Breathe

Sometimes I forgot to take a second for myself to just breathe. Starting uni has been great in more ways than I was expecting but the constant pressure to conform to expectations is exhausting. One month in and people are beginning to be themselves and stop preforming the role of 'perfect person be my friend'. I need to remind myself that it's okay to miss one night out (they're all the same) or missing a pub trip every once in a while won't mean that my new friends forget me. A reminder that a lonely night listening to lonely music in my lonely room with the background noise of laughter from the kitchen is important in order to recharge, and it's okay to join them later. I'm okay. I'm doing fine. I'm not alone no matter how desperately I may occasionally feel it. Isolation is as good in moderation. Everything in moderation. I can do this.

Can I be a Fairy Princess...Please?

*warning: excessive use of rhetorical questions*

I am 17 years old and I have no idea what I want to do with my life. My friends and classmates are receiving offers and finalising personal statements and I am yet to even decide on a course. It has got to the point where the age old question 'what do you want to do when you grow up?' is no longer applicable to me as I'm supposed to know. I am supposed to have my life and ambitions planned out and 'fairy princess' is supposed to have been replaced with an actual career plan. But what if I'm not ready to have an alternative answer?

Today my feelings on university, that I have spent weeks trying to find the words to clarify, were summed up into a nice short sentence: 'surely what you can display after three years should be much more impressive, diverse, and extraordinary than a certificate to say you’re good at one single thing.' (x)

It feels as though we live in a culture where university is the only option because, hey, I'm an ordinary middle class white girl with the intelligence to go to university, so why shouldn't I? But why would I want my life to halt for three years whilst I get a degree that doesn't even guarantee me a job at the end? Nobody has one singular talent so I am at a loss why it is so expected for me to spend three years proving that I can do just one thing. I don't need a degree to prove what I can do. University is not my only option, despite what life (aka school) so far has told me. The duration of the past few years have been filled with the stress of schoolwork and deadlines and UCAS and the fact that I am supposed to know by now. I don't know. I am stuck in a desperate sense of the unknown. I feel as though I'm living for what is expected of me, what I'm 'supposed' to be doing, instead of what I actually want to do. (Not that I know what that is either)

However, are there other options? I want to move out and meet new people and live the excitement that comes with uni, but after the initial 'freshers' period will I still want that? I can already guarantee my answer will be no. For some people, university is the dream. I am not one of those people. A friend she was saying how jealous she was seeing the year above apply last year, I have distinct memories of being filled with dread. I still am. It was only then it dawned on me that she had experienced, and was experiencing, what wanting to go to uni feels like. I just haven't had that experience and maybe I never will and I think I might be getting to be ok with that. And with the fear of sounding arrogant, maybe I just want to be one of the people that have the ability to get somewhere without needing a degree to do it.

Or maybe I just need to find the girl with the big dreams and magic in her eyes that somehow got stuck inside the overwhelming fear of being alive.