So, recent news of the new restrictions are making me a little anxious. It seems that the minute we feel comfortable again and get a taste of normality it is slowly taken from us. I am really worried about my upcoming trips to Portugal and America; what if they get cancelled? This year has brought a lot of change into my life and I’m finding it hard to accept that it’s almost over. I don’t know if anyone else was struggling with their bodies this year, but I took self-hatred a little too far. The whole “Hot Girl Summer” and “What I Eat In A Day” trends were very damaging especially to someone struggling with body confidence and body dysmorphia. In 2020, I had a very difficult journey with birth control. This may be too personal for some but I feel the information is the key to education. In March of 2020, I had decided to get an implant which was the safest long term contraception I could think of. This would prove to be one of the dumbest decisions I’ve made which I blame on the misinformation of my upbringing. My parent would never speak with me about safe sex and we never had the ‘birds and the bees’ talk. It was a forbidden topic. I first heard about periods from a school lecture. I had a horrible reaction to the implant but I could not convince my doctor to remove it and they kept telling me that in six months everything will stabilize, and the fact that I was menstruating every single day of the month every month and gaining a lot of weight was not important and labelled “normal”. They tried to help me two ways, first I was just on the pill to try and stabilise the spotting. It only made things worse, I was in constant pain and constantly bloated. I stopped taking them and this is when the worst thing happened. I got the depo shot on top of my contraception bar. The injection is meant to cover you for three months, which it did, the spotting stopped but the bloating worsened. In the three months I was on the depo I gained 4.5 kilos. I removed my implant in January and got another shot as at that point I thought the bar was the problem. In the next three months, I gained another 4.5 kilos. I stopped all forms of contraception in February and began to hate my body, which is about when everyone started posting the “Hot Girl Summer Prep” videos.
Now almost a year later I still struggling with my body image, I work out and I am not on stable contraception which I got recommended by a gynaecologist specialist after a check-up and blood test. One piece of advice I can give you is to be kinder to yourself, and speak to a specialist about decisions such as contraception. If your family is like mine and the topic of sex is taboo, do research about local gynaecologists who could help you. Fingers crossed that there won’t be further restrictions so I can tell you all about my trips in my next diary!
