Memory Exercise 12/04/2016 - Peace with my Past [Part 3 of 3]

It was a Tuesday. My mum’s fingernails were bitten right down, some were bleeding but she carried on biting. Occasionally she would make herself jump as she broke a new piece of skin and yet she continued, I don’t think she realised I was watching her.

“Katie Harper?”

I looked up to the smile of a fat, Irish doctor. Warm and happy, but I couldn’t bring myself to smile back. Why had she been so happy? She was fat and ugly, surely she didn’t have a partner, what made her so happy that she felt the need to smile at me, a stranger?

The interrogation began, I let mum do the talking. When she cried, the doctor gave her a tissue, but I couldn’t help but stare at her the same way I did when she was biting her fingernails. Why was she crying?

I can’t even remember what was said. I watched the seconds go by on the clock until I was given a prescription for some tablets with a name that I’m not even sure the doctor understood.

One in the morning and one at night. Repeat. Meet with doctor. Repeat. For how long? The rest of my life? I couldn’t feel this sick for the rest of my life. The tablets had some grim side effects, they made you sick and dizzy which didn’t help my already unwelcome mood.

I felt like a fucking nut job.

Mum always lingered, handing me my pills one by one, making sure I didn’t hide them under my tongue. She wouldn’t let me out the house without her, it was like being on day release. We’d walk round the shops arm in arm as she desperately tried to make conversation with me.

She’d point at disgusting, frilly dresses, “oh Katie that would look lovely on you.”

She’d approach old friends, “Katie, how are you? How is that nice lad you were with? What’s his name, Joe?”

She’d sigh as I picked at my cake in the café overlooking the Pump Gardens, “Katie, I wish you would eat something. You’re just skin and bones.”

That’s exactly how I‘d felt. Skin and bones. No interior. A waste. Nothing gave me happiness. Not even my mum, regardless of how hard she tried. The only thing that had given me the slightest feeling that I might be alive was the crystal, and being imprisoned in my own house, I couldn’t even have that relief.

I was dying.

Every single day that went past I died a little bit more.

I want to say it was a blur. Truthfully, the idea had been skipping around in my head for a very long time, coming in and out of view and at times, consuming me.

I bided my time, money was getting slim and it took almost a year, but mum eventually returned to work. She’d had tears in her eyes as she’d said goodbye, hugging me. I’d squeezed her back, taking a breath in and smelling the sweetness of her perfume. I came away slowly, looking at the wrinkles on her face, every scar with all their stories. I thought about everything she’d done for me all my life, how much of an amazing woman, and mother she was. Strong and caring, the type of mother I’d hoped maybe one day I could’ve been. When she left, I’d sat on the floor for what seemed like hours.

Under my bed I’d kept the note. I’d been writing it for a long time, although I had actually considered not leaving one. I didn’t want to be melodramatic or have people to feel sorry for me, but it turned out that this was the very reason I left one. I owed my mum an explanation, I’d wanted her to know that it was a decision I had to make myself, that it wasn’t her fault. I wrote about my poor baby, about how nightmares and reality began bleeding into one another. I wrote about how I’d failed my mum as her only child, how I’d never be able to take care of her, the way she did me. I wrote about Joe and how I felt that I was less of a person because of what he’d done to me. I wrote about my dad and how what he did kept me up at night and made me hate Joe before I ever really hated him. I wrote about when I was fourteen and she’d found out I’d been cutting my upper thigh. I wrote about my fear of never being happy again.

Mum had given her keys to our next door neighbour Mary, and had told her to check on me. A few minutes more and I would have died.

“You’re lucky to be alive, petal.” Said Mary. I didn’t feel it. I drifted in and out of consciousness, every time my vision focussed, I looked over to Mum. She was reading my note.

I told them that I didn’t want to be alive. I was angry at Mary for calling the fucking ambulance. Why didn’t she let me die? I didn’t do it for a fucking joke. I didn’t want to be alive.

“You old cow. You horrible bitch. Why didn’t you let me die?” I burst into floods of tears, I wasn’t allowed to leave the hospital for six days. On the last day I was given the truth.

I’ve been here for a while now, it’s getting better. My mum visits every other day, and I meet with Jenny three times a week. She likes the Libertines, and puts up her hair with chopsticks. At first I thought she was just a snotty doctor so I wouldn’t tell her anything, but she’s sort of like a friend. I haven’t had one of those in a while.

One day in the social space they were playing a comedy that I remembered going to the cinema with Joe to see, and for the first time in a long time I laughed, I really laughed.

Within these walls I have explored my lows, and reminded myself of my highs. It’s not going to be an easy ride; in the time I have been here, I have been back to that dark place, but fortunately it’s no longer my life.

This morning the cleaner swept around my feet as I stood leaning against the wall, scribbling in my notepad and barely noticing her. She made me jump as she asked me the question that no one has dared to in a while.

“Are you ok, my love?”

“No,” I said. I began to smile, “but I will be.”

Memory Exercise 12/04/2016 - Peace with my Past [Part 2 of 3]

The nightmares were the worst part. I dreamt that I’d climbed to the top of Guy’s Cliffe house. My mum and dad used to take me there as a child, telling me that I was a princess and that one day I’d live there. In my dream I look at my innocent baby with no emotion and I drop it into a sea of hands that were never to catch her. Angry women run to the top of the crumbling building and they spit at me, pull my hair out. They scream at me, call me a murderer. One of them is holding my dead baby in her hands. “Look at her. Look at what you’ve done you sick fucking disgrace!” I woke up panting, coated with sweat. What have I done?

Another dream was of me sitting on the sofa in a house I had never seen before, eating banana bread while watching cartoons. Then in would crawl a little girl no older than two.

“Mama!”

“Yes pretty girly, that’s your mama! Are we going to give mama a kiss?” Joe follows her into the room on his hands and knees, smiling at me the way he used to. She reaches out her chubby arms, drooling onto her t-shirt and I smile back as I’d give her a cuddle. In the dream, I love her. The Joe and Katie story, complete with our baby girl. A story from an alternate universe where I had done everything right, where Joe hadn’t left me and I‘d not killed my baby. I wished to stay there; the pain of waking up and remembering was far too much. They don’t bother me much anymore, the nightmares. As time passes they grow less frequent, one day maybe they’ll go away. It’s reality that becomes the difficult thing to endure.

At the time I was plagued with guilt. Every baby I saw left me disgusted at myself. I despised pregnant women, despised the fact that their babies were alive and I'd killed mine.

I’d needed to get out of the city fast. When it'd gotten too much to handle on my own I left. My mum was pleased to hear from me, it'd been a while since I'd last called.

“You’ve lost weight, Katie.” She pulled at the arm on my jumper which was now baggy. Shit. I had. “How’s Joe?” she asks.

“Fine,” Why am I lying to her? Because if I'd told her about him I was scared she'd have made me tell her about everything, and she will see me for what I am; an adult woman with no meaningful relationships and her grandchild's killer.

She's always been incredible though, my mum. You can tell her anything and she'll help no matter what. So I swallowed my fears and told her.

She sat and listened to me cry, my wounds open, the secret finally out. I told her about Joe, how I was confused at how easily I’d discarded my beliefs, my guilt about my abortion and the nightmares. She didn’t shout at me, just told me that she loved me and that I shouldn’t have kept it a secret.

“Katie, I love you so much. But right now, I want you to come and live at home. Not in the same house if you don’t want, but I want you to be close.” I stayed that night, couldn’t bear to be alone any longer.

So I moved back home, but my mind was somewhere else. My mum wasn’t angry at me, but I didn’t feel any better.

I still remember my first time with the crystal. Remember the way my pupils dilated, everything I saw intensified. The trees danced and the sky and the land became one as the horizon disappeared. 

Cars zoomed past as a flash of colour. The world had appeared crystal clear. The crystals themselves flowed through my veins and in that moment I noticed how important my blood was, how I was entirely impotent, that my existence depended on it and how it felt like liquid gold as I’d came up. Every breath had felt heavy. In that moment, I hadn’t just been living, I’d been alive.

In the years since this, the crystals continued to make me feel that way, enlightening and disillusioning me. When I was in oblivion, and my body was numb, my mind was filled with music, neon colours and paradise.

It’s never stopped the nightmares though.

It’d felt as though I couldn’t sleep - but being awake was even more difficult. The days and nights blurred into one another. With no job and no real friends, there’d been no purpose being here.

Memory Exercise 12/04/2016 - Peace with my Past [Part 1 of 3]

In some Indian cultures, the feeling of a sinking heart is a recognised illness. It’s that feeling where you’re walking upstairs in the dark and you think that there is one more step than there is and so you fall into the black obscurity, your hair standing on end and your heart racing. It’s the feeling where the person who you changed yourself for tells you that the exterior you crafted is not enough to cling onto their love, no matter how much you plead.

I still remember the first time. A pain I‘d never felt before, first physical, then emotional. Then, at back of my mind, a question - is this really what it means to be a woman? Because I was terrifyingly happy. I felt the butterflies pirouette in my stomach as I realised that I was no longer my own, knowing that the crimson stains on my bedsheet were a weakening of not only my body, but all my beliefs. The beliefs became white noise, and words from the literature, squiggles that were to be lost alongside the person who I used to call myself. For this I hated him. He tore away what fundamentally made me, me.

No matter how happy my hormones had told me I felt, I hadn't been sure if I could really have loved him, been committed to him, a cannibal of the soul, someone I knew could kill me one day if he woke up and saw fit. I'd always known this, deep down where I kept my doubts, yet the day he woke up and did so, I'd been no more prepared for it. I changed into a person I never thought I’d become, someone incapable of making their own decisions, someone who had no respect for them self, someone who allowed the illusion of love to consume them, and bind themselves to the harbinger of their torment. 

We all question what love is. Regardless of how educated we believe we are, no one ever truly knows the answer to a query so subjective. Some say that love makes them weak at the knees. Well, love weakened me in every way a person can be weakened – if this is true for love then obviously, I’ve been in drowned in it. Kicking and unable to breathe, this suffocating feeling is colossal compared to a physical pain, although I can still remember the pain she felt when he broke her nose and cracked her ribs. This dominance I once thought I could’ve fought, can in fact drown me.

I clenched my teeth as I walked past the leering builders.

“Alright love, where’re you off to, a modelling shoot?” Being 5ft 4”, and a size 12 on a good day – I was clearly not on my way to a modelling shoot.

I held my tongue, I couldn’t be arsed with the confrontation, not on a day where I was running late for work.

“Get that face off o’yer!” And with this remark he slapped me on the backside. I jumped and without even thinking I returned the slap, right across his face.

“Fucking hell lads! The fat ones are always feisty aren’t they?” scoffed the slapped builder. The ‘lads’ descended into fits of laughter as if what the tosser said was remotely funny. They continued to discuss how ‘feisty’ I would be in the bedroom. I walked away wishing I’d hit the bastard harder.

I once was confident in my beliefs that women should not be subordinate to men and shouldn’t live to please them. Yet despite this, when he leaves the room and there’s a sharp sting between my legs, I smile, knowing that I have done everything I needed to, to please a man. There’s no denying that I loved the feeling of being useful to him.

Jump to my twentieth birthday. Two blue lines on the stick before me blurred as I looked up to the mirror. I examined the mousey brown roots in my bleached blonde hair, my fat spilling out of the top of my jeans, my mouth and its opinions silent for once. There was a baby inside of me.

Are women put on this Earth to birth children? Whether you’re religious or scientific – that is what people are made to believe. As a woman, I was going to fulfil my ‘purpose’.

Those two blue lines disgusted me. Have I not gone through enough?

“I’m pregnant.” Silence.

“What you going to do with it?”

I paused. This isn’t what I’d expected, though what was I expecting? Anger? Love? “I can’t… I can’t have the baby. I’m not ready.”

“Well what the fuck do you want me to do here, Katie? We’re not together anymore. Your body isn’t any concern of mine.”

“But Joe – I didn’t make this baby alone. We’re in this together.”

“No. We’re not anymore.”

I fought back tears as I asked the question. “What do I do?”

“It’s not my problem Katie.”

He’d reduced our baby to an inconvenient ‘problem’. A problem so immediate and complex that I couldn’t put it to one side, to resume it when my mind was in the right state. It was one that I needed to solve now. But he didn’t help. I remained silent and the result was evident. That I was on my own.

I didn’t know what I wanted. For someone who in the past had felt so empowered when alone, I had never felt so powerless. I hadn’t the courage to make my own decision. I just wanted him to tell me exactly what he thought, then, when the decision was made, I would know that the fault didn’t lie in my hands.

I'd pictured him letting me fall into his arms, then kissing my sore eyes. I wished that he’d cried tears of joy, told me that he wanted our baby more than anything in the world. I would want it too and wouldn’t feel the need to end my pregnancy. With his divine consent, I would be happy. My stability rested entirely on his permission, a cage I promised myself I’d never be trapped in.

I was willing to take his share of the ‘problem,’ his exact half of the baby, a whole life, into my own hands, but I was too young to have a baby, too unstable. The maternal instinct that seemingly comes as part of the package of being a woman had never arrived for me. Almost everything in me was telling me to make the appointment, and yet somewhere inside, a small part was drowning out the rest, branding me a killer and haunting me.

No, it’s not fair, but how can we blame individuals? When Mr. Punch kills Judy and her baby, the children laugh. The puppeteer laughs too, an innocent, stifled giggle as he presents the show to us children, and we’re taught that the death of this lady and her baby is ok at the will of Mr. Punch. Not only ok, but comical. So later in life when a man kills a woman in whichever way he chooses, the spectators smile and the woman remains silent. Which is exactly what I did.

The words continued to pierce through every fibre in my body, resonating to a terrifyingly familiar level of sadness, piercing deeper each time they repeated in my head.

“It’s not my problem, Katie.” It wasn’t his problem of course, not if he didn’t want it. And so, at my own will, I made the agonising decision to terminate my pregnancy.

Elizabeth

Source: http://brianabbott.net/photos/2012/11/11/macro-weekend

Not even the sun assists the sunflower when she seeks sanctuary in a world that will only continue to fail her. Innocence shines out of her smile – unsuitable positivity for a person whose life is far from perfect. And behind the smile? I didn’t concern myself with the answer to this question for she was below my eye line, or so I thought.

Where is she now? I don’t know. I didn’t care until I was reminded of her existence, eight years after forgetting. Looking back, reminiscent of the journey from which I came, I remember her. Few people do until they delve deep into the ignorance of their self-absorbed minds and when they do find her, they find her sitting in a dark corner wrapped in cobwebs, behind uneasy experiences and rainy afternoons, behind memories you have to remind yourself to forget and behind ones that you don’t.

And when you finally displace everything in the way so that you get a glimpse of her you are filled with guilt and worry, because who knows what happened to her while you were gone? I should have been there, I should have protected her. If there was a demise at all, I contributed to it. Anxiety closes in, my head filled with questions that I can’t ask and so will never be answered. It’s terrifying how my complete ignorance has been so indefinitely invaded by all-pervading feelings of guilt, consuming and ruining what I now see was an oblivious paradise. The guilt I feel because I laughed at the sunflower’s unkempt hair, I laughed at her dishevelled clothes and I laughed when they called her names and plucked off her petals and it was ok because she laughed too.

She laughed so it’s ok. Repeat. Repeat. But I can’t repeat for much longer as with each child that plucks a delicate petal from her sore head, I envisage her suffering until there are no petals left and when they are gone, what happens then? Perhaps she wilts and dies, she rots away being eaten by mice and birds until there is nothing left. No sunflower, no memory, no pain. No one cares that this sunflower died, no one ever has, worst of all the sun.

But the way in which I contributed was not direct. I did not pick her petals off of her, I did not stamp on her in my Mary Janes in an act of malevolence, and I did not ridicule her for not being like the others. I painted a picture and she wasn’t in it. I painted the grass and the sun, I painted the children sat around her and yet I did not paint her despite the fact that I knew she was there.

She was an unusual flower, dirty with black stains and when I approached her to introduce her to my other senses, I held my breath to stop the unfamiliar stench of cigarettes from filling my lungs. Not only was she an ugly, unloved flower, her sweet smell had gone – I didn’t want to look after her or restore her back to full health, it was best to ignore her.

My questions could start here. Did the gardener who planted her ever come back to see if she was well? Did the children pluck off her petals until there were none left? Did they choose to leave her to decease and decay? Is she still alive – ugly with a foul smell? Or perhaps she bloomed, the sun shining on her to restore her petals, a kind hand watering her to relieve her from the agonising heat she had grown to uneasily tolerate.

Because while the oxygen in my lungs has never failed and with an undeniable flame in my heart, I have prospered from the goodness of the earth and the kindness of the water fed to me since birth. I am not lucky, this is merely what I need to live. Those four same friends who should also have been hers excluded and damaged her, leaving her without the essential elements she needed to survive.

Unlike me, they laughed when they knew her laugh was false. They purposefully spat on her and crushed her under their feet when they should have been fundamental to protect her. The Earth and the people on it refused to take care of her as soon as her seed was planted and I don’t know if anyone ever did. For the years that I knew her, all I have is her first name, the realisation that she was neglected and I did nothing to relieve her. 

An Ode to Jessica Clayton

For a few years now I've wanted to venture to Eastern Europe and this year I was going to do it, regardless of what happened. It got to the point where I was so determined to go that I was going to go alone, something I was originally completely opposed to. Then came the legend that is J Clay.

Cliche, but when you leave school, you really do realise who your real friends are; you no longer are forced to spend 6 hours a day with people. Regardless of how hard you try not to, you inevitably part ways when you go to university or take jobs that make you old and boring and stop you being able to spend time with your friends. On paper, myself and Jess probably shouldn't still be friends; her job requires her to travel away to events and uni for me means that I'm constantly drunk, so I break my phone a lot and therefore have no point of contact.

We also have other friends that are undoubtedly our bests that we throw into the mix, some common and some not. Megham Clements, the beautiful giraffe-like creature who we love dearly, Curly and Tammy and of course the rest of my LUWRU girls. But we know that our friends that we don't have in common would love each other and we're happy to introduce them as and when and we know they'll all get on - this is when you know that the people who you surround yourselves with are awesome.

But yes, Clay and I are best friends. We go through periods of talking everyday which is wondrous, but sometimes life gets in the way and we will only manage to speak properly once a month if we can. The incredible thing about this is that despite how much time we've had away from each other, each time we talk, it's as if we'd never left each other and this was proven by spending twenty days away together this summer. Spending twenty days with only one person is pretty intense, you'll be exposed to the person's strengths, their weaknesses and most importantly of all - how much of a nutter they are.

Jess and I discovered on this trip that we balance each other out VERY very well. There were times on the holiday where one of us (usually me) messed up and the other was there to provide solitude. E.g. When my bag got "robbed" and therefore the bank of Jess was there to help me out for the remainder of the trip when I had to cancel my card (my bag definitely did not turn up somewhere that I might have put it when I was drunk). And at times when Jess was being over-pragmatic and stressing that we wouldn't get things done in time or that things "weren't going to be ok," I was there to provide the hippie, (apparently radical) left wing, chill out vibes.

Some memories will live with me for a very long time, despite being drunk for the duration of the trip. The Drunken Monkey bar crawl in Prague where we first had a true taste of each others' limits, the Sparty in Budapest, lovingly referred to by Jess' soulmate Larry as the "Reservoir of Sin" and Benicassim festival which was honestly the best time of my life.

We met some interesting people from all over the world throughout our trip and were reconciled with our lovely friends Megan and Georgie in Spain for the festival. A festival which by the way, I cannot recommend highly enough. From the guaranteed weather to the brilliant acts the festival was always going to be insane, it was only the company that could have made it any better, which of course it did by miles.

We had some funny times, some scary times (Munich) and some crazy times and I wouldn't change a single part of it.

We absolutely had the trip of a lifetime and I can safely say that along the way, we've made friends for life. The important thing to remember is that your friends are important, you need to make time for them, you sometimes need to spend a shit tonne of money to go on holiday with them when you're close to not being able to afford it. This holiday (if you can even call it that) was phenomenal and despite ruining my body in every way it could be ruined, it has consolidated and reminded me why this utter knob head/absolute legend is my best friend and I love her.

This blog post however, does not weaken me. I still don't have feelings, this wasn't me, it was Bev.
CYA.

#NotInMyName

So while I should be putting myself to bed absolutely ecstatic that I've had one of the best days in a very long time, defending our title as Liverpool's best university women's rugby team and having a curry night with some of my best friends, I find myself writing this blog.

Tonight I go to bed more worried for the future of the world than I was when I woke up this morning. In the same week that we saw our government vote to cut the bursary for NHS funded courses, the politicians of our country have voted to kill innocent civilians, they have voted to destroy the homes of families and they have voted to encourage people towards radicalisation.

Well they didn't... But they might as well have.

I am just another small fish in a big pond with an opinion, which a lot of the time means nothing. But yes, I disagree with the air strikes. Now I'm not purposefully going all - "I do a degree in politics so I know what I'm talking about and you know nothing." Because it's not entirely true, but I believe that with my education in politics thus far and mere observation of previous international relations, I am somewhat qualified to have an educated opinion on this subject that isn't simply sharing a Bush/Gandhi/Martin Luther King Jr quote on facebook to illustrate the opinion.

So of course, many of you will disagree with me. But if you're sharing mirror articles, George Bush quotes and Britain First-esque posts, then this is what I say to you - sign up for the army. Air strikes will not be enough and in time they will need ground troops, some of them to torture innocent Syrian men, women and children as we have seen before in Abu Ghraib. So please, sign yourselves up.

Some of you may disagree with me with completely valid reasons and that's ok, that's your prerogative. We will each have different ideologies, different thoughts and different minds. We are inherently individual so anyone who has actually attempted to make an educated point on why we should bomb ISIS strongholds in Syria, which many argue is only logically following on from the current troubles in Iraq and Afghanistan (which I don't agree with either) - thank you for adding intelligence to this debate rather than mindless racism. I still don't agree with you and you won't agree with me - but like I said, we wont, that is what democracy is for.

In 2015 I voted for the Green Party, a party I knew from the outset would not advocate war and the destruction of our planet. However the UK voted in a Conservative party majority, currently led by a man who thinks that killing people will educate the people that kill people that killing people is wrong - find this confusing? I think so too.

But yes, as "democracy" will fail us time and time again, our unrepresentative, elitist, disproportionate House of Commons has voted for the air strikes. I'm not going to go into the deeply ingrained unfairness of our democracy because I can't be arsed - read a book.

A quote I saw from someone who reckons they're an academic in International Relations on Facebook - "We need to take our country back!" What is our country? We're an island. We are part of something much bigger that the United Kingdom, United Nations or the European Union - it's the world. Of which we have only one (get where I'm coming from? If not what I'm trying to say is this - let's not screw it up). The world is currently a place where I can't see myself ever wanting to bring a child into, I'd see myself as selfish for having to leave the Earth before a person that I had brought into the destruction, pain and suffering of the world has to endure it.

We can jump into bed with America, we can legitimise crusades in the name of democratic peace, we can bomb ISIS strongholds and we can get rid of terrorism by fighting fire with fire, right?

Wrong.

Muslims who believe their culture has been oppressed by the intrusive West will only feel more marginalised - fueling more movements to extremism. The exact thing we should be educating against.

And hello? A small percentage (of the already small percentage worldwide) are already in this country, so bombing Syria isn't already going to antagonise them? Of course it is. We can grab our giant red white and blue balls and bomb ISIS strongholds, but this is a global movement - bombing their strongholds will only awaken extremists around the world, we don't know who they are, where they are or where they can or will strike next. Paris being a prime example.

"CLOSE THE UK BORDER PETITION." Sweet. So we're going to force people out of their countries and leave them on the border?

Syrians who have fled from the exact people we are waging war against are seeing the superpowers of the world bombing their homes and in turn, the world doing next to nothing to give them a place of refuge. It's a vicious circle and it doesn't matter who is causing it, it matters that these are lives and the people are terrified. The only luck we have over these refugees is the country that we have been born into, it could just as easily be you.

But don't even get me pissing started on the arms trade or the situation regarding oil in the middle East - we are giving these people their weapons so that our country's economy doesn't suffer. I've given up on hope that the government may one day put people before profit in all aspects from job losses to providing people they intend to fight with, with weapons. And oil? If I start, I won't stop talking about it.

All we really need to do is look at what happened with Iraq, history is repeating itself. And remember this - the people who are at the most risk of  being killed by terrorists are living in these Eastern countries. In America, you are 187 times more likely to starve to death than be killed by terrorism, which only says to me that the world's priorities need seriously shifting. But again, following an attack on white people from the West (Paris) we are all prepared to go to war. Does this sound similar to the events following 9/11? No? Well I think so and look how that has 'ended'. Many of you who are making a case for these air strikes are the same people that want Tony Blair tried as a war criminal. Cross reference and make one opinion.

Now I don't have the answers on how to solve any of this, many of you will ask me "well, if not air strikes, then what?" My simple answer is - I have no idea. The more I learn about politics, the less I want to be involved with it. I don't understand violence because I can safely say that there is nothing on this Earth that I care about enough that would make me want to bomb for it. So no David Cameron, I am not a "terrorist sympathiser" for not wanting to kill another human being, but I'll tell you what I'm not - a monster. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter - so while we're bombing Syria and reciprocating to them what they have done to the West, what jargon do you think they're branding us with? Turning more of the East against the West. We are NOT divided, we are a human race, we are one. Killing is killing and now we're just as monstrous as the perpetrators.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-terrorism-statistics-every-american-needs-to-hear/5382818

Bigger and better than Crohn's Disease

This morning I saw a trending post on Facebook and I couldn't help but write about it. It was an article from the Independent about a young man called Ste Walker who suffers with Crohn's disease. Many of you do already know, but for those of you that don't, my boyfriend and best friend Sam suffers with the disease. Luckily, Sam's condition doesn't seem as severe as Ste's, but of course, all his struggles are relative to him.

Sam was diagnosed earlier this year, however it was something that we knew had been happening for a while - he now manages his condition with a hefty amount of tablets and has just finished a course of steroids. His steroids have given him bad skin and he has a very weak immune system, meaning that small cases of what we'd see as a bit of a cold, can really affect him and make him ill.

Now - if you met Sam, you would have no idea that this was all going on inside of him. Although he is 23 next week, he is often referred to as "the man-child" for being so hyper and upbeat so unless he comes out and tells you (which he does tend to, as he's quite open about the disease), then you probably would never guess.

Talking to someone everyday, you don't really see the effect that the disease is having on their body, but when I look back to pictures of him at his worst, when he couldn't eat properly and was under 10 stone - I can really see how ill he was.

If I'm honest, I find Sam's disease hard to understand - I'm ashamed to say that sometimes I'll forget and get frustrated if he's too tired to do something or if he's being short tempered with me and it has really tested our relationship. But I always make it clear that he knows that no matter what happens, I'm always here for him - because if I find it difficult to understand, one of the people closest to him, then how can we expect others to? It doesn't matter how much literature I read on the subject or how much people try and explain it to me, Crohn's is a disease that is very hard to understand if you're not going through it. Which I assume is true for many 'invisible' diseases.

There is a very strong link between Crohn's and depression. This is for many, many reasons. The disease can give you extremely painful stomach cramps - making day to day activities difficult such as simply going to work or even leaving the house. This can leave you feeling not only in pain, but helpless - 'normal' people can go to work and go out with their friends with no problem, so why can't you? It doesn't seem fair. It's important that anyone with an 'invisible' disease knows that it's not invisible, people do care and understand and they do want to help you and make you feel better.

A lot of Sam's friends are at University and a few of them have just left for 6 months in Australia and so he feels as though there's very little to do with his time - although he's played football pretty much all his life, even that can be difficult. I know this gets him down, but luckily he has incredibly supportive family and friends, although they may not always be around, myself included. He probably wouldn't say it to many people as he likes to come across as the happiest guy around, but in reality, he's not necessarily. He has good days and bad days, luckily the good outweigh the bad. However, it's important to remember that what's going on, on his face is not always exactly how he feels and we need to be mindful of that. 

Later this year (or it could be next year, I'm not sure!), he has signed up to do two marathons in two days in order to raise money for Crohn's and I think it's very important that we all get behind him. It's something that has affected his life in a way that he never could have anticipated and it's something that anyone can develop; there's no known cause or cure.

Reading Ste's story this morning really hit home because although it's hard and it doesn't make Sam's struggle any less of a struggle, you can see that it is not as bad as it could be. I wish Ste all the best on his journey as I know that he is probably going through some very similar experiences to Sam. Something I know too well. 

Although it has strained our relationship in the past, it is part of who Sam is and it has made him who he is. I wish I could make his life easier and make it go away, but I wouldn't change our experiences. I believe that everything happens for a reason and Sam is dealing with it incredibly. He is such a strong person and I love him for it.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/ste-walkers-facebook-post-about-living-with-crohns-disease-is-shared-more-than-33000-times-a6720451.html