Trigger warning: Self harm, anxiety attacks
My name is Ria, and this is me about a month ago. I’ve submitted to SHYB once before and I’ve gotten so much farther in my road to loving my body.
The weekend that picture was taken was a really big step in my self-confidence because I’d finally built up the courage to buy a bikini. My friend Christina came and took a bunch of pictures of me and for once, I let her. I had finally felt good enough about myself to even be around someone wearing that.
Over this year, I found myself in a really low point in my life where I was having at least two panic attacks a week over petty things. I felt like the only way to keep myself in check and make sure I didn’t have another panic attack was to make myself feel pain. For weeks, I cut with anything I could find; safety pins, my favorite Beatles button, broken bobby pins, then finally razors. I had stopped for a good amount of time because my then boyfriend would refuse to talk to me if I would self-harm. He made me promise I would never self-harm again. He was one of the most important people in my life, and sometimes I like to believe that he still is. I had done him wrong, and felt that I deserved ever shred of disrespect he served me, but I didn’t. I just ended up telling myself that. No matter how hard things were through the break-up, I never broke my promise.
Right now, he dates the friend abovementioned, and that’s giving me a bit of a hard time. I had gone through the same thing as C, and I didn’t want to drift away from her as I did with the friend of mine that dated him before, which is really where the anxiety attacks began. Before then, I had only had two or three, total. When everything with that friend had hit the fan, the attacks increased to four to five a month.
My mother didn’t believe me when I told her about my attacks, which is exactly why I didn’t tell her in the first place. Only a select few people that I trusted knew about that side of my life; the side that could barely grip to reality wasn’t a side that I cared to flaunt. On the outside I was cool and collected, when most of the time I was trying to not break down. I had started to cope with my condition once I admitted it to myself.
As of now, after one slip up of the promise, I am almost 2 weeks clean of self-harm, and I have gone a month and a half without an anxiety attack. I have made a new promise to myself; from now on, I’m going to be the best me I’m can be and nothing is going to tear me down, because I’ll get by with a little help from my amazing friends.
