howl the other night.  It’s a very intelligent movie about Allan Ginsberg and his poem called Howl.  The movie centres around when the book was released and how there was a movement to have it censored and around the life that Ginsberg lived.  The movie was brilliant and whilst I should have been thinking about the filming and the story, I got distracted…

There is a scene where Ginsberg is in bed with an acquaintance and they decide to cuddle and this is where I got distracted.  By Ginsberg’s arm.  You see when two people cuddle in bed and then go to sleep there is always one arm left over.  And that arm when you wake up is dead not very comfortable.  But why is this?  Why can two people not cuddle to sleep and both of them not wake up with two perfectly fine arms?  In the scene, Ginsberg is the one doing the side cuddle whilst the other person is doing the lying on the back cuddle.  Ginsberg’s spare arm ends up sticking straight up in the air, which kinda shows the kind of awkward person that he was.  I have never ended up with an arm in the air, but have ended up with them in all other kinds of interesting poses.

The worst is when it gets trapped under the other person.  It might be under their neck, so when you wake up you are not only trapped, but have a sore or dead arm.  If you have somehow managed to spend the whole night like this, then there is nothing more painful than the blood returning to the arm in question.  I am sure that I have a bad shoulder from the other choice which is to lay half on your stomach and half on your side so that you have one arm over them and one out behind you, hardly a great position to sleep in.

I was discussing this with a friend of mine, who was telling me that after making a curry the other night and then seeing on the news that the mix that she had used had been recalled due to it being known to cause paralysis, she was very concerned when she woke up with a dead arm.  But was relieved that it was just cuddle arm.

So you can imagine why I was a little disturbed when I got distracted and could not stop thinking about this arm.  I was watching a movie that was about one of the most impressive and discussed poems of this century, something I was really interested in, but yet I was caught up with the issue of the arm.

There is another solution to the pesky arm, and that is to not be a cuddly sleeper.  But where is the fun in that.  There is nothing nicer than a cuddly sleep and problematic as finding the right non-dead arm position is.  In fact there is nothing quite so nice as a good hug/cuddle in general.  I am sure that I remember reading somewhere that the more hugs you have a day, the more well adjusted that you are.  I know that certainly feel better after a good hug.  I tend to get them most often at the pub – which sounds dodgy, but the English don’t really hug, so only tend to get them from the Kiwis, who are all concentrated at the pub, strange that.

So do you get cuddle arm?  Are you a cuddly sleeper?  Have you seen Howl?  Were you distracted by the arm or did you find more in the movie?

I see the moon, the moon sees Me

I have a bit of a love affair going on with the moon.  It’s a bit odd as I love the Sun as well.  I have some serious Seasonal Affect Disorder going on, and since the Summer was rubbish this year I am hanging out to get some NZ Sun on this pasty white skin of mine.

The weather is London is terminally grey.  I struggle with the grey.  It infects everything, even your skin.  Londoners in January are a miserable lot.  It’s cold, it’s grey and no one has any money.  And because of the grey, you often don’t get to see the moon.  Or the sun for that matter.

So when I get to see that gorgeous big moon in the sky, I get quite happy.  It currently gets dark at about 4.30 or 5pm.  That means that often I leave in the dusk, and return home in the dark.  I have been walking home recently and so have been able to see the orb at its best.

There is a fair amount of folklore associated with the moon and I wonder if that has me hooked.  I love a good fairy story or myth… There are some beautiful songs written about it as well.  One that stands out for me is out of a movie called ‘The thing called Love’.  My Mum and I watched it when I was a teenager one night.  I have no idea where the others were that Friday.  But we set up camp in the extension to our house that was not finished and sat under blankets and watched this movie.  The song has a second verse that goes – ‘There’s a full moon tonight/and I’m bathing in its light/naked as the day that I was born/there is no shame beneath this sky/I have kissed the past goodbye/and mended up my broken heart so torn.’  We loved it so much we rewound the video (yes it was on VHS) and put the tape recorder up to it and recorded it so that we could listen to it later.  My Mum had visions of me learning to play it on the guitar.  I was not brilliant at playing the guitar so it’s probably best for the song that I didn’t!

I also remember the great moon that we used to see out our kitchen window, I would sometimes find my Mum standing there with the light off having a look at it rise over the hill there.  A low yellow moon always held us both transfixed.

Or it could be a case of being brainwashed a little by Disney.  When I was a kid I loved The American Tail, you know the story with Fifel the mouse who was moving to America where there were no cats.  I loved that song Somewhere out there and it has the general gist of that if you are looking up at the sky, somewhere out there your loved ones are doing the same thing so you are connected.  Maybe I like looking at the moon cause I think that my Mum is doing the same thing? 

So this week whilst it is still freakishly warm for London, has seen some clear and bright days, and this leads to clear nights.  I love walking over Vauxhall Bridge on my way home and seeing the moon there, and reflected in the Thames.  I smile as a I walk home and kinda feel as though the Moon is watching over me, keeping me safe.  I guess it’s been a slow week for me if that is the most important thing that I have to write about!

I'm so tired I could eat a Lion

If you were a kiwi kid then you would recognise the Animal bar ad there.  I am so very tired over the last two weeks.  I even missed out going to the pub last Friday, choosing instead to stay in and order pizza.  Not my finest hour.  This week the tiredness has continued as I strive to make it to the gym or at least walk some of the way to and from work, as well as keep up with a very mentally draining job.

My job is, well it is, right now.  Days spent staring at spreadsheets is not really what I was cut out for.  My talents lie in event planning and writing.  Numbers are really not my forte.  I am doing ok at this, but feel as though I could be doing a lot better.  I just don’t know how.

In the face of all of this, I am really enjoying exercise right now.  My brain gets to switch off and my body gets a great workout.  Almost on auto pilot as I am soooo tired.  You get the picture.  I have been in hibernation for a few weeks now.  I have hardly been out – great for my bank balance, but not great for the friends that I am neglecting.  I miss them.  I know that this exile is self imposed, but my tired mind starts to play tricks on me, telling me that they don’t care.  When I get really tired like this I get emotional and precious.  Even I am annoyed at me.

But the upside is silly humour.  Everything is funny when you are tired.  One episode that stands out the most took place on an average Sunday in a lingerie store where I work part time.  I had just finished serving a customer at the counter when another lady pushing a pram walked in.  My customer looked in the pram and smiled, and I thought how lovely a grandmother with her grandchild.  I then began to serve the grandmother.  She was a little odd, and kept mentioning that her daughter was joining her soon.  I thought it was nice of the lady to take the baby and help her daughter have some down time.  Another pair of ladies came up and looked in the pram and laughed.  My customer seemed miffed and asked why they were laughing, then brushed it off and said something to the effect of, its hard not to look at them and smile.  She then left the counter and began pushing the pram around the store.  At one point she leaned into the pram and was cooing at the baby. 

Then the baby barked.

Umm WHAT?  The lady then proceeded to pick up a fluffy white dog that was dressed in a red and white stripped jumper.  I nearly had kittens I was trying so hard not the laugh.  But it certainly cheered me up.

So this week has been work, exercise, cook dinner and sleep, then repeat.  But I have discovered a great tele programme called Raising Hope, its making me laugh and keeping me sane right now.  I am really looking forward to getting on a plane and seeing my family and friends in NZ again.  I will be sleeping on that plane before the damn thing takes off at this rate.  I once slept through a flight from Canada to the States, I don’t remember take off or landing, I was so out to it.

So how are you?  Tired, perky, excited or just normal.  What do you find funny when you are tired?