Another Year Bites the Dust

It seems crazy, to be back here again – at the start of January, having welcomed the start of a new year at the beginning of the week. I’ve never really liked the atmosphere around January, something I discussed this time last year, with how we try so hard to cleanse ourselves of the year before that it makes us almost miserable. The constant dieting, the determined weeks of sticking to resolutions with the knowledge that it won’t last. I always felt a sense of defeat whenever I tried to set resolutions in the past, because I knew they wouldn’t come to fruition. I’ve thought of saying I’ll exercise more, that I’ll be healthier, that I won’t eat as much sugar, and every year I last a good month before binging in whatever way I had tried to restrict myself.

But what if I don’t want to cleanse myself of the year before? What if I don’t want a new start, and am happy that I’m in the middle of my journey? I don’t want to wash my hands of 2017, or the year before that, and the year before that, and so on. Each of those years has brought me to where I am now, and I can say with hand on heart that I couldn’t be happier with where I currently am.

Of course, it hasn’t always been like that, and I’m so incredibly lucky to be where I am now. Still, despite all of this talk of hating resolutions, I still like to set goals and markers – albeit, very vague ones that are more like a continuing goal that doesn’t really have an end goal.

Maybe I should stop this rambling, and get down to the nitty gritty of it.

giphy

Last year I set myself three goals. They were to prioritise self care, to speak up and not sit quiet, and to ‘get out there’. The first was meant to be my take on the January Cleanse, but a more long-term effort. Like with all of these resolutions, I don’t have a plain ‘I succeeded’ or ‘I failed’ answer. I definitely improved on my self-care, that’s for certain, but there’s still a long way to go. I think I want to work even more on it, to set aside dedicated times of self-care instead of doing bits every now and then. I think it would be good to have one evening set aside to just pamper and relax, be that running a bath and luxuriating in bubbles or just climbing into bed and reading with a cup of tea and biscuits.

This leads to my first goal/resolution/whatever you want to call it, which is to be more self aware of my mental state. I’m so incredibly lucky and privileged not to suffer from a mental illness, but that doesn’t mean that I can mistreat my mental health like one would mistreat a body. I need to be more aware of when I’m in a low moment and feeling a lot of anxiety, and make an effort to combat that. Instead of feeling so low and depressed that it’s like I’m sinking, I need to get up and do something to help myself. The latter half of 2017 was filled with rejections for me, from jobs to love to plans that I had been looking forward to, and each rejection was like another blow to knock me down. I struggled a lot to stay positive and to pick myself up each time, but looking back I know that there were things I should have done. Instead of wallowing and wasting days to sadness, I should have tried some of that self care stuff I yammered on about. I should have gone out, tried to walk and breathe in fresh air, even go shopping for books or clothes or lush products (my current obsession). So that’s my first goal for this year: to look after my mental health.

For the second goal of to not sit quiet and speak up, I’m really not sure how to answer how I did. I definitely opened up more to my close friends about I felt, but I suppose a more accurate goal would be not to be so concerned with the thoughts of others. To just be, and not overthink how others see me – to not try to change myself to please someone else. I definitely learned how important that was in 2017; that it didn’t matter what other people thought, and really it’s down to me to decide how to act and live. Whether it’s on what other people think you should do with your career, or what they think about the people you surround yourself with – the important thing is to make sure that you’re happy, because the thoughts of strangers and of those you don’t care about really don’t matter.  So my second long goal of 2018 is to continue that – to work on what makes me happy.

The third goal was to ‘get out there’. I interpreted that vague cliche as pursuing my career-centred goals, from writing more to getting ahead in publishing. Well, I can say that this was successful. In terms of writing, I once more participated in NaNoWriMo and won, and in terms of publishing I not only made more contacts which led to some work experience in a large publishing house, but I also got a job in a large publishing house – and not just any job, but my dream job in my dream department. Yes, I’ve been successful, and the end of 2017 was like a dream come true for me.

So my third goal for 2018 is less of a goal, and more of a mantra – and that is to keep going. Keep striving forwards, keep trying my best to be the best I can be, and don’t let that determination to move forwards settle. I want to maintain that drive and motivation to just keep going.

So that’s me for 2018. I don’t know exactly where I’ll be this time next year, but I definitely have some ideas and dreams of where I’d like to be next year. So, whether you’re the kind of person who loves those pesky resolutions or whether you’re more like me and prefer more open-ended goals (the vaguer the better), I wish you all the luck for 2018.

Let’s smash it.

Is this the real life?

There are sometimes moments where I think to myself ‘this only ever happens in movies’. Of course there are great moments in life – incredible holidays, brilliant friendships, fun romances – but the big moments? No. They’re few and far between, but they do come around every now and then – and when they do, they always throw me off-guard and leave me questioning whether or not this is the real life (or if it’s just fantasy).

Queen really knew what they were talking about.

In my life, I can think of four big moments where I’ve thought ‘is this really happening’, where it seems like my perspective shifts to above and I’m looking down at myself, blinking as if I’m staring at what’s occurring on a television screen rather than experiencing it myself. One of these moments happened today.

Of each of my four mad experiences, two are about my dog (go figure) – the first of which, if we’re going chronologically, is when I first got Pete, our older dog (who now has a companion in the rescue dog Minnie). My parents had kept Pete as a secret, and when we drove to pick him up I was under the assumption that we were picking up a leather jacket, which was to be my big Christmas present. Then we pulled up outside a kennels, I was led in and a puppy was dumped into my arms. I was in shock for a good few days after that.

The second moment, again with Pete, was when I was recovering from having my gallbladder removed at home. My Mum was upstairs and I downstairs resting on the sofa, when I needed to go to the bathroom. I managed to make my way there, but feeling woozy and disorientated I collapsed to the floor and cried out. Luckily my Dad was downstairs, so he heard me calling out after a few minutes. Yet Pete went upstairs and stood in the doorway to my parent’s room, and after refusing to come to my Mum’s beckoning, she went toward him to investigate. He headed straight downstairs, to which she followed to find me – just as my Dad had got me off the ground. Whilst you could easily argue that Pete had no idea what was going on, it definitely felt like a movie moment with him literally fetching my Mum when I needed her.

The next moment, which was to be expected, was when I graduated. The surreal 8 seconds I spent walking across the stage and shaking the hand of the Dean of the university felt stretched out, and I remember every moment of it very clearly.

Which brings us to today. I had sat down to write a blog post (this one, actually) about my Grandma. She passed away July last year, and in a few days time we are spreading her ashes. I had wanted to write about her, as she had been on my mind a lot recently, about her positivity and spirit and overall personality, how close we had been, when I remembered something I’d written on my old computer – one I hadn’t removed from its case since before she passed away. I went to get it, only to hear something clink, and turning the case upside down the ring she gave me fell out.

You see, she’d left me one of her rings after she died, which I of course cherished and adored. I had never wanted to speak about it online because I didn’t want certain members of my family to discover and be upset or disappointed or angry, but in February of this year it went missing. I had left the flat in the cold weather, but as I went to answer my phone I took off my glove. I had been certain the ring had been on my finger when I left, but after the phone call I realised it was gone. Rushing back, I ran up and down the pavement searching to no avail. My best friend came to look with me and we teared apart my room, still to no luck – this was a ring I had worn every single day since my Grandma had died, and the only time I took it off was to shower.

Yet if I had taken it off I would have left it on my desk – but between then and now, it had somehow made it’s way into the closed drawer of my wardrobe and into the sealed laptop case.

Many people will scoff with disbelief, but for me today it felt like an incredible movie moment – so much so that I called my Mum and cried on the phone whilst laughing. It felt like my Grandma was there, wanting me to have her ring for when we spread her ashes in a few days time. It’s crazy, it’s unbelievable, but that’s what happened.

I’m sure we could try and think of some kind of explanation, but for me it felt like my Grandma had been watching over me, and after a particularly awful week, this was something I needed desperately. So whether it’s something as universal as graduating, as classically cute as a getting a puppy, as touching as a dog looking after you, or as unbelievable as discovering a ring you’d thought you lost on the streets of Lambeth – these moments happen. I treasure each of them and will do for the rest of my life, and I can only hope that there are more to come.

The Post-Uni Void

All my life, I’ve had some semblance of direction in terms of education and work. I’ve always known that I first go to primary school and do well to then try to get into a good secondary school. Then, you work hard for your GCSEs to make sure you get into a good sixth form. After that, you have A-Levels for two years that need to be good enough to get into your chosen university to do a degree. Then it all starts to get a bit hazy. You complete your three (or however many) years, perhaps doing a dissertation because ’employers like that’, and work hard with the notion of getting a good job at the end of it.

For people who do degrees such as engineering and medicine, degrees that are career-based if you will, pretty much have no problem (and I say this with experience personally having a humanities degree, and family who have gone through with career-based degrees such as medicine, nursing etc). Their main focus is to pass their degree – and, of course, there are other levels in terms of the better you do the better your placement etc, but at the end of the day all they need to do to get a job is pass.

Now I know, I know, I’m making it all sound like a piece of cake. My point here is not the degree itself, because obviously doing a degree in nursing is no walk in the park. Everyone can argue about the difficulty of their chosen degrees, so I’m not going to delve into that here. My point is merely that post-uni void, the one that for those of us without career-based degrees have to face. Whilst others are discussing their careers, essentially awarded to them as soon as their positive results came in, I’m left surrounded by applications and notifications from various job websites, alerting me to anything popping up in my area. Whilst some of my friends are settling into careers they’ve been preparing for throughout university, others are trying to figure out what career they’d even like to do. In my last year at university, not only did I have to worry about modules and essays and exams, but also about internships and securing work experience, going to talks to try to meet people and make contacts. I had to go to a job interview during my second term, so sacrificed several days of university work in an effort to prepare.

And then come the rejections. I imagine those in career-led degrees know rejection just as well, but I’m pretty sure that they don’t (at least, I hope they don’t) spend their post-uni months trying to stay positive as rejection after rejection comes in. Most of them are in secure jobs, a lot of them pretty well paid, whilst others (myself included) are trying to figure out how exactly to manage in a world with no more student loan, but a shit ton of taxes and bills they never had to worry about before.

I talk a lot, maybe too much, about rejection – mainly because at the moment it’s what I’m experiencing. The other reason is because, when I read encouragement posts or blogs about life achievements or similar, they’re all by people who have already succeeded. Or even just in everyday life, when someone tells me ‘oh you’ll get there’ and ‘this one just isn’t meant to be’ or, my favourite, ‘you’re great, of course someone will pick you soon’. Whilst it all comes from a good place, more often than not it’s from someone who is in a very stable place in their life. Blog posts and videos from people that are there to inspire are all from people who have already won their prize. It’s difficult to listen to their words without feeling bitter, or at least that’s how I feel. It’s hard to hear about how fantastic someone’s life is turning out and hear their advice, when you’re in a place where it feels like no one can relate.

For the past few months, I’ve been living in a post-uni void where I’ve let those reassurances from other people linger in my mind every night when I go to sleep. I’ve thought to myself ‘it’s just the wrong time’ or ‘something better is coming’, but when I see yet another rejection – be it for a publishing job that I wanted more than anything, or from an agent who didn’t like my manuscript – it makes me start to doubt. It’s like university gives you rose-tinted glasses, and you look at that degree on your CV and think it’s like a key that unlocks the next level, but that key doesn’t always work. People without that key seem to be just as successful and not, so really what is the point of this key?

Of course, then you start to think that of course that key is going to get you places, you just have to put in the work to keep it gleaming and find the right door. I’ve only been able to gain access to such a thing because of my privilege, as someone who comes from a family who was able to send me to good schools and someone who hasn’t had to worry about anything other than working hard. When I read this back, I can’t help but think of myself as being seen as the whiny white girl, who at the first hurdle sits down and cries. But damn, for me this hurdle is bloody huge. It seems every time I try to make a leap and think I’ve gained some ground, I just can’t get past it – even putting in all the effort and hours of work doesn’t seem to work.

There are too many metaphors and similes going on here, which is when you know that I’m being increasingly dramatic.

It’s hard. Life is bloody hard. Trying to keep that positivity in the face of failure and (what feels like) constant rejection is hard. Hearing from successful people the cliche sayings that it’s not meant to be is hard. Looking at people rising up all around you when it feels like you’re standing still is especially hard. I feel like I jump from happiness one day to despair the next, and this is one rollercoaster that I can’t really navigate. It’s like my head space is one tangled web and I just can’t figure out what is going on anymore.

Because, really, at the end of the day I do have a job. Yes, it’s in retail and, yes, it’s my part-time job that I’ve taken full-time, but it’s also a job that I love and am passionate about. It’s a job where I love what I do and love the people I work with, and isn’t that what anybody can ever really ask for? I’m in a flat, living with my best friend, and spending far too much money on food – which I can only just about do before going completely broke. My parents support me, and that’s shown in the fact that they’ll probably read this first and immediately call or text to tell me that they think it’s written well, even though 9 times out of 10 I don’t really think it is.

So when I go to sleep at night (and then wake up blurry eyed in the morning), I’m going to stop repeating those stupid sayings that make me think something will just turn up round the corner. Or, to put it better, I’m going to stop placing all my hope on words that really don’t mean or promise anything. It’s far easier, and I’m sure far healthier, to focus on the present day instead of wishing for something that may or may not be just around the corner. Instead, I’m going to try to think about what I do have and what I’ve already achieved, which I guess is what all those successful people are trying to say anyway in their inspiring speeches. And, hell, I’m successful in my own right, even if it feels that in my current stage of life with its goals I’m not. I’m sure a fifteen year old trying to get into a good sixth form and university would count me as successful, high paying job or no.

Or maybe they’d just think I’m a bit dramatic, and tell me I should probably just go get some tea, have a little sit down, and think of some nicer things. So on that note, I’m going to go put the kettle on and watch some dog videos. Feel free to join me, whether you feel successful or not (that’s the great thing about dog videos, or cat ones if you’re that kind of person; they don’t give a damn who you are, they just like the views).

Grief

I’ve been absent for the past few weeks as finding the motivation, or even the inspiration, to write a blog post has been near impossible. My Grandma passed away two weeks ago and I’m still no closer to feeling back to normal. I’ve been so lucky as I’m twenty and this is the first death close to me that I’ve had to deal with. My Dad’s parents died when I was much younger, but I grew up seeing my Mum’s parents at least every week.

It’s strange, this grief. I guess I expected just to feel sad for a few weeks and then the sadness would just become less and less, but it’s nothing like that. It’s more like an emptiness, a hollow spot in your chest and your bones that sometimes you forget about for a few moments but then you feel it again. Grief is more like a balloon inside of you, inflating and deflating constantly but contorting into different shapes. One moment you feel numb, the next you feel desperately sad, and then you’re angry, then you’re back to feeling empty.

The stages of grief aren’t stages at all, really. They don’t fall on a straight line. You don’t pass one to get the next. They’re on overlapping circles, crossing over each other and continuous with no end in sight.

The funeral was a couple of days ago, and although I felt strong at the beginning and like I could handle it all, the feeling didn’t last for long. And there’s still this numbness that I can’t get used to. Being at work is good and bad – keeping busy is wonderful, as you forget that the grief is still there, but you can be in the middle of a conversation with a customer and it all comes back. I had someone say ‘sunshine’ to me yesterday, and all I could hear was my Grandma calling me ‘Sunshine girl’. I also saw some customers that looked slightly like my Grandma, and again it all comes back in waves.

But not everyone understands – I certainly didn’t. You hear the news and feel sorry for your friend’s loss, but after a few weeks it’s old news. Already at work it feels like I should be getting over it now, like it’s just an obstacle I have to get past instead of something that I’ve picked up and can’t just get rid of.

So I’m not moving on, but just carrying on with this new weight/absence/whatever-the-hell-you-call-it with me. It’s a part of life that I never really thought too much about, or at least didn’t want to think about it, but it’s something that you have to shoulder. For now, it’s the memories that help me get through the day, the times of smiles and laughter and love. It’s trying to fill that emptiness with a bit of life.