I’ve been crying today.

How many people tell you when they’re really down?

To be honest, I don’t give a stuff about being the kind of girl who doesn’t wear her heart on her sleeve.

Remember, as a big bugger, I’m always in sleeves. I’m never bare armed.

That should tell you something about my emotional and mental well-being.

I know what’s caused it. I just don’t care much about acknowledging it. That’s my problem.

Yet, curiously, I know that if I don’t these peaks and troughs are going to continue to litter my life like the flakes of the FOUR bread rolls I ate in the car home from my mother’s the other day.

She gave me them to share out with Significant (thin) Other and housemate Hiya Love, along with some boiled ham.

But by the time I’d got to Morrisons on the top road in Ebbw Vale, two minutes away, I’d managed to light a fag while filling the buttered beauties with ham (AND pick out the fat and scary red bits) while driving.

I juggled guilt for a bit in the one hand too. Good, eh? I should be in the circus, me.

Then I had to walk into the house and mime to Hiya Love, like some half baked Lionel Blair, that I’d had all the food on the way down, making sure he knew what to say if Mam Jones phoned.

I also didn’t want S(t)O to get the gist of the exchange. Not that he’d mind, I don’t think – it’s just that he’s already seen me around the house without a bra on, I didn’t want to run the risk of him seeing me without my marbles.

The strange thing about tears, and about emotional razor blades in general, is that once you’re all cried out, when you’re free of the slump, you forget the real texture of sorrow.

All you know is that you had a feeling, a sensation so blue it was almost pornographic.

I’m like that now, oddly nostalgic – and starving – a few hours into my recovery time.

I don’t feel sad right at this very moment, but I am left with a real sense of palpable frustration with myself.

I can feel it, just like I feel my trousers getting tighter as a result of the indifference I’ve been suffering for the last few months, the type which manifests itself in crazy car journeys and dawn fridge raids.

Add another four rolls to my tally and I figure I’m now about 6,775 steps back from when I started to regain my sense of self by losing two stone off its carb-covered casing.

Things/stuff/comments, call exterior forces what you like, have conspired to make me feel like screaming at myself or apples, anything around me really, for being so bloody useless and self-defeating.

The rolling around with the rolls didn’t spark my most recent fall from the grace of personal equanimity, though. They were just the topping.

A tight bra, an evening out in a fashionable bar, an email which said “stop putting yourself down... you’re beautiful inside and out” (talk about missing the point of these columns), and someone getting upset about me never socialising with friends has me reeling.

I’m also facing up to the fact that I’ve put on weight, so much so that my cheeks are playing a game of kiss catch with my fringe.

It’s not hard for me to be candid about my weaknesses, or at least what I perceive them to be.

I’m so used to being so utterly uncomfortable in my own skin most of the time, it’s natural for me to talk about the unease when asked. It’s an almost light-hearted swipe at myself. But others don’t quite see it that way.

When I try to articulate this to people who are concerned about my well-being, those who prattle on about my weight NOT being an issue (Newsflash: It Is To Me), they don’t seem to like my answers to their questions.

“Why do you so rarely go out?” friends ask.

“Because I get so uncomfortable, especially after work and following a sneeze and wee session while everyone else appears to have dropped in after a make-up session heaven,” I tell them as they scowl.

“Why are you so hard on yourself?” someone else prattles.

“Because it’s so easy and I’ve got a leak in the self-confidence department,” I answer.

“But you LOOK confident, you ARE confident, you’re the life and soul when you do go out,” they reason.

Yeah, and Irony’s my mother’s other skinny daughter, this only fat child sometimes thinks to herself.