Part of that inspiration was using images of what actual fat looked like and women that looked as I did. I kept these journals and their descendants hidden from my friends and family as I kept working on them, writing down meals, writing out exercises, and collecting anatomical and 'thinspirational' images to try to motivate myself, to try and beat my depression, in order to be that 'better' person. It didn't work. It was years later that I would take another step towards getting healthy. Over that time, my motivation dried up and the access I had to a gym vanished as I moved back home from college. My mother had watched me struggled and fight and give up and she came to me with information on getting surgery to help me. She tried to play a vanity card for me by telling me I would look better and then like myself more, but her true concerns came through. Even though she did not say it outright, she did not want to have to bury a daughter. This was not about looking good or getting into a bikini, it was about saving my life. In December of 2010, I went in for surgery and had a lapband placed around part of my stomach. Since then, I have dropped 125 pounds (56.7 kg), but I still have roughly 60 pounds (27kg) to go until I am considered an appropriate weight for my height. It was not a magical 'cure-all,' and there was a lot of work (and there still is a lot of work) that I have to do to achieve these milestones. There is a lot that you have to give up and a lot of modifications to your life you have to be willing to make. I started another journal at this point and made the focus less on the body-shaming version of thinspiration I had created before and moved purely to a healthy side of things. I wanted a document to show how much I had lost and I wanted it to be fun. However, life took over and kept me from working on this journal and it soon became another item in the stack of failed journals. What kept me away? The short version of it is that after getting my degree in Fine Arts and moving home, I took two years to study psychology and get some other classes under my belt before I ventured to grad school and got a degree in Art Therapy (It was during grad school that I had my surgery.) After graduation, I got a job at a crisis unit for persons with mental illness and have worked there ever since. Crisis unit work is difficult, and the turnover rate is very high for both patients and staff. Staff who lack the ability to understand the person they are treating and to have compassion for that person, even when that person may be infuriatingly difficult to work with, do not last long. In grad school, we learned the importance of self care and I attempted to fist handle this with art journaling. It wasn't fitness, but it was creative and I needed that more in my life at the moment. I had almost all but given up my other art studies due to school and this job and I needed some of it back. There is a lot less art making in Art Therapy work than you'd think (at least, for the counselor.) Art journaling was my solution, right? I loved to make art and making art on a small scale about daily things was perfect, right? Well, I did manage to fill up one journal with artwork to the point that it could no longer close with the magnetic clasp-flap it had. I bought several other ones, specifically made for art journaling, and set them up, but I never finished them. I still have two that are blank with the starting dates on them proudly reading "2014," but no art on the pages. What happened? Depression and burn out. As I stated, crisis work is hard. The people that we see struggle with mental illness (ranging from depression to psychosis.) While in grad school, I had a feeling that I did not want to work in mental health, but I was too far through the program and to quit was not an option. After two years working in the field for real, I decided to go back to school and try to become a graphic designer. I still worked full time at the crisis unit while going to school, putting me at 16 to 18 hour days, but I knew it would be worth it all in the end. I had hope and I knew that everything was going to be better. But, like most things in 2016, everything was not better. I graduated with a degree in design, I met some nice people at the portfolio show, I got tours of a local design company, but I could not find a job. I applied at several jobs, some as far as Seattle, and if I heard back from them, all I received was a polite rejection. I had reached my four year mark of working in crisis and most of the people I had known and started with had left to find other jobs. I got increasingly hopeless with each failed application.
I again gutted my planner and tried to make it a sort-of bullet journal. I included all the things I wanted in there, including my first collection around books, but it never felt real. I never looked at my planner and said, "Gosh. I feel like a true bullet journalist!" After some more research into supplies and journals that others used, I ordered myself a Lechttrum1917 dotted-grid journal and set to work.
It took me months to develop my own style of how I wanted to do things and how I wanted them to look. Going through my journal it is noticeable that my first few months were rather bare and straight forward with few illustrations and little color. Gradually that all changed into the brightly colored, stamp and illustration filled images that are on my Instagram now. That is the long version of how I got into bullet journaling. How I went from failed fitness journals to art journals to planners, and finally the bullet journal. If you made it this far, thank you for sticking through it! I hope that is has inspired you to look at things in your life, find what it is you need, and integrate it in a manner that brings you multi-faceted help.
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Graphics and photos on this blog are by Melissa Thomas, unless otherwise noted. If something is credited wrong, please contact me to correct it. Thanks!
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