That's the thing about pain. It demands to be felt.

When the clock struck midnight on New Year's Eve (or technically New Year's Day) I was probably the lowest I'd felt in quite a while. The last two months of 2016 were so emotionally draining. I deferred from university, my anxiety was at an all time high, and a relationship that I was quite invested in crashed and burned, and ultimately, I was left feeling exhausted, drained and really hurt.

While I had tried to ignore my growing anxiety and the symptoms it was giving me throughout November, there was no way I could ignore how much I was hurting after the relationship ended. My friends and family were constantly telling me that I deserved better, that it was his loss, and ultimately that I should just "get over it". I know that their intentions were nothing but pure, that they only had my best interests at heart and they hated seeing me so sad. The issue with just "getting over it" is that I'm not the type of person that can just cut someone out of my life with the click of a finger. The people I choose to invest my time in, that I choose to let into my life are important to me and I find it difficult to cut people off. I'm far too loyal, sometimes to my own detriment.

Instead of trying to ignore everything I was feeling: anxiety, pain, loss, self-worth issues - I decided that I was simply going to allow myself to feel. I wasn't going to bury my feelings, I wasn't going to pretend they weren't there, I certainly wasn't going to pretend that I was fine when I quite clearly wasn't. Like Albus Dumbledore said to Harry Potter, "numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it". I thought that it would be healthier to feel everything as I was going through it, rather than repress it and have those feelings come out weeks or months later down the line in uglier ways.

So since the start of December, I've been allowing myself to feel. When I wanted to cry, I cried. Whether that was a quick five minutes throughout the day, whether that was a few cries throughout the day or whether that was an incontrollable sob (or two). I let myself feel sad, disappointed, angry, devastated. I let myself spend hours in bed when I needed too. My appetite was pretty much non-existent because I felt disgustingly sick all of the time. I questioned my self-worth, I wondered why I wasn't good enough.

Some days I felt really bad. Other days I felt a little better. Healing is never going to be a simple straight line, there will many ups and many downs. And that's perfectly normal.

The thing is, I'm glad I felt everything then rather than now. It's only been nearly two months (how is it nearly March already?!) but emotionally I'm in such a different place. I'm certainly a lot happier than I was at the start of January. I'm not really sure when I stopped crying about it or when I stopped thinking about it all the goddamn time. I guess it just kind of happened.

I guess a lot of the time, people have a habit of shutting themselves down and ignoring pain. And if that works for you, then great. But for me, it doesn't. I know, for me personally, that if I had decided to shut down and deal with that pain in other ways, either through alcohol or simply ignorance, that pain and those negative feelings would have definitely came forth eventually and have been much worse to deal with.

The end of that relationship was not only a major change, but it caused a major change within my life. In 34 days I'm flying to Australia where I'll be living for just over five months. Australia was never part of my plan for 2017, it was a decision I made when I was sad and heartbroken. My Dad called it running away and knowing how I was feeling at the time, I would be inclined to agree. Now though, my mindset has completely changed. It's less about running away and more about running towards. Running towards a new country, new friends, new experiences, new travel opportunities. And I couldn't be more excited about it.

Love,

Brogan