back up blog

The opening notes of Fame came up into my ears as my first steps out into the cold began. I’d fuelled up on protein, taken a pre-run poop, and wrapped up in my wooly hat and mittens. I was ready to kick running’s ass. Baby look at me, and tell me what you see, you ain’t seen the best of me yet… I turned to my running partner, mouthing the words dramatically. We had five minutes of warming up to do before breaking into a jog, and so? And so I danced. Likely misguidedly, I feel totally hot in my work out clothes. There’s something about the endorphins when I’m exercising, how good it feels to use my body , how my Lycra pants remind me of my most womanly curves. Add in a pumping soundtrack and the generally elevated mood I find myself in of late (radical self love is good to you like that), and I started to Billy Elliott the fuck out of the street – even though, as we’ve established before , I ain’t no Beyonce. It made Amy, my running partner, laugh, and so I played to my audience. We san...

Last week I took photographs of myself in my underwear. I uploaded them to my computer, pulled similar ones from a month ago up beside them, and flicked back and forth between them, over and over again. Fucking hell, I thought to myself. Fuck-ing-hell. In pursuing a healthier lifestyle – one that dedicates as much time to a healthy body as I do a healthy mind, heart, and soul – I’ve lost 15.2 pounds so far. I feel amazing. I went to the supermarket to hold seven bags of sugar in my arms to illustrate that weight, and it astounds me that I’ve been lugging that around -- literally having it drag me down. I’m physically altered enough already to enjoy running three times a week now – I feel elegant and free. I’m bending and twisting and stretching and marvelling at what my body can do in a weekly yoga class. I’m catching glimpses of myself in the mirror and thinking, Oh, she’s pretty, because I seem so alive. Using my body in these new, different ways makes me feel like the most beauti...

Remember how last August I was homeless for 6 weeks? That the third housemate in my brother and mine’s apartment was a coke head, and so I left without a plan because I could not bear watching his three-day come-downs on the sofa a second longer? And then I moved in to what I thought was going to be the house-share of my dreams , with a girl I’d come to love like a sister in the year I’d known her? Well. I never did finish that story. 3 weeks into my move, alarm bells started ringing, and within 4 weeks I knew, in my disheartened gut, instinctively, that it wasn’t going to work. Not only did my new housemate turn out to be apologetically sociopathic – this blog post was about her - but she also wasn’t very good at using the extractor fan when she cooked, so the house always smelt, and whenever she’d been in the bathroom it was like an Alsatian had shaken itself dry in there i.e. gross. Last September through November was a nightmare for me. An abusive nightmare. The situation escalat...