'Why must I hide in the forest of my mind? I want to come out of the woods'

I'm on a strict 'no buy' this month and it looks to be the following month as well. What with the upcoming house move and my succumbing to stupid jackets has me on a tight budget. It's annoying but at the same time, I rather like the challenge of it. Of course there will be unavoidable purchases that will need to be made, such as train tickets, food, phone bill, all that malarkey. But only absolute essentials will I allow myself to purchase. 

Definitely feeling emotionally charged, hormonal time of the month, but I feel a little more in control of things than how I do usually, which is a nice change. Perhaps tomorrow i'll feel worse! 

I've create a form on my online spreadsheet thing to track the food I eat in relation to my mood which is somehow linked to this very blog and unknown to me I realized it has saved all the photos I've ever uploaded here. Which is going back nearly 7 years, maybe more than that! I scan through the brightly coloured icons and small cropped photos of my younger face, heavily edited with garish colors wearing bows, badges and my dyed dark brown hair covering one eye. Very of the time, I thought I was so emo. I wished I was an emo, looking back it looks so try-hard, almost cringey but then a warming feeling creeps through my body as these familiar snapshots takes me back to those years where I only wore thick black eyeliner and could only buy certain clothes after birthdays or Christmas's when I saved up the money. I had Uni ahead of me and I couldn't wait to get away. 

I would love to visit my younger self, step into the photograph and emerge to witness the expression, the likely disbelief. Would I have ever have believed it if someone predicted my future to this date? Probably not. I haven't achieved much at all in my life, I'm by no means boasting - but I was so, so young then with no real plan, I was following everyone else and lacked my own true direction. I latched onto music, I listened to it loud on i-pod-wannabe MP3 players, I bought Kerrang every week and tore the posters out and stuck them on my walls. I threw myself into Myspace, spent hours and hours editing the layout to match an unattainable aesthetic, messaging friends who i'd see the following day. I'd try and dress like I was skinny when really I was a little podgey and awkward. But there was a joy in trying to find myself along the way.

I thought I was so much older back then, I thought I was all clued up and in the know. But I was only a girl, not far from a child who had some lessons to learn. Only in the past couple of years do I feel as though I've grown.