10 Years Ago…

Apparently, the natural lifespan of a sheep is around ten years. This fact is pretty irrelevant to this post – the only link really is the length of time the sheep in the feature photo are likely to be around is the same as the time span from my own life that I’m covering today in this post. I didn’t have a photo for the topic and so I had to make this one, of the sheep, relevant somehow. And that tenuous link was the best I could do…sorry.

Ten years ago, conveniently, I was ten years old. That feels crazy to type – I don’t know if it’s the fact that I’ve been on this planet consuming Marmite for two decades that freaks me out a little, or the thought that ten years is literally half my life. Either way, it’s strange how far away I feel from my ten-year-old self. When I was ten, I was in my last year of primary school. I had a t-shirt with an ice cream on it that I wore religiously, I played four square in the playground, and I choreographed dances to Blondie with my friends.

At eleven, I took that leap into secondary school – suddenly going from the oldest in a school of 360 pupils to the youngest in a school of 1,600 students. It was disorientating for most of us I think. I (wrongly) learnt that backpacks aren’t for cool kids (don’t worry, a few years later I realise how mistaken I was and rediscovered the backpack life) and that school skirts should be rolled over at the waistband to shorten them (they still looked awful, whoever thought that stiff polyester is a good material for a skirt clearly never wore one).

From twelve to fourteen, I think my life remained pretty similar – I enjoyed school, put effort into my homework, and aside from a few friendship changes, things went pretty smoothly. I learnt how to flip on a trampoline. I really got into cooking, and would often have dinner on the table for when my parents arrived home from work. I became more self-aware and consequently, more self-conscious. I grew to dread class presentations. I read a lot of books. I liked History and English and hated the school bus. I became really passionate about dance, joining clubs for every style and taking part in performances. I played the violin in an orchestra and went to Guides – neither of which I felt much of an affinity for. This is the time I really started appreciating routine: I made my school lunches for each day the night before, fitting an abundance of snacks neatly into one tuppaware.

At fifteen, the pressure of school was starting to trap me into this feeling of worry: that I wasn’t good enough, that I couldn’t do it, that I would let people down. But I also had wonderful friends who made the days at school pass pretty uneventfully. We got into concerts, a notable one being the night we saw Bastille and met the lead singer after the show.

Sixteen came along and I took my GCSEs in a whirlwind of panic. The summer after that was long, in a good way. I dip-dyed my hair green and went to Cuba with my family. September shoved me back into reality: I moved schools for sixth form college and started the IB. This period of my life I’d characterise as intense – hard work and constant effort, with a smattering of hysterical laughing fits in the Film Studies ‘editing suite’ and a few relaxed lunchtimes playing cards in the canteen. I became more aware of the wider world and discovered veganism. I got my first paid job and overcame panic after panic. I lived in flannel shirts from thrift stores and expressed myself mainly through my manic making and consuming of baked goods. There were plenty of good moments, yet the fear of failure was like a damp laundry smell that followed me around. Somewhere in the middle of that whole alienating experience, seventeen pretty much passed me by.

By eighteen, I had a couple of months left of revision before 10 days of solid exams, and then I was finally free from education: I vowed I would not put myself through something like that again until I really wanted it. And then my life was travel: Paris, Iceland, Florida, Canada, Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, India… I worked abroad, met people from all aspects of life, and completely changed my perspective on so many things. It’s cliché, but I do think travelling, especially alone, teaches you a lot about yourself – your capabilities and limits, the heights of your happiness and depths of your lows, your resilience and resistance to fear – the growth of it all is overwhelming really.

By nineteen, I was home again and depressed: no money, no future plans, everything good felt behind me at that point. I took a job in an ice cream shop where my friend from school worked and sweated my summer away scooping gelato. I visited friends in Sweden and felt okay for a while. The monotony of this type of work was kicking in by Autumn though, and my brain felt like it had weeds growing in it, or tumbleweeds blowing across it, from lack of use.

I enrolled in the Open University to get the cogs turning again, started this blog to encourage a bit of creativity into my life, and looked for a new job. I landed a Healthcare Assistant role at the hospital and after a relaxing New Year’s away in Wales got stuck into it. The work was hard but rewarding: my life became a juggling act of long shifts, online learning and ferocious writing. Yet somehow this wasn’t enough. This was the point at which I applied for physical university: I had a yearning to learn, and be around other people also learning, and doing a distance learning course wasn’t satiating these things.

I turned twenty and completed the year-long online course regardless of my waning enthusiasm, quit my job and went travelling again: Greece, Poland, Prague, Amsterdam, New York, Spain. A much better summer than the one before it, that’s for sure. I worked hard on my blog, getting my first couple of sponsored posts in August and driving up traffic. Things felt like they were looking up.

By September I was at uni, studying Sociology and getting a new job as a Communications Intern. The first term flew by, not uneventfully that’s for sure, but every tornado passes eventually. Christmas came as a welcome break and a week hiking in the Peak District (the source of the sheep photo) helped ground me a little again. And here I am, back at university – ten years on from that little girl in her last year of primary school, completely unaware of everything to come.

Where has the last ten years taken you?

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Finding a House – January Reflections

I feel like January normally drags a little, the cold days and endless greyness of the sky stretch out and we all find ourselves wondering if February is ever going to turn up. I haven’t found that this year though. The bleak weather is certainly hanging around as usual, but the actual days have been tripping over themselves in a hurry to get to spring.

My month started in the Peak District, hiking around in the hills and eating bakewell tart. On one of my favourite walks, it started snowing for a couple of minutes which was magical. The whole week was wonderful actually (apart from losing my bullet journal…).

I headed straight back to university from the rugged hills and had a hectic first week back on a compulsory course workshop. It was pretty tiring and a lot of people didn’t show up, but I’m glad I went. If I hadn’t, I would be wondering what I’d missed out on. I really can’t complain, most people had exams that week which I thankfully didn’t have to do.

Reflecting on My 2018 Goals

We have reached that reflective point in the calendar, a week in which lots of us cast a thought back over the previous 12 months and linger on the good and the bad the year had to offer. I thought I’d take a moment to wrap up by looking back on the goals I set way back in January.

Physical Health

I wanted to spend lots of time outside and move more in an effort to improve my general wellbeing. I think my success with this varied over the months but I did get out the house quite a bit and I did give basketball, yoga and running a crack. Through these activities, I attempted new things and overcame old anxieties; I’d say that’s a win even if exercise did fall off my radar as the year toppled into the colder months.

An Anxious Introvert’s Guide to Freshers’ Week (Part 1)

At school I was always the kid hiding a furious blush behind a curtain of hair, desperately hoping not to be noticed. Whenever a teacher threw a question out into the room like a knife-edged boomerang, I became painfully aware of the chair jamming into my spine as I attempted to disappear into the plastic. In short, some school days felt like being led to slaughter (in front of a cheering crowd). So not too pleasant, really.

I’m not saying I hated everything about school, I actually liked plenty of things about it. But I did find it extremely difficult to be part of a group and to interact with people I didn’t already know very well. Understandably, when I left college at 18, I did not want to go to university; I took a bit of time out of education to figure things out and, perhaps naively, hoped I would be able to fully overcome these awful feelings.

Time, Space and Vulnerability: August Reflections

Normally when writing these reflection posts, I sort of know what I want to say as I begin typing. There’s a theme that comes to mind, or something I’ve learnt about myself or the world. I’m not sure August has held such monumental realisations as I haven’t been travelling, working or studying (but I’m sure at least one will emerge as I type). It’s been more like a collection of moments, all coincidentally held together by the fact that they occurred within the same month, and all surrounded by a bit of time and space.

This is definitely something I needed – a month in which to process things and prepare myself for what’s to come. Perhaps some will see this as pathetic (maybe it is), others will see this as a clear show of privilege that has allowed me to have this time (and that’s certainly true). Either way, I’m so grateful to be in a position that gives me these freedoms.

12 Things I’ve Learned in the Past 12 Months

A year ago today I was probably walking home exhausted and over-heated from my full-time job at an ice cream shop in town. I was in a totally different place then, to where I am now. Not just in terms of work, but in all areas of my life. I guess the same can be said by comparing any two months a year apart, but I think I become particularly reflective around autumn, and this past year has held a lot more change than most.

Coming into September always feels like a new beginning – the start of a fresh academic year breathes a renewed wave of energy into everything, even if I’m not personally attending school that year. And so this seemed like a good opportunity to reflect on the last 12 months – the good, the bad and the lessons I’ve learnt.

You Are What You Eat: Considering Going Vegan?

A friend from America once told me about a slogan that exists over there for a popular supermarket that describes itself as ‘at the corner of happy and healthy’, and although the cringe factor of that is eye-roll-worthy, there is an important concept in there. What we eat isn’t just a matter of giving our bodies some kind of energy, it’s about giving them good quality energy; energy that is compatible with us. In this way, we’re much like cars in need of gas. I’m no mechanic but I’m pretty certain that if you filled up a vehicle with the wrong kind of petrol it wouldn’t run at all, let alone at its best.

We’ve all experienced this ourselves, I’m sure. You know, that day you ate fast food twice, an extra piece of cake and somehow forgot fruit existed? Yep, we’ve all been there. And most of us can feel the impact of that either straight away or the day after: the tiredness, the sluggishness, the mood swings, the irritability… Even if you never linked these things to what you were eating, it is likely that the food you choose to fuel your body with is leaving its mark on you through how you feel physically and mentally – whether that’s positive or negative.

July Spreads: Getting Back Into Bullet Journalling

Shock horror – I’ve taken two months off from the blogger’s essential hobby that is bullet journalling. But don’t worry, this isn’t as disastrous as it sounds. This time away from rigorous planning was, ironically, planned in. I was travelling for (nearly) the entirety of June and half of July and so it felt ridiculously redundant to set up bullet journal spreads I wasn’t going to use – trackers, to-do lists, goals… I wouldn’t find a use for any of these pages!

I could have set them up anyway, as they’re fun to design and relaxing to draw (not to mention writing posts about them pull in more views than many of my other posts) but that wouldn’t feel authentic. If I knew I wasn’t going to use them I’d feel fraudulent creating them. So if there’s one thing you learn from this post is that I’m keepin’ it real, 24/7. But if you’re a regular reader I guess you already know that from the eclectic mix of happy/motivated/life-completely-sorted posts, sad/anxious/where-is-my-life-heading material, and down-right-angsty content that appears each month. Don’t mind me, riding the rollercoaster of every single human emotion possible in the space of thirty days.

June Reflections – Illness and Travelling

Well it looks like we can all breathe a little easier as this post is going to be a lot more positive than May’s Reflections: otherwise known as the episode in the series in which disorder is the star of the show and no one knows where the plot is heading next. I would say head on over to check out why May was like rooting for Germany in the 2018 World Cup (on paper it looked like it was going to be a celebration but in reality it was a stressful disappointment) but that post is pretty depressing. For that reason I’d recommend sticking with this one (which has been more like the Russian football team: everything surprisingly and impressively pulled together in the end, and no matter what happens now no one can deny the excitement and success so far).

If football references aren’t your thing – and believe me, they’re not really mine either, that’s just what happens when you spend a month travelling with a football fan – then don’t worry as that was the last of them.

31 Moments of Gratitude from May ft. Just Hannah Here

After my last post, my reflections on a slightly shambolic May, I think it’s time for a little pick-me-up. A highlights reel of glittery moments. Some sparkly POSITIVITY. Yes that’s right kids, I’m dusting off the concept of ‘gratitude’ and shoving it centre stage again. Because May was a tricky one for me (slight understatement, but we’ll go with it): I struggled with illness and essays and generally feeling helplessly stuck.

But that doesn’t mean good things didn’t happen – in fact, they did. It’s just hard to fully appreciate the taste of a fine wine when you accidentally pour it down your windpipe (or if, like me, you think all wine tastes like a grape-infused oil slick). These are the most important times to recognise and be grateful for good things in life though. Noticing the small moments can help to lug us back up the hill so we have a chance at seeing the sunrise.

At the start of the month I was talking to the lovely Hannah, from JustHannahHere. She writes about all things lifestyle and I really love her content! We decided to collab on the topic of gratitude, noting down a small thing from each day that made us that little bit happier. I’m going to be honest here: I didn’t do this every single day. Life has been hectic and I didn’t make the time for it. Oops.