First post

Since I've been a young girl (about eleven or twelve), I've been writing regularly. Writing is an essential part of me and always has been. Writing is how I work through things, how I express things and how I talk about things. I'm not sure if I could live without writing. There have been times when I have been reading little and writing a lot.

So I have now decided to start a blog. Everybod does it, so why shouldn't I. Aside from that, sometimes I feel like I have things worht telling. Other times, I might just be rambling. So who am I: I like to stay relatively anonymous because I don't want my real life and the internet to be to close together and I don't really want people from where I live to know what I write here. So all you will know about me in terms of facts is that I'm Jayna and I live in a city, close to a lake with my boyfriend and a few pets. I'm 26 and my boyfriend and I are quite poor, but we have an amazing flat which everybody loves and I think we have a good life.

In the past, I have been through a lot. As a child, I grew up in a very fundamentalist Baptist church and we left when I was 15 because I was in deep trouble. I had tried and tried to be the perfect Christian, fearing God's punishment and hell. I was always anxious about that as a child which might be the reason I still struggle with anxietxy. I worry about the future a lot. And since I didn't really allow myself to be a teenager and to find out who I was, I had to do that in my early twenties. I also used to be anorexic for more than a decade and I used to cut myself. My arms are covered in layers of scars which look awful even though they are pale now. I also have hyperthyroidism and now struggle with hypothyroidism and I have ostearthritis in my knees which means that very often, I'm in pain - sometimes so much I can hardly turn round in bed.

One day I decided I wanted to be healthy and to have a life. While studying, I got a job in a bar and got to know my boyfriend. It's been a long, painful journey - so much I had to learn, so many things I had to leave behind to be healthy. I still struggle with anxiety and still haven't finished studying, but I have not given up. That may be the most important thing in my life. I still believe I can have a good life - I am having a good life right now, despite anxiety, despite being poor, despite struggling to stay healthy and to cope with things in a healthy way. I'm making progress every day and I have become so much stronger.

Aside from the sad part of my story, I have my very own character traits. I am quite impatient and have trouble waiting for things. I try to do everything at once. I'm hyperactive. I always jump up to do things and I often run into thing. When I work in the bar, I get bruises on my thighs and hips because I run into things. Recently, I had a bike accident and bruised my ribs badly - I was too fast, too impatient. I am very creative and I used to dance a lot. I never had lessons, but just copied things I saw on TV or in books or made up my own dances. Dancing used to be and still is a big part of me. However, my knees are in no condition for dancing. Sometimes I still do it since I can't help it, but actually, I shouldn't. I love music and used to sing a lot and I love pictures and music videos and even made two music videos as a teenager with scenes from the TV series "Stargate SG1". I often talk too fast and while I am very shy when I meet strangers or people I don't know well, I can get very lively and talk a lot if I'm in a discussion on a topic which is important to me - of which there are many since I'm an extremely curious person and love reading about things, watching documentaries and learning new things. This year, my goal is to read two books every month and so far that has been going well. My boyfriend is an artist so we're both a littel "different", but looking from outside, we have quite a boring, quiet life.

So what will I write about in a blog? I don't know yet. Maybe everything, maybe nothing. I leanr things in my life, new experiences and sometimes I feel like sharing them. One of my favourite authors is Adrian Plass and my mother once told me about a book by him in which someone said to someone else that there is no wasted time, no years that went wasted. i used to think I wasted part of my life when, in my early twenties, I still had to find out who I am and go through things teenagers usually go through and I know now that this time was not wasted. It might not have been used to accomplish something big on the outside, but I learned so many things. There is no wasted time. We live in a world which has become so complicated, focused on capitalism and materialism. if you don't want to focus on that, I think you generally don't have an easy life. And if you do want to focus on that, you don't have an easy life, either since you have to keep up which is often a struggle as well. I had to learn that success, a career or money is not nearly as important as it often seems to be. Success and money don't buy you happiness and you can be happy with little. We always want everything and we think we have a right to have everything, but we don't. These days, I am grateful for a clean, warm place to live in, for enough food and clothes, for our pets and for the little extras we manage to afford every now and then. Once you start being happy about little, you generally get happier.

So I guess this is part of my journey, my learning and in some way, still, my recovery.