A Letter and an Apology in advance for this extremely lengthy post!

We have every Wednesday morning of school off! Weeeeee!

Good morning, my darlings. Yes, I'm posting in the morning, because this will probably be the only change I get to do so today. School has really been messing around with my time management skills... Which barely exsist, anyway. So, lack of commenting has been due to the weird and whacked times I am able to use the computer. I do apologise for this, but I read your updates, every day! Every morning and night I check to see how you are all going, and I want to send you all my love right now. I am always thinking of you, and always wishing you well. Your courage, your honesty, your words and your recounts leave me speechless, and for those of you who are moving onwards and upwards, you have been such inspiration and motivation for me. To those who are having trouble, my heart is with each of you, and I hope that you regain that inspiration. Each and every one of you is worth fighting for. Please, all of you, fight for yourselves, because you are all beautiful - your lives are full of love and warmth and endless possibilities and successes, and your hearts are full of courage and strength. You brighten my day, and the days of those who love you.
My love goes to you all.

I'm going to be completely unoriginal and post you a "letter" we were assigned for homework in Literature. It's about "me", and I've always found writing about myself an extremely hard task, but I wanted to share with you my almost-narrative-lengthed Letter!

"Eleanor likes words. Eleanor loves words. She loves how they look, she loves how they sound: rich, strong. She loves how they feel and how they roll off the tongue. She loves that such a small thing can hold an abundance of meaning. She loves that they can bring the imagination to life.

Eleanor loves words. She writes them, she reads them, and quite often speaks them. But the one thing Eleanor doesn’t like about them, is that no matter how many letters she strings together, they just do not sum up or come anywhere near to explaining Eleanor herself. She’s tried and tried, and often gives up, knowing that although words have the power to portray almost anything, they aren’t powerful enough to bring to life who she is. Another trouble is that she is oftentimes confused about who she is. Is she this, is she that? What word can describe this characteristic? What word can describe that emotion? Eleanor has come to the conclusion that, no matter how much she loves and cherishes her words, the words that make up her world, she’ll never be able to write or speak enough of them to describe her.

Eleanor can’t be described in words, but words can more or less (most likely more) describe her daily rituals and routines.

Every morning, Eleanor wakes to the sound of her phone alarm obnoxiously blaring into the early hour of 5:20am. Her tummy rumbles, but she ignores it, and instead busies herself with the task of making the trek from bed to door in the pitch black of the morning – finding the doorknob in complete darkness never gets any easier. Lights on, two cups of hot water gulped down and yoga mat rolled out, Eleanor stretches out her aching and stiff muscles. Yoga in the early morning, to Eleanor, is her time to be herself. No expectations, no judgements (but those that are in her head), no obligations to be a certain person, do a certain deed or think a certain thought. Breathing in the early morning air, and breathing out all the worries, problems, stresses and anxieties of the previous day. As the morning wears on, her Mother, Katherine, rises. With her meditation disrupted, the anxieties of the day flood her – they can only be escaped for so long. Yet she continues on with her morning, by preparing her bowl of oatmeal spiked with a “Nutritional Supplement Powder” and a heavy-handed shaking of cinnamon & ginger spice. Breakfast hot and steaming, she settles herself down in front of the computer, where she checks her emails and reads the blogs she follows.

Every morning, same routine, same ritual. Nothing changes, because change scares her.

As mentioned, Eleanor reads blogs. Not only does she read blogs, she has her own. No one else knows about this secret blogging world of hers – it’s her space, where Eleanor can be Eleanor, or whoever she thinks she is. Blogging allows Eleanor to write her beloved words, in any form she fancies. Emotions, although hard to express, are written, and these feelings are brought to life in a different way. These feelings she can see, instead of feel. Written words are physical, and that physically helps Eleanor to understand herself a little more. The blogs she follows are of girls in similar places in their lives, and she finds that she’s able to connect with them, on a level that she cannot connect with those around her. The words they write, she feels. Although they’re words that have come from others, sometimes it is a relief to see her thoughts from someone else’s perspective.

Eleanor tries to be optimistic, but she feels that she’s unfortunately been born or brought up with the pessimistic attitude her father, Guy, also possesses. The glass-half-empty approach to life often gets her into trouble, mostly with herself. Having a perfectionist’s attitude, also inherited from her father, is another problem she’s faced with daily. Although she loves to write, the things she writes are “never good enough”, or “never quite right”. Her confidence has never been sky-high, but due to circumstances, involving her perfectionism, the confidence in herself has further decreased, and for a time last year she simply could not write. Her English teacher at the time, however, believed she had the skills and ability to write herself out of writer’s block, and so she did!

As words are a very important part of Eleanor’s life, one of her greatest pet-peeves is bad grammar. Specifically, apostrophes. She shares this, yet again, with her father, who has a neurotic obsession for picking out apostrophe misuse, and so he was dubbed the Apostrophe Police. Another of Eleanor’s pet-peeves is the feeling one gets right before they sneeze, only to be extremely disappointed as the sensation disappears, or worse, stays in the nose but never quite reaches the sneeze-climax.

Eleanor believes she’s quite odd. Although only 16 and a half years old, Eleanor feels she’s much older than the date of 20th May, 1993, displayed on her birth certificate. She finds it extremely irritating that the majority of people her age are immature; she simply hasn’t found someone she can fully connect with, on a deep level. In that way, she’s always felt alone. That, she believes, is why she turned to writing, and specifically, blogging. Being the middle child of three, and the only girl, Eleanor has had to fend for herself much of the time. The older brother (Matthew, 22) acts not his age, but more than half of his age – the maturity level of a 6 year old. The younger brother (Julian, 15) is much the same, and when the three children were a lot younger, the boys made a game out of ganging up on Eleanor. Although those times were extremely frustrating, she did come out on top in the end. Through the teasing, she learned how to stick up for herself, which was character building. She also gained quite a lot of independence from those times, not to mention the wit and wicked tongue from the back-chatting. From that wit grew sarcasm, and that team of dry and black humour has enabled her to win the silly arguments with her brothers... Sometimes even her parents!

Although Eleanor has a strong family and a smattering of friends, she’s found herself in very dark places. As was mentioned, she has a perfectionist’s tendencies, with low self-confidence and self-esteem. Eleanor is easily stressed, and has a need for control and order, and after losing control and becoming extremely anxious and stressed, there was a tipping point a year and a half ago. Unfortunately, Eleanor found herself in a very deep and dark and lonely hole, where she became all-too-familiar with a deceptive voice that formed in her head. That voice told her to do things that, at the time, she didn’t even know she was being told to do, and wound up being a shadow of who she used to be. No smiles, no passion, no compassion, no liveliness, no communication. No life. That shadow was, and still is, an Eating Disorder. Without knowing it, completely oblivious to it, she developed an Eating Disorder as a way of gaining back the control and “order” she lost. Every day, she tackles and battles and fights the thoughts that come into her head. Every day she is faced with a challenge, with many challenges, and is often too afraid to overcome her fears. But every day, she gets up, gets ready, and makes it through the hours until she can finally rest her overworked mind, her aching bones and her fluttering heart. Eleanor is on a journey of recovery and self-discovery, and every day that goes by is a day she learns something. Not every day is a good day, but some days are, and she has learned to appreciate life. Although she’s still finding it extremely difficult, she’s got the support of her family and her smattering of friends to help her through. It’s a long and hard road, she has realized, and although the dark thoughts in her head are overwhelming, she pushes through, because she knows, she has a tiny little bit of hope, that she’ll one day see this through. The thoughts may never fully leave, but Eleanor feels that every day she is growing stronger, every day she is learning what life means, every day she is finding herself and piecing herself back together. Yes, Eleanor is naturally a pessimist, and the pessimist in her plays broken records in her head, but she knows she’s got the ability, the skills, the strength and the willpower to do anything she wants and everything she wants.

Eleanor is a mixed bag of... everything. A bit of this, a bit of that, a shake of this, a spoonful of that. She has pet-peeves, she has aspects of her she wishes she could change, she has routines she wishes she could break and she has an unlimited amount of words that will never truly sum her up.

But Eleanor is not a giver-upper-er. Oh, no, she is not. She’s much too stubborn to give up."

 

love, love, love.