Four Life-Changing Years & Three Powerful Words

You will probably know by now that I am very fond of marking the various TSW milestones in some way and as time passes, for some reason, they seem to mean more to me. You can imagine then that hitting four years since starting TSW was a pretty big deal for me and in that time my life has changed significantly. I was thinking about what I could post to mark the occasion and I have decided to tell you a little story about what it means for me to not give up on something and come out the other side.

Through a lack of self-belief and a rather severe fear of failure, I spent most of my teenage and young adult life running in the opposite direction from any opportunity that came my way and in turn, missed out on things that I now can't look back on without feeling a sharp pang of regret. I had absolutely no confidence in myself and what I was capable of and chose to work hard in the wrong areas through fear that if I put my heart and soul into the things I truly wanted, but failed, I would have wasted time and been absolutely devastated. It was easier in a way thinking about what could have been, than trying and possibly failing. As a result, I spent many years quitting and giving up on my dreams. For a long time, I wanted to be a singer, so I set up a MySpace music page then, as it grew, I started a YouTube channel until over time, I had gained a small but ever-growing fan base and was even getting the odd singing job off the back of it without even trying ... but what did I do? I gave up because I was scared. I loved it so much that I quit rather than really try and to this day, I can't think too much about singing and what might have been. Who knows, I might have ended up failing but I'll never know and now, I don't want to. Around 2012, I set up a fashion/beauty YouTube channel and blog but when I started getting an audience, what did I do? I gave up. A year later, I set up another blog ... and what did I do? You guessed it.

I would say in the months leading up to withdrawal, everything was coming to a bit of a head. I had a great social life and loved my friends and family but personally, I was going nowhere. I remember Monday 20th May 2013 vividly as it was a turning point in my life. I was in the middle of a shift at a job that had absolutely no prospects and on this particular day, I was asked to work in a different area where I was made to feel absolutely useless by other staff members. At one point, I pretended to go to the bathroom but instead, I ran to a deserted corridor, hid behind a pillar and cried my eyes out. I remember thinking to myself, what the hell was I doing with my life? I had spent years wasting time in these jobs through fear and where had that thinking got me? I had a job I hated and was crying in an empty corridor. It was at that moment that I knew I needed to change my life completely. For a few months, my skin had been worrying me – I'd started having a lot of trouble with my eyes and rashes were appearing over my body that no amount of topical steroids were clearing. Even worse was the fact that my skin was thinning badly and I had developed some kind of allergy to the sun. Around this time, I went to the doctors feeling absolutely desperate but their only advice to me was to use stronger topical steroids. Even then I knew that was just a slippery slope but I didn't know what to do.

Over the following few weeks, I did a lot of thinking about my life and on the 1st June 2013, after years of wanting to write but being too scared to, I finally took the plunge and, in that moment, fell head over heels in love with it. Five days later, on 6th June 2013, I found out about TSW, had my lightbulb moment and changed my life. I always get a little choked up when I think back to the moment where I realised I didn't have ‘incurable’ eczema but topical steroid addiction – it was the most sure I've been about anything in my life and in a way, the answer almost seemed so obvious that I couldn't believe I hadn’t thought of it in the first place. I remember experiencing such a concentrated form of relief and knew with all my heart that topical steroid withdrawal was the right thing to do, and even in those two plus years where I doubted the process and questioned if I really did just have eczema, I never gave up. For the first time in my life I gritted my teeth and held on for dear life to something I totally believed in and after just over two years, the storm finally cleared and my ‘incurable’ eczema was gone, leaving in its wake better skin than I'd ever had in my life.

TSW was the first thing I ever did where I just kept going – ignoring those that didn't think TSA existed and fighting my own doubts along the way. The process taught me three words which I will spend the rest of my life being eternally grateful for: Don't. Give. Up. TSW taught me that if you keep pushing – keep fighting for what you believe in – you will get there eventually. For years, I thought I'd have to use topical steroids for the rest of my life to treat my ‘incurable’ eczema – I'd almost resigned myself to the fact and was paying the price with thinning skin and photosensitivity, but in the end, I went against what I was told and did what I believed to be right, and won.

Today, I am going to celebrate these four life-changing years and embrace this new phase of my life - so here's to following your dreams and seeing where life takes us.

Don't give up,
Cara x

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