today I started packing things up for the move. I thought i'd just go through some random bits that I don't need immediately so that it gets easier to get through everything else - it's the most amount of stuff I've ever had to pack for a move, and I've done a lot of moves in my life!!

anyway, it's funny how going through stuff you spend more time looking through old journals or belongings that you've not seen in a couple of years. I found some old journals (because apparently I couldn't stick to one, and ended up writing entries across at least 3 different ones), where I scrapbooked some stuff and honestly... mostly just completely insane emo rants. through the process of getting a diagnosis of a personality disorder, being passed around different types of therapy, the hurt of a messy "relationship".

I even found one of them, which I guess was one of my earliest of that era, dated for 5th April '21 - where I wrote about relapsing into self-harm for the first time in 10 years or so. it felt really crazy and surreal to find a date for when this started, to be able to put a little pin in the timeline.

since that point, I've made it to being a year clean and a year of therapy to heal a lot of my pain. it's crazy how different I feel to that girl 3-4 years ago. she was in so much deep pain every day that she was either dissociating, crying, or hurting herself, and I honestly don't know how she hid it - or I don't know how people looked at me and saw my pain and carried on ignoring that. I really feel like at that point I did not think I would make it many more years.

last night I had a rocky night mentally, where I felt like I was falling back into that space, because something triggered me and I was losing control of the spiral and the emotions, but it's crazy to read those journals this afternoon and to realize the difference in myself; in how I had been able to write about my feelings, talk them out with a friend who I trusted, and be able to go to sleep on it, and "confront*" in the morning about my feelings when it felt less raw to me.

*not really a confrontation since it was just talking it out but for lack of a better word

i'm not where I want to be ideally, but compared to where I used to be is... so surreal.