I’m going with the End of the Year theme and reposting my favorite HNT of the year… even though I haven’t done all that many in the first place :) I wanted to do a new one, but… turns out I have pretty much no privacy at home. I share a room with my 16 year old sister, and every time I try to kick her out she bombards me with whys. She even found this blog by purposefully looking up wordpress on the browsing history, after seeing me use wordpress a couple of times. Argh.

Anywayyy… I’m glad of the theme because it coincides with me wanting to look back on the year, and on my blogging experience so far.

So my favorite HNT (and probably most of yours if stats are anything to go by :) ) is Beautiful:

Why is it my favorite? Pretty simple – I look gorgeous in this picture. Not just my body, but… the pose, the color of the backdrop, and the overall mood is just so delicate.

When I took this picture and I reached out my hand like that I was thinking of pushing a door open or pushing a curtain aside and discovering something new. And, looking at the picture now, it says so much about how this past year and this blog have changed me.

Throughout me and the Actor’s relationship, we’ve had so many conversations where I angst over my average grades/crappy social skills/body/failures/whatever and think of ways that I could improve myself, and he always insisted that most of my problems stemmed from my low self-esteem, and that I should work on improving that instead. At the time, I disagreed with him.

He definitely isn’t the first person to say that to me. My mum, and basically any friend who has gotten close enough to me throughout my post-childhood life has told me that I’m way too hard on myself.

I spent a very long time believing a plethora of unhealthy things. When I met a new person, I anticipated that they would either dislike me/reject me, or would only spend time with me because they wanted something from me. I’d feel anxious about approaching new people because I thought that they would snub me. I frequently doubted whether my friends really cared about me. (Example – it took 8 months of friendship with Christopher and various different forms of ‘proof’ before I believed that he truly cared about me.) When people complimented me/were nice to me/I achieved something good I would brush it off as a fluke, or question the person’s intentions. But at the same time I would believe that my friends were always right and I was always wrong.

I thought I was unattractive. I remember times I would get up in the morning and sit down on my bed in the middle of dressing, and look down at myself and just feel depressed.

I felt somehow different; that I didn’t fit in or belong anywhere. I disliked myself. I thought I wasn’t good enough and never would be good enough.

So, no surprise that the Actor frequently told me I needed more self-confidence. But I didn’t even know what confidence meant, why people felt confident, or how to get more of it. The Actor explained it as having faith in yourself – but then my next question was why would I have faith in myself? Not like I’ve given myself any reason to! His response to that was – you just have to.

Self-confidence is the ’something new’ that I discovered over the past year.

I’m not trying to portray myself as this person who has struggled and tried really hard and finally ‘made that change!’ It wasn’t as if I knew what to do and purposefully set out to change myself. It’s more like I searched very hard and managed to learn and find ways that would help me along the way. The ironic thing is that most of these ‘ways’ are things that any adviser/therapist/book would have told me, except that I could only use them after discovering them and evaluating them for myself.

I can narrow them down to a few:

• Leaving my hometown and experiencing places and people that had different (maybe more open) mindsets than what I was used to
• Instead of trying very hard to ‘fit’ myself into a particular mold or act the way ‘everyone else’ acted, I acted in the ways that I wanted to – that made me feel comfortable – and used my efforts to find social spaces and people that accepted me the way I was
• Breaking negative thought patterns (and this is definitely something that I heard during one of my few counseling sessions, except that I scoffed at it at the time). Learning to recognize when my thoughts would go out of control and become excessively negative, critical and bad. Instead of merely letting the thoughts consume me, I’d stop myself and question what I was thinking, and try to think of possible alternatives to why I ‘failed’, or whether the failure was even a failure at all. E.g., instead of blaming myself for setbacks and assuming I was a ‘bad person’ because of those setbacks, I thought of possible outside reasons that could have caused it. Maybe it wasn’t as big a deal as I thought it was and I could maybe use it as an opportunity for growth, etc. I didn’t believe myself for a while at the beginning but merely considering other options helped.
• Meeting wonderful and supportive friends, fwbs, Caribbean dorm-mates, readers and members of the sexblogging community :) My college friends have been amazing – letting me vent on them, disagreeing with me when I criticized myself and reassuring me that they cared about me and that they thought I was an awesome person. My fwbs told/showed me how attractive and sexy they found me so often and insistently that in the end I just had to believe that they meant it :) And my readers have been so supportive and left such lovely comments :)
• Examining myself and exposing myself on my sexblog
• Doing things/taking classes/etc that I love and that make me happy, instead of doing things I thought I was ’supposed’ to be doing
• Letting people’s compliments, affirmation and positivity in and accepting/believing them instead of brushing them aside, denying them or trying to find some ulterior motive behind them

I still ‘relapse’ sometimes. Just today, I’m supposed to meet up with my friend N and I couldn’t even give him a meet-up time because I started worrying about the possibility of inconveniencing him, of spending too much time with him and boring him, and looking too desperate to see him but… he’s my friend for goodness’ sake! Why would he be my friend if he didn’t want to spend time with me?!

So overall, I’ve broken out of my dark little ‘box.’ And it feels wonderful.

Happy new year :)