The road to my passion

When I was a pre-teen, I remember very vividly starting to make lists about all the things I wanted to do as a girl to improve. I would open my black diary that had a picture of 90s Australian girl group Girlfriend on it, unlock the heart shaped lock and write down my hopes, dreams and ‘beauty’ lists.

The beauty lists looked something like this:

Buy lipgloss

Buy waist belt

Buy Spice Girls deodorant for my bag

Learn how to straighten my hair

Get perfume testers from Grace Brothers

Buy pink hair streaks

Buy rings

Find nice smelling hair perfume

…. you get the gist.

You might think this list is pretty innocent. And in an isolated instance it is. But if I place it on the timeline of my coming of age, I wonder how I grew to place so much emphasis on how looking good physically might have made me happy.

I want to share my story because it led me down the path to discovering an unwavering passion of mine. Something that would eventually set my soul on fire. Something that would make me feel as though I was making the world a better place with each conversation. My passion is to help young girls who are at the age I was when this all started have faith in themselves and always know their worth.

When I started high school I was obsessed with fitting in. Whilst learning how to make friends in a new environment I was also worried to show my true self incase I was not liked by the other girls. I was attached to the idea that I needed to be accepted and popular, and I remember certain instances where I would tweak my personality in order to come across perfect or cool.

When I finally found my true group of high school girlfriends I was still afraid, but I was able to share more. Talk more. I was still desperate for validation even in the company of my best friends - but I can only see that now.

I loved high school. I had my friends around, canteen food options available for ordering without a side of judgement, days planned out for me, teachers at the ready… I mean what’s not to love? This contained school life was all I knew and it never crossed my mind to think about what came after year twelve until I had to decide on my favoured university degree - even though I never really knew if I wanted to go to university. My responsibilities before this point were to do well in my classes and find the striped wrist band that Avril Lavigne wore in her Complicated video for my next outing.

I got my period in year six and I was extremely embarrassed and ashamed. This was the first time I remember being shocked at what my body could do.

My mother coaxed me into calmness and understanding that this was a beautiful phase for a girl to come into as a teenager but the education stopped there. As a thirty five year old woman, only have I just start educating myself on what happens to the female body once a girl starts to menstruate and how important it is to honour this process and never be ashamed of it. Firstly, her body changes - yep that’s right, she doesn’t stay in a teenage body forever! My, did I wish that’s what I read on the cover of Girlfriend magazine all those years ago. This idea is something I have struggled with for a very long time. I used to pick up magazines and swoon over the skinny bodies we as girls were made to think were perfect.

I was one of those teenage girls who ended up being pretty popular at school.

I surrounded myself with funny friends who always made me laugh and many of my memories consist of me eating Zappos and laughing uncontrollably about absolutely nothing. While I was laughing through school and enjoying art classes I was also secretly coming to terms with the fact that I had to live with curly hair for the rest of my life. I hated it. Instead of learning how to embrace it, I did everything I could to change it. There was no such thing as a GHD back then so one day I decided to pull out the clothes iron, throw a tea towel over my beautiful curls and go over them until they singed. I wanted to look like the girls in the magazines with straight blonde hair. Other than Mel B who was my idol back then, I don’t remember seeing girls looking like I did in magazines. I allowed my ethnicity to puzzle me.

I didn’t think it was beautiful to look the way I did - whatever that meant, and still means today.

Throughout these years my body kept changing. School became stressful and the expectations placed upon me by my teachers to get good grades made me feel panicky. I was suffering with severe anxiety but back then I just thought that was completely normal.

I started getting invited to parties and liking boys and my aforementioned beauty list kept growing to the point where it would take me quite literally hours to get ready for each weekend party. I needed to look good because would a boy even want to date me for my personality if I wasn’t pretty enough?

About three months before the HSC, I started feeling different sensations in my body. The ones that I now know are stress and anxiety. I wasn’t coping but I didn’t know how to communicate my feelings, so every time a feeling arose and I pushed it down, it got trapped inside my body. Rather than facing these emotions, I would eat them. Literally. Maltesers, peanut m&m’s, Oreo’s… entire packets on endless sleepless study nights. I thought this was what teenagers did before the HSC! It makes sense though right? Food increases serotonin and lowers stress, so my body was smart. But now that I look back on these times, I realise I was the only one eating these amounts and every time I would eat larger than normal quantities of typically junk food I would experience an extreme feeling of guilt following, and a barrage of self deprecating talk. “You’re disgusting! Why did you eat so much you pig! It’s schoolies in a few weeks and you have to fit into a bikini but you’re going to look fat!”

Wow.

I had absolutely no idea that I was bingeing my emotions away rather than processing them. Growing up in a household where my grandparents had experienced extreme poverty during the war, large amounts of food were considered a luxury and the ultimate ticket to bliss so out of experience, it also became my coping mechanism. I remember my boyfriend at the time criticising me for eating too much in his presence. Wasn’t I worried about getting fat he would ask?

After high school my friends and I planned to go to Queensland for Schoolies week. This is when things started to go downhill for me. One week before schoolies I remember waking up and looking in the mirror. I hated the girl I saw. I hated the girl who ate her way through the last six months. All of a sudden the HSC was over and I was left with feeling completely out of control, bigger on the scales and depressed. I hated how I looked and I cried and cried wondering how I would change that with a one week countdown to putting on my bikini in Queensland. So I got busy. I went to the shops and bought every magazine on the shelves and trawled through for the quickest way I could lose weight - I remember seeing a headline on the cover of a magazine once titled “lose 10 kilos in a week!” So off I went on the quest to become my best self. After a week of drinking only watercress soup and eating tonnes of laxatives, I lost not only some water weight but a whole lot of common sense. During that whole week at Schoolies I could not really enjoy myself because I was so preoccupied with how I looked. As you can imagine, I didn’t lose ten kilos in a week.

When I came home the obsession with my weight continued. I ignored all my emotions, all my issues and needs and only worried about my physical appearance.

After a good few months on diets I started experiencing health issues which ended up being the start of a torturous twelve year journey into trying to figure6 out why my body was against me.

Sweet Angela, you were against it.

Pills, potions, tests, cameras… you name it, I had it. But alas not once was I asked about what I ate and how much. I spent year after year tirelessly punishing my body in order to look skinny enough because I told myself that it is what I needed to do to be accepted. The thing is, I was so worried about being accepted that I never considered accepting myself. I struggled so much with self esteem that I completely neglected self compassion.

Last year I admitted myself into an eating disorder clinic. As scary, and as much of a shock to my system it was, I started learning how to understand my own emotions because I did not have my food habits to turn to to disguise them. I spent three weeks meeting and getting to know many young girls who had been on this journey for a long time. Girls around the ages of about sixteen and up who were so confused about their future, so sad that they could not get on top of self destroying thoughts about themselves, so desperate to be inspired and know they are not alone. I was there for me but part of me believes the universe created this opportunity for me to be there for them. I would get knocks on my door and texts from other rooms from girls wanting to sit with me and talk about normal things. My job, my story, my love life (or lack there-of), my friends - anything other than their complicated eating disorder which is so much more than ‘why can’t you just eat that?”

I watched these beautiful young woman in art class and group therapy and music…when they were given the space, their souls would ignite. When they remembered they weren’t alone their was a sense of relief. When they believed they were strong enough to get through this they would keep going. I was battling with myself whilst in the clinic but I was surrounded by love and these girls needed me too and it ignited my passion.

My passion is being the bigger sister that I never had. I don’t want it to be complicated. I currently make weekly music playlists for my loved ones and these playlists make their weeks. My dream is to create a weekly newsletter to the young female population of Australia. This would have poems, drawings, quotes, a playlist, inspirational piece of writing, information about the practise of self compassion and an email to reply back to me. These girls will receive this newsletter and each week the content would be different. One week there might be a beautiful story about someone who has overcome similar challenges or an interview with a psychologist including tips on how to understand and know it’s safe to talk about our emotions - one week might just be a funny animal video with a whole lot of self care tips and morning songs to get a good feeling flowing inside the heart. My intention is to create a safe community for girls to rely on. For them to know they are never alone and that life does not always have to be serious - we just need the tools to help us understand. I want them to know there is a way out of everything and feelings are normal and so is struggling and failure. My dream would be to partner with different artists who will help me create beautiful newsletters each week - something that the young females of Australia will get excited to receive every week.

I cannot control the information out there on social media or in magazines - but I can certainly add to it.

There is nothing more important than how you think about yourself and this is the lesson.

This lights me up.

Sometimes I cry for my younger self. I cry about how badly I battered and bruised her and how sometimes I still do. I want to reassure her through this project that she is unique. That she was never alone. That a compliment is far more than what body weight equates to and that her best was and is always, always enough.