Loving the optimism of my last post! 20th February, just off anti-depressants for the first time in two years, orgasms abound. Nice!

Five months later and a mental health review booked back in, my Google searches leading me to Reddit threads of people trying to con their private psychiatrists into prescribing them Wellbutrin, I am not feeling so hot. Turns out doing a PhD is very hard. I don’t think I was ever mulish enough to think doing a PhD would be easy, but I think I had definitely imagined myself lounging about with a book in hand 24/7. It would help if I could read.

There are different levels of self-comparison. I’m impressed by other first years running events and workshops, who are being proactive and supporting special-interest groups, giving presentations of rapid fire literature reviews. Connecting with someone who was struggling, only to find out that it’s because they’re reading just so much that they can’t narrow their research questions down. Anyone with a side project linked to their research, and anyone with a side project (‘hobby’) that’s bringing them joy.

When I say I am doing nothing people tend to not take this literally. They’ve not witnessed the 10 hours of dead sleep – and, back again, vivid dreams that pull me back in when I’m trying to wake up – and hour it takes for me to actually come to consciousness. Then the additional hour(s) on my phone where I take nothing in because my inner dialogue is going through the motions of shoulds and coulds. I can draw a Saturday’s worth of undone life admin across a whole week. (Can I call a shower life admin?)

Knowing that I am a good writer but being unable to will myself to write is pain. Knowing that going outside will help a bit but I can’t quite bring myself to get dressed or move. In the same way that keeping a planner will help me not miss essential things, but now I have a new snazzy planner and that’s looking pretty empty. My Outlook calendar made redundant as I’m avoiding my emails. Imagining checking my emails fills me with The Fear. A sense of dread, located in the top of my stomach and making my blanch and eyes bulge. Imagining writing and imaging what I would write has the same effect, and I have to mentally hit snooze on the very idea for fear of a full panic. I’m so busy imagining what I would say in a therapy session that I forget to book the session.

Day one (yesterday): had my first proper, all-out, hot orgasm in what might actually be two years (i.e. when I started taking Venlafaxine).

Day two (today): lots of tears in eyes as I reflect on sad moments. I’ve not been able to react or cry in response to my own feelings or memories in such a long time. Just writing this and knowing it’s true is enough to bring me to tears again.

Am I coming back? I’ve felt so lost.

A little bit lost this week (month)

Complete separation of church and state / who is the mind and who is the body?

I used to get so angry at my (imagined, fat) body for not representing me (my mind). How could it! How dare it. Deviant and unruly body, as if it could be bent and moulded into shape (it seemed like it could). A project to make myself (body) representative of myself (mind).

The things I valued about myself (mind) were intelligence and empathy. I could not imagine an intelligent or empathetic fat body as being reflective of these qualities. I demonised fatness and tried to embody a cold anorexic logic: desensitised, abstemious, focused and driven, self-sufficient.

Recovery is recovering selfhood. When you’re that young you do not know about identity because you are developing and growing, by embodying values that equate thinness with success (goodness) and fatness with being limited (badness) you ingrain this and drill it into you. If you’ve grown up in a fatphobic house it’s likely this has been ingrained and drilled into you from childhood. You drill it in more with an eating disorder. By the time you’re in your mid-twenties you are left with no clue as to who you are because you are no longer eating disordered (a livelihood), you are no longer thin and you are doing desperate detective work to uncover what you want, what you like, who you like, how you want to be perceived by others and by yourself, and any other vague fundamental of personalhood.

I do not actively think thin/good fat/bad anymore. Now it is more subtle. The eating disorder is easier because it is underdeveloped black and white thinking. Now I congratulate myself for moving my ‘goal weight’ on my FitBit app up by five kilos (a fairly substantial amount, to tell you that the goal weight I had before was both silly and unattainable through any ‘healthy’, and I mean healthy for me, method. It had been set to that weight for a long time.) but why have a goal weight at all? Can’t I get rid of that feature on the app? Why haven’t I opened the app to have a look at if I can do that? I probably can. But I haven’t looked.

In maybe February I went out for dinner with a friend. Some days I am great (feisty, loud, outrageous commentary, very but daaaahrlings) but this evening I was not great. I was a tightly wound ball of anxiety for no good reason, trying to be daaaahrlings but missing the mark, shrill and not keeping it together. I had been overwhelmed by feelings and thoughts of leave, leave, escape, leave the country, move abroad, live alone and expressed this as “I’m considering going away, maybe a gap yah to find myself, ya know?” My friend laughed and said, along the lines of, you don’t need to do that! I don’t? No, you have such a sense of self, you seem to clearly know who you are! I was desperately overwhelmed by “please tell me who you think I am”. Please. Ready to beg, I must know – who do you think I am, who am I presenting, who is she? Because I do not feel as though I have a clue.

At the start of lockdown I redid my Myers-Briggs, we all did, sat around the kitchen table and then conferred with each other and later with friends. I had been an INTJ (I was very proud of this, very ‘I’m not like other girls!’ of me). On reflection, the pride may have come again from that anorexic logic: decisive, rational, private. Now I am an INTP (the personal growth is not being too disappointed about now being a slightly less rare personality type). Reading about my personality type and feeling understood but then reading some bits out loud and having friends go “I don’t think you’re like this!” is frightening. It makes me want someone to do the test for me, I can sit at their shoulder and explain my answers. It frightens me because it makes me question if I know myself, if my ‘true self’ (i.e. my thought process in choosing answers) is reflective of who I actually am or is just trying to fashion some kind of interesting or ‘best case’ personality, and then, who is this person my friends know?

This whole ordeal furthers my recent reflections on why I choose to research and learn about and surround myself with eating disorder literature. Does it come from a place of complete insecurity? Have I signed up to do a PhD just to try and ‘find myself’? Some people go to Thailand for a month and I commit to three years of inquiry. Personal inquiry, at that? At every stage I’m getting closer to unpicking this apart, but I think as a whole could be a dangerous game. The joy is learning about and seeing other academics do this, finding methodologies where they’re able to bring in the “I” and “me” and engage in what is valuable, reflexive work. But I wonder, for me, how much of that is framing – what is my real intent here?

Anyway, I don’t know. I have so many thoughts and have not been able to string a coherent sentence together for weeks now, so am glad that I’ve sat down and knocked this out. I feel very baggage heavy, a little bit lost at the moment.

Crowbarring an I into Recovery, somewhere

What am I doing? What am I writing about or working on, or in this case, thinking about writing or working on? I have my MSc project to finish (and start) and a PhD place for October (providing the MSc is done, godspeed).

I’m interested in the grey areas. The grey areas of recovery and what it means to be a ‘recovered’ eating disordered person living in a world that equates exercise with weight loss and health with thinness, where you are bombarded by low fat yogurts and skinny teas in ‘health’ shops, friends on diets, vanity sizing as both a concept and a reality, a TV show where participants are asked to crash diet, thin people hunched over in pictures pretending to have rolls and proclaiming feminism, and, perhaps the worst, your own health system fat shaming its population. Yet we are still asked to recover. What does it mean to recover, when the new ‘normal’ is disordered eating, dieting, self-surveillance and body-animosity? What version of a walking, talking, living person do you recover to?

As someone who worked/still works hard to recover it’s almost unfair. How come the general public gets to engage in behaviours that I’ve been banned from? What’s the difference between me and you? In 2010 I stumbled into a MyFitnessPal forum on intermittent fasting. I’d never heard of it, but I knew what fasting was and practiced it regularly. These people – adults, athletes – were telling each other how to do it! Sharing their own experiences, tips on how to keep going, the best way to come off a fast, how to start with short fasts and then progress. Mouth-agape levels of shocked, I posted in the thread urging them to stop promoting this, didn’t they know that once they started they wouldn’t be able to stop? They were hurting themselves. I got shut down fast – “go get yourself the help you need, sweetie”. The responses were patronising beyond belief and I couldn’t understand why. Why can’t I post about fasting without getting my account frozen, when there are whole forums on how to fast successfully? Why are my tips and my community different from yours? How do you – the people posting from their accounts, and the moderators – know the difference?

This unfairness cropped up whilst as a day patient. We couldn’t exercise (I was told off for walking to the hospital, even though I lived in the same neighbourhood), eat low-cal or low-fat versions of food, couldn’t drink. There were pages of rules to follow. But we were there to break our own rules around food, because those rules were the wrong, ‘disordered’ kind. I remember us all ganging up against our nutritionist who was incredibly hot – bet you have a personal trainer, how can you tell us we can’t exercise!! She thought this was hilarious. I still believe she had a personal trainer. And, I’m being facetious, I know why it was important for us to eat full fat and not exercise, so that we could practice or imitate a disorderless life. But it still felt as though it was us, the patients (sick – fair enough), vs them, the grown-ups (well – allowed to stay out late, eat dairy free and do yoga). I knew I was sick and I needed to become un-sick, but the un-sick people in the supermarket buying 5% fat mince instead of the 20% were throwing me off.

If I’m not throwing up but I’m picking all the non-existent spots on my face until they bleed, am I recovered? If I’m not throwing up but I’m lumping chocolate puddings in my porridge every morning, am I recovered? If I’m not throwing up but I’m binge drinking and sleeping around, am I recovered? And, if at the start of lockdown, I take before shots, phone propped up on a book, and subscribe to a fitness app, setting my goal as ‘fat loss’, am I recovered?

I can’t lose the “I” in my thinking. I’ve been reflecting on this a lot recently. I can’t extricate myself from my research, I’m in too deep. My own experiences inform my lens, my angle. I came to this academic place in anger too, from seeing the vilification of eating disordered communities in the academic literature and in the media – seeing in action another double standard, I think. We can’t have a support forum, but breast cancer can? Yes, I went there. That’s a grey area: what’s promoting eating disorders, what’s experience sharing and community building, and what’s promoting recovery? How can you be honest about your recovery struggles and still separate yourself from a pro-eating disorder narrative? Is it through honesty? Because, if I am honest, sometimes I am delighted to wake up feeling slimmer, having digested dinner. I came to Ireland in the hope of a writing getaway but in my head hoped that I would lose weight, being away from the ease of London takeaways. I’m not promoting eating disorders (am I?), I think that I’m sharing my feelings, and parroting beliefs shared by millions of other women – secret hopes for weight loss even though there is nothing wrong with my body, which I genuinely believe most days now.

If someone who hasn’t shared that they have an eating disorder or used to have an eating disorder shared that, would it be OK to share that, to post their fears or desires online? Am I doing harm, is it more about the audience than it is me? And, how does an algorithm, looking to censor content that could be considered harmful, know what accounts and posts are promoting eating disorders? I don’t know. I’ll keep wondering, maybe even bother to look up the answers. And if the answers don’t exist yet, then maybe I’ll actually start asking the questions out loud.

Oh dear! (On procrastination and poor work ethic)

Oh dear, oh dear. Someone who’s not written a damn thing for over a year is facing a blank screen with an equally blank brain and a big ‘ole looming deadline.

“How do people return to university after work? How do mature students do it?” They work really, really hard, Katya. That’s how. For someone who has a constant narrative running through their head, and I truly do mean constant, this is a real weird place to be in. Every blog post I’ve never written, every tweet I’ve never sent, Ted Talk delivered or presentation given, conversation with friend or therapist, has been imagined and planned in my head, words visualised and revised. You would think or hope that, when it came down to it, I would have something interesting to say. Why so difficult, saying already articulated thoughts out loud, or at least typing or writing them down? The serial disconnect between head and mouth and hands is a real bug bear. Any attempts at ‘productivity’ have been fairly feeble – I think I’ve gotten done in the last two weeks what I once may have done (when faced with similar external pressure) in one library sitting.

Craftily, I’ve referred to my inactivity of the last two weeks as ‘developing modes of thinking’. Academic sounding enough, but a shit way of saying ‘I’ve not a clue’. Some reading, some thinking, few moments of note taking. If not under deadline, really may have been a delightful way to spend my time, formulating some foundational ideas and brainstorming directions. Unfortunately this should have happened in May, at the latest. Which I knew, in May. Which I’ve actually known since last May, seeing as I’ve had a year of interruption since last summer – so, well versed in the timeline. Coronavirus really throwing processes a loop, giving me rolling deadlines for ethics approval to use as excuses to. do. nothing.

I really do think this goes beyond your usual modes of procrastination, hurdling past the baking or room cleaning or sudden interest in an unrelated but I promise very interesting field, and straight to the catatonic, staring at the ceiling, well of dread in your chest, state of anxiety. And then, where I am now, one past that: where nothing is real anymore. A deadline, what’s that? Never met him. Is it denial? A complete shutdown of the rational park of your brain going ‘if you don’t do this, you lose your funding – that’s really important, now more so than ever, seeing as the world is in bits and financially unstable and this means three years of security’ and you going ‘hey! I know that! What do you tyke me for, a fool!’ in the voice of Henry Higgins from My Fair Lady. Vague loopiness, the anything-but-writing, to ‘I’m reading this Guardian article on Covid, that’s health related, therefore relevant to my dissertation .. right?’ (which you honestly, genuinely convince yourself of) and just. Plain refusal. No! I shan’t do this. I shall draw circles in my sketchbook and paint silly faces in each of them, go away!

I try to rationalise or fit my inactivity and ‘behaviours’ (when thinking in this rationalising way) in with my mental disorder. Other times I just call myself a lazy so-and-so. I look up symptoms of ADD and fit it into my ‘gifted child’ and ‘bulimic teen’ narratives. I fit it in with my narcism and ego, my self-degradation and suicidal ideation, and my inability to get simple tasks done, the highs and lows of my moods. Then I think that perhaps, again, this lazy so-and-so is reaching for excuses, because, again, there are no results. Years of education and no results! A blog post about not doing work written instead of doing work. A real low, we know, as I’ve not written a blog post in over a year. Really scraping the bottom of the procrastination activity barrel, you might say.

I think I’ll go write another blog post, I’m bored of this one as I am bored of myself and my not working. Ironic!

Recovery™/recovery?

Here’s what I had in my draft for this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week:

It’s mental health awareness week and the theme is body image (yikes).

Monday – did not apologise for body hair to nurse

Tuesday – was happy to have takeaway even though that wasn’t the plan I made

Wednesday – no bra, big nipples

Ah, yes, excellent. That week I was thrilled to find myself practicing Recovery™ activities. Let’s unpick this for World Eating Disorder Day.

This post can’t be called ‘what they don’t tell you about recovery’ because, for once, I think they do tell you. I find it hard to believe someone can turn around and say ‘recovery is easy, get cracking’! The behaviours sure, maybe we’ve all read or heard the ‘just eat the damn thing already’, but recovery itself? Nah. The sheer amount of willpower, the choices (great and small – all relative), the amount of money, time, patience, diligence, the internal power struggles, the defence you have to put up for yourself – all in a world where in fact, your disorder may not be an irrational reaction to have. So why don’t we hear about the intricacies of how very hard it is? Where are the personal narratives? Whenever I read [short] recovery stories in a newspaper or online news publication or even in academic literature it’s about Entry and Exit. That’s how the eating disorder or behaviours began (the Entry) – then a bit of you middle re: how terrible life was – and recovery !! life is so much better now !! hear about my achievements !! (the Exit). Usually written by someone who is, or is presenting themselves as, very comfortable and confident in their status of Recovered Person.

The entry/exit story is irritating. As are many highly publicised, too-good-to-be-true recovery stories, even if they are real and genuine. I sound bitter because I am! Stories like this make me second guess where I am in my own recovery, and sometimes even if I am recovered at all (and then we have the whole ‘well who gets to determine that anyway?’). I’m recovered in that I’m disengaged from behaviours, so much so that I wouldn’t fulfil any clinical ED checklist, but I’m still not having a very nice time, which I find very disappointing indeed. From where I stand, I sometimes seemed a lot more productive as an eating disordered person. At least, if anything, I was “working on myself”, as they say (please do see Orbach, Bodies, for comments on working on the body as labour). I also don’t seem to have achieved very much, in any sense. At the end of a day of doing sod all, no revision, not teaching myself all the stats class content I missed because I was busy being a recluse, the messages I haven’t replied to and emails I’ve ignored for weeks, I can’t really turn around and say “well, I didn’t throw it up!” Who cares. The banality of recovery is real, though apparently not real enough, seeing as above I was going to write a whole blog post on my personal victories of not apologising to a medical professional for not shaving, eating a takeaway and choosing to not wear a bra. Between the body hair and bra refusal it may as well be the ’70s. Is a sense of achievement deserved for such tiny victories, is trying to celebrate them sincere or just distracting me from a bigger picture?

The reality for me, and I imagine the reality for a lot of people who have (or had?) eating disorders or some form of disordered eating, is our experiences have, overall, been fairly mundane. I had an eating disorder for a very long time but there were phases when it wasn’t particularly present. It used to bring me a shame that I could feel in my actual joints to say: I have never been underweight. I have never been an inpatient. Some of us will never receive formal treatment or a diagnosis. Some of us will never tick all of those boxes (that some of us care very much about, some of us don’t know about and some do not give a single shit about). It takes indescribable willpower to not crowbar in symptoms or lengths of time or things I did or weights to try and justify the severity of my eating disorder. But does an eating disorder need to be severe to justify a need for a recovery, are some recoveries smaller than others and if so, does that make them less interesting or impressive or important?

Stewing

One of the reasons I don’t write posts anymore is because I’ve spent the last few years writing them continually in my head and now they’re all a big mess and I have too much to say. Nothing is neat. Everything allows for a tangent. In my drafts folder are post after long post of gibberish, all under titles of ‘Mental Health Awareness Week’ and ‘EDAW’ and a suspiciously long one called ‘How About … Bulimia?’ (Don’t really know what to say about that one, the bits I’ve skimmed seem very Angry with a capital A).

I don’t exactly know what the argument is in any of the drafts but I can hazard a couple guesses. A la ‘not all men’ we have ‘what about bulimics?’ (The ED literature leaves me feeling very hard done by). We have Recovery™ but then also recovery sucks and sometimes I hate being in this weird limbo (and then the ‘once you go through the looking glass can you ever actually go back?’) I’m likely to add a new draft on the anti-recovery narrative. A misnomer it seems to me, as it’s more a shift away to the realities and grittier stories of recovery, including ones that people (doctors) maybe don’t want you to hear .. is my very limited understanding as I’ve only just started looking into it. As ever I am utterly Furious (capital F, please note) that fitness bloggers and raw vegans and every other food-focused lot gets the societal OK to exist online and promote their values and overshare, yet people with eating disorders are censored out of the picture. Anyway. I needed to get this out and down before moving on to something even vaguely constructive and interesting. Onwards !

Me (a woman) and my head (angry)

Today, standing in the kitchen, I realised that if I were a man that most of the damaging things that have happened to me most likely would not have happened at all. In fact, scrap ‘most like’, I am sure they would not have happened. In the early stages of eating disorder recovery feminism played a big role for me, it taught me to get angry. I realised that the relationship I had been in had been abusive, and I got angry. I realised that I hadn’t just woken up one day and decided to stick my head in the toilet, that it was a reaction, a product to a succession of events and a context that acted as an ED incubator that had gotten me there. And I got angry. Standing in a different kitchen, four years ago in a North Melbourne suburb, airboot on one foot, orange and black patchy bob and a skirt slowly becoming too big again, I told an old school friend of not one but two incidents where boys had assaulted me. A year ago, age 24, I actually learn that a forced blowjob is actually, legally rape, not ‘just’ assault, and I’m stunned. And then I’m angry.

When I think of the real catalyst, an anonymous bullying shitshow, it would be easy to fall into the girls are catty, girls are the real bitches here, sure boys tease but girls can hurt trope. I’m bored of that. The group of girls in question, spearheaded by someone who this summer tried to add me on LinkedIn, seemed to have walked out of the OC, with eating disorders and self harm issues to boot. The way they felt about themselves, the things they said to me, were as much a product of tragic self-esteem and forced narcissism as they were internalised misogyny. I am sad for little me, in her too tight clothes, rolled skirt waistband and poorly applied eyeliner. I was the easiest target in the world.

The need to be thin, the need to be liked, the need to be desired, the need to be just right. This has been the first summer in 12 years where I haven’t tried to lose weight. The last two weeks I’ve powered through More, Now, Again and Girl, Interrupted, and re-read Wasted. All I want to talk about at the moment is the injustice of being a woman, and its effects on my health and my wellbeing and my sense of self. The concept of ‘woman’, was so completely alien from my 19 year old identity (and it was a proud identity) of ‘bulimic’, but they are so obviously connected now. Too much, where the boundaries of my body blurred and I poured myself into the world and the world poured itself back into me. 17 and pokey bones, in love with how poetic I was and how creative it felt to very slowly set myself on fire, for everyone to see. I’m pissed at the literal years I wasted, but I’m more pissed at how much I still want to be back there.

I’ve typed out a tweet, it’s just sitting there, world mental health day now technically over, and it reads: this has been the first summer in 12 years where I haven’t tried to lose weight. that’s my happy #WorldMentalHealthDay for you x. I can’t figure out where it comes from, am I showing off? If I’m showing off why do I feel ashamed. I’m embarrassed to have not attacked my body. I’m reflecting and trying to find something to call myself out on. Last summer I was vegan and in the gym for almost two hours a day. Summer of 2010 is one of the more memorable, I discovered the world of pro-ana and consciously tossed myself into a 16 kilo-loss, lanugo-filled, friendless pit. 2008 I’ve started throwing up properly again, the dresses I got for a wedding are too big and I’m pleased. 2006 I come back to school and the girls who sent me paragraphs on who I was a bigfatslut are in the changing rooms telling me how good I look before we go to PE.

The pride women take in how little they eat is disgusting. I came home and played with the idea of going straight to bed, 8pm, with no dinner. Boyfriend at work, no one to know or ask. I played with how good that made me feel, I imagined waking up in the morning and feeling emptier and my stomach flatter, any feelings of fullness, of substance, gone. I made the conscious choice to have dinner. That’s recovery, to be honest. You can spend years and hundreds and it boils down to standing in the kitchen pantless and alone making a small but very important choice. I get to make that choice several times a day. Sometimes but rarely it’s not a choice, in that walking out the office I find myself in the Co-op, and I am pleased to find that my choices are not eat or not eat but falafel and hummus or a ploughmans or maybe an all day breakfast because fuck you I’m not vegan anymore. That’s a cool day and I don’t think anything of it at the time. That’s recovery too. You let things go and you don’t sit in bed at almost 1 in the morning writing a blog post about your Choices afterwards (oops).

Hornbacher’s right you know. Recovery is this place, it’s not an end point and then you’re done, you’re in this weird place bopping around. The intensity of every day is turned up just a lil bit because if you’re not in the zone where you are capable of choosing which sandwich you would like then you have to force yourself into it. The mental energy required is astounding and exhausting. It is tiring to make good choices. It’s tiring to feel sad about making ‘good’ choices. I have the right to starve if I would like but I don’t think I have the capacity anymore. A friend once said “I don’t hate myself enough to do that anymore”. The we said “sometimes I wish I did”. I wish, sometimes, that I hated myself enough to not eat. Why. Because, I think, I am a woman. And again, now I am angry.

Make London Glossier!

We aaaaall know who Glossier is! How could we not? The cruelty free brand has taken instagram by storm with its millennial pink packaging and skincare-first attitude, and it’s a definite favourite of mine to read up on (along with Milk makeup, I gotta say! They need a lil mention, too). Glossier’s essential products replace the drugstore storm of too much choice. Rather than every colour in every formula, they’ve found the handful of Best-Ofs that work for as many as possible. It’s back to make up basics – the white tee for your face. It’s an approach that must be effective, cos I feel like more and more brands are doing this, and not because they’re just starting out or want to eliminate risks, but because it’s a totally effective and marketable approach. (Asos face and beauty, for example! Makeup staples only, for now).

Anyway, the aesthetically pleasing Glossier has popped over to London and has been pleasing us W1 dwellers with velvet settees and fresh flowers the last five days. I’ve been watching queues to their previous pop ups on their insta story, and desperate to get a look in I walked up to Portland Place today (the last day of the pop up, tragedy!) for a little looksee, and to swatch products that I’d been positively gasping for via screens. One of my friends had put an order in a couple of weeks ago (free shipping over £25, and they’re very generous with the freebies and samples) and I’d just done lots of staring instead of sampling, so was very very ready to get hands on.

I don’t know much about merchandising or branding or the real power it plays on consumers, but it must be a lot. Glossier is two parts pink one part a white that’s so bright it’s almost antiseptic. The historic house of 34 Portland Place had been taken over with velvet furniture, all real signature pieces, flower displays, a massive mood board, and mirrors with lil slogans on. Downstairs was the room seen above plus the shopping space, and upstairs was a room dedicated to their heady and delicious perfume, as well as another shopping space. Orders were placed via iPad, and their staff were dressed in pink jumpsuits.

The two rooms with the products were big and bright white, and as Glossier doesn’t actually have a huge range of products there were lots and lots of repeats on the tables – which was perfect seeing that it was quite busy, and it gave you the chance to have a quick try of everything.

Damaged: hot oil hair treatment

As someone who four years ago had a black bob .. I’m pretty tough on my hair regime now. Having really long and thick hair is a total blessing and though I get a weekly urge to either cut it all off or bleach it again, I keep myself in check and remember that I’m lucky to have great quality hair, and also have a really lovely natural colour. The one thing I do need to do is keep my hair moisturized, particularly the ends which are still the remnants of my bleach/bleach/colour strip/bleach/box dye cycle (eek, eek). I have a lot of broken hair (baby hair) and so I have found myself blow drying and straightening my hair more often than usual, and that really adversely effects the quality of my hair, even if I’m using protector sprays.

I went into my favourite little Lush (in Waterloo Station, it’s the smallest Lush in the country!) and was looking to branch out in my Lush products anyway, so asked the lovely girl (Amy, we now follow each other on Instagram haha, oops!) for some recommendations. I came away with Damaged, a hot oil treatment priced at £6.50, and a little tester pot of R&B (which by the way, I really did enjoy and actually preferred to Damaged – found there was a more immediate difference and I preferred the scent). Anyway! Here’s a bit of a photo journal of the steps it takes to use the product, and then a little before and after.