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Things I have learned from moving away for a year.

Things I have learned from moving away for a year. Change is good. Pulling the rug out from under yourself will make you stop and breathe for a second whilst you recalibrate. It will be hard, but you will learn about yourself. Chasing change does not always mean that you are running away, but sometimes it does. Figure out what you are running from. There is nothing like being hundreds of miles away from the people that you love to make you realise how much you love them.  When building a new life, friendships will happen fast. Try to slow down. Look out for the people who feel most like home. Sometimes things go wrong. It is important in those moments to be introspective. It is not important to assign blame. Be cautious with how much of yourself you give away. It is okay to let people earn your trust. You do not have to express every emotion as soon as it appears. Repressing feelings is not healthy, but neither is overindulging them. Some things can be processed quietly,
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I've had enough.

It’s about 7pm, and I’m walking home from the library. I’ve had a knot in the pit of my stomach since I looked out the window when I finished my work and realised it was dark. I am alone. I hear a man’s voice behind me and my breath catches in my throat. He passes by me. I see a man standing outside a door start walking as I’m passing him. I start walking faster. I can feel my heart beating. This is the reality of being a woman. It has been ingrained in me since I was 12 years old and my dad told me to take the dog with me when I was walking to my village shop for the first time by myself. I am constantly aware of my own frailty. I am constantly aware that in the dark, alone, I am unsafe. I have been conditioned to believe that I must be hyper vigilant, that I am responsible for what happens to me at the hands of men. You might say that nothing’s going to happen to me, that my fears are in my head. Tell that to my friend who was picked up in a taxi and taken back home for
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Reflecting on Oxford

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It’s an odd benchmark, to judge how far you’ve come by how you feel when watching Lewis. But I was watching a rerun last night and I realised that each shot of the stone streets of Oxford, each panoramic of the Radcliffe camera, made me feel light, happy, proud and nostalgic.   Watching Lewis hasn’t always made me feel like that. I went through some very dark times at Oxford - times I’ve written about on this blog. I used to want to cry when I saw shots of the library, of my college. It was a place I felt alienated from. It was a place that didn’t feel like home anymore. But somehow, yesterday, I rewound a scene which was filmed in my college and watched it over and over with a full heart, thinking ‘that was my home for a while’. I have always been someone who has attached feelings to places. In my first year I lived in a building called Florey which one might describe as having a marmite effect. Some people, my friends included, loved it and thought it was an archite
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On endings

There is an emptiness to it that I did not anticipate. Or perhaps I did, but I didn't have time to consider it before it happened. I was borne to the inevitable ending by anxiety and stress. I kept waiting for it, wishing for it. It came, and then what? The euphoria can only last so long. The impossibly long list of things to do that I put off with the endlessly repeated phrase 'It can wait' now hovers, encroaching. But still I feel I have no purpose. For weeks, months, my life has been the inside of libraries. I did not think I would miss it so much. I am someone who craves routine. I am someone who has never coped well with change. I went home - I thought it would help. But the walls didn't seem as familiar as they usually do. My bed did not feel like my bed. It has not been harbour for me for so long now. I am no longer an undergraduate, bouncing from home to Oxford and back again. Something has shifted. The house seemed to have shifted too. It felt somehow alien.
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Breaking up with someone

Hi all. It’s been a while. I have been toying with the idea of writing a post like this for a couple of months now, but I haven’t really known where to start. This story is not entirely mine. Half of it belongs to someone else. But I’m feeling a little off-centre today, and writing helps me to centre myself. Besides, half of the story still belongs to me, and I think I should be allowed to tell it. I started to realise something was wrong when I couldn’t remember the last time I wrote poetry. It had been months, and it was symptomatic of how I’d been feeling generally. I felt stifled, weighed down. The wrongness felt like a heavy cloud hanging over me. At first I thought it was just depression. I explained it away as something innately wrong with me , because I didn’t want to - couldn’t - look at the relationship in a critical light. We were happy. I was not. I was the problem. Increasingly I began to look to external influences to feel better about it, to pull myself out
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I cannot be 100% happy 100% of the time (and there is nothing wrong with that)

I just walked past a shop window and saw a book, titled “For every minute you’re angry, you lose 60 seconds of being happy”. I stopped walking. Snowflakes were landing in my hair, and I could feel my nose beginning to turn red with cold, but I was struck by something in that book title so I stood there for a few minutes considering it. In some of my unhappier times, I have spent time reading messages about forgiveness. I have pored over poems about happiness and healing. I have imagined myself as the person who forgives people for her own happiness, who finds healing in it, who does not spend time being angry. I have equated anger with a disease, with toxicity festering inside me, making me unwell. But the problem with those poems, and with that book title, is that they presuppose that your anger is toxic. They presuppose that you have the luxury of being able to forgive people at will, to let go, to just refocus your energy on being happy. They presuppose that healing is line
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On self-criticism and fear.

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(cartoon by Liana finck) I am not always very good at being nice to myself. I’ve addressed this briefly in other blog posts in relation to my anxiety, but I wanted to give it its own post, because it’s an issue I’ve been struggling with especially recently. I’m writing this from my bed right now. I’ve got an essay due in tomorrow evening, which I haven’t done any reading for, but I woke up this morning feeling fluey and tired and all my plans to have a productive day and do some exercise have gone out the window. I know that what I need is to rest, but there is a voice in the back of my head saying ‘you’re lazy’, ‘get up, you’re not even ill’, ‘it’s going to be a crap essay, like last week, if you don’t start work now’, ‘why are you so bad at managing your time - you should have worked more over the weekend’. It’s relatively quiet right now, but it's there. Some weeks it’s really really loud. I’ll slip up and say something stupid, and spend the rest of the day inwa
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