Journey to know thyself - reflection to recovery

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This journal entry stems forms an open and honest reflection about my own journey and life experiences. In that open and honest reflection, my entry is about the relationship with outside influences such as alcohol, but for this alone, my focus on this is about my relationship with food and the emotional triggers that brought me to overeat. 

My earliest experience and awareness of overeating (or secret eating) was as a child where I would go to the kitchen to pick up biscuits and run into my room with them. My parents would say' what are you hiding?' I would run past and laugh. 

If I look back at this period of my life with open eyes and an open heart, it was a period of processing who I was in life in small and finite steps. I knew I was developing and forging relationships and comparing myself to others. It was a difficult time because there was a part of me that became conflicted. I knew I was different in many ways, like I was separate, away from the norm. I was growing up in a life without visual representation of other LGBTQ people. I was beginning to internalise who it is I was. I had no concrete idea of who and why. I felt alone without a sounding board or an ear who'd listen and understand. 

As time came to pass, I began to learn. I remember the first gay kiss which was aired on the BBC flagship soap opera, EastEnders and round about that time I did see a gay sex scene on a TV movie and at that point, I thought to myself, I could identify with others. I felt a connection, where I was not alone in this and that I was not the only one which did felt like a intense weight being lifted from my heart, mind and soul. Although, having said that, it was instantly replaced with a sense of shame and guilt that sank deep because I sensed I was different from the norm of the world. That world at that point taught you the expectation and the visual representation of what family is and how it should be lived.

For me, I always felt that I could not be open and honest about how I felt about who I was inside. I knew my family loved me deeply, but I had ever lasting fear of 'what if'. In that, the fear was genuinely real, because I feared that I would be rejected. That was a deep rooted fear. I was young and was led by anxiety on these thoughts. I was also also experienced whilst coming to terms of my sense of identity, I was bullied for the way I walked at school. As a young child I was diagnosed with septic arthritis after misdiagnosis by hospital professionals. I developed septicaemia after my first hospital admission and this then resulted in the poison destroying my right hip joint. This would impact me in later life.

For  years food was always a source of comfort, especially if my mood was low or down and some of these life experiences led me to form unhealthy relationships with food and other substances, along the journey of my own discoveries and journey rediscoveries. A journey of finding a sense of love and understanding for myself. The LGBTQ community is at a higher level of mental distress or forming unhealthy relationships with substances as a result of abuse, discrimination, rejection and ostracism that we all undergo. 

This journal will  continue to chart my journey and lived experiences  with an open heart, mind and soul, in the aim of inspiring and connecting with others to say that you are not alone.