Some thoughts about life and other things

Have you ever read a poem where it feels like the poet has reached into your head and pulled something out, woven it into words you never could've come up with to express a feeling which you didn't quite understand? That's the feeling I get when I read this book. It must've become annoying by now to my closest female friends that every time we stay up until the small hours of the morning talking about life and broken hearts, I find a poem by Rupi to read aloud. One of us will stumble upon a feeling and I'll get up, reach for her on my bookshelf, reaching for the writing which will render that feeling universal, make us feel less alone. She takes your pain and makes it tangible, then makes it bearable, then teaches you to allow yourself to move on from it. She is the voice I need to hear when I am feeling low, feeling like I can't fathom how to let go of anger, or hurt. "It's okay" her poems whisper. "You are allowed to feel this way, I ha

When I was 16, my BMI matched my age. I know this because one morning my mum asked me to work it out - the night before my sister had seen me getting changed into my pyjamas from her room across the hall and seen the vertebrae of my spine sticking out. For her, that was it. She’d spent weeks and weeks watching me make excuses at mealtimes, eating a yoghurt for breakfast, skipping lunch at school for one piece of toast, and overexercising, and she’d kept trying to make me see that something was wrong, but I wouldn’t listen. Finally, desperately, she told my parents, and they stood and watched me weigh myself, worked out my BMI and were mildly horrified that I’d managed to become malnourished under their noses.  I was taking my GCSEs at the time, and had taken them so seriously that I’d let my phone go out of charge for weeks, deactivated my Facebook and shut myself away to revise for 8 hours a day. I felt out of control - these exams were dictating my life. So I decided to reestabl

Earlier this year I visited Paris with one of my best friends. It was my first trip; he'd been before. Immediately before we went I'd had my wisdom teeth removed and developed a horrible, painful condition called dry socket. I kid you not, the worst pain I have ever felt in my life. I called Alex from the train platform on my way to London to meet him (we were getting the coach) and said "I'm in a huge amount of pain, and will probably be grumpy as hell for this whole trip, but I'm really looking forward to it". Or something along those lines. Luckily with the help of French pharmacists (who really know their shit) I managed to get hold of some clove oil, so I spent the 5 days relatively pain-free, smelling of clove, with everything I ate faintly tasting of clove. Although I would warn anyone taking French paracetamol that you should NOT TAKE TWO DOSES AT ONCE of 1000mg of paracetamol. I made that mistake, went completely loopy, and sat in a park staring at pa

This is quite a scary entry for me to write, but I've been thinking about it for a while. Mental illness is often stigmatised and not talked about, so if talking about my experience could help even a tiny bit to destigmatise it, then it'll be worth it. And also I find it sometimes helps to write things down. So here goes.  Towards the end of this (academic) year, I went through a difficult time. Some bad things happened, and I made some very difficult decisions, and I fell. Hard. I wasn't sure how to get back up. My self esteem was at an all time low. I couldn't see a way out of the pain I was experiencing, but I had to. Life at Oxford doesn't stop for mental illness. Over the course of a term, after I got up the courage to ask for help, with support from friends and understanding tutors I slowly managed to find my way through it. But at that time, for the first time in my life, I suffered from quite severe anxiety.  Before my experience with anxiety this ye

An open letter to the owners of Brandy Melville. To whom it may concern, I don't know if you will see this (you probably won't), but I am so angered by my experience in your store that I had to do something about it. I've been shopping at Brandy Melville for about 3 or 4 years now. My mum and I first discovered your shop when I was around 17 (and much skinnier than I am now) and I loved it. Your clothes were comfy, the fabric was soft, and pretty much everything was stylish. We'd take a trip to the King's road every time I went to London with my family and I'd come home with at least 3 or 4 items. My two sisters and I are constantly stealing each others' Brandy clothes (they have been the cause of some of our most explosive arguments). At that time your clothes mostly consisted of loose-fitting t shirts, or elasticated shorts, so it didn't really bother me that your shop didn't seem to have more than one size, because it fitted me anyway, and n

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the stereotype of the ‘bitchy girl’, and its origin. I’m guilty of perpetuating it myself - a number of times in the past I’ve made the observation that I have more male friends than female friends (which is for the most part still true, but I'm working on it), and said things like ‘I just get along better with guys’, ‘guys are just easier to be around’ or even ‘I just don’t like bitchy girl drama’. But why is this something which I associate with my gender? I can’t deny that I have encountered women who seem to me to fit this stereotype throughout my life, or at least indulge in it every once in a while, myself included. I’ve lost count of the number of conversations I had growing up in which I’d gossip about another girl’s love life, or call her a ‘slag’ (I hate my past self for feeling that it was acceptable to use that word), shaming her for being sexually liberated, or the way she dressed, or her new haircut, or the amount of weight