2 years ago I was the girl who appeared to have it all figured out. A boyfriend, a beautiful house, holidays abroad, date nights and weekends shopping. Pretty blissful huh?

Appearances can be deceptive.

Relationships end and relationships last for a number reasons and sometimes there’s a combination of these reasons which keep said relationship “ticking over” and just existing. Imagine being in one of those relationships and knowing in your heart of hearts that it just isn’t going to work anymore and that you’re not happy.  Yet you try to find the strength to not only get yourself out of the situation but to do so in a manner in which you’re hurting the people around you as little as humanly possible. To quote a line from Eat, Pray, Love:

“The only thing more impossible than staying was leaving. I didn’t want to hurt anybody. I wanted to slip quietly out the back door and not stop running until I reached Greenland.”

So many times we as women see family members or friends stuck in dead end relationships which drive us crazy because they stay stuck and make no effort to leave or to better their situation.  I know I have friends who I want to shake and say “why do you stay with him?  He treats you like rubbish!  You’re worth a billion of him!”  But the simple fact of the matter is that it isn’t as simple as it seems.  To up and leave a life that is in existance to move into the unknown is scary enough as it is, to consider embarking on that change with confidence which has been trodden on by somebody who is supposed to love you is worse.

I wanted to write this post not to gain hits or to make people feel sorry for the situation I found myself in – this is the last thing I want to do. This is an insight into something which I wanted to show, a snapshot into a life that went before and that I once allowed to define me as a person. Occasionally I have these moments of self doubt in my “new life” where I begin to believe all that negativity again and certain things replay through in my mind. Recently I was in a situation where my new life and my old life collided and I saw myself change in a split second from who I am now to who I was.

When I saw this image which Louise from Sprinkle of Glitter posted a couple of months ago I felt content in that I was not that girl. Not anymore. But then I thought of the hundreds of girls who beat themselves up on a daily basis because of the opinion of their boyfriend or their husband or some guy who just doesn’t even know that they exist. Who are utterly unhappy because of somebody else’s opinion of them.

Important part of that sentence? “Somebody else’s opinion”.

People have described my blog as “ballsy”, “sassy”, “preaching girl power and independence”, “the single girls bible” and that is what overtime my blog grew into after I decided that writing solely about lipstick and foundation was not my bag. With that aside, when I look back at the girl of then, I feel a little bit ashamed and silly that I allowed another persons opinion, and that of a man, to make me feel the way that I did and sometimes without even knowing it, for such a long time.

Which is why I’m a great advocate of girls not judging their self worth on the opinion of someone else, whether its a man or a “friend”, someone in the work place and so on.  The only judge of self worth can come from your opinion of yourself. I think there should be a thing where any girl who allows the festering little worm of self doubt which is the opinion of someone else to cloud her judgement, she should get the above image tattooed onto her face.

Drastic I know.