I don't know if I like change.

I suppose there's something rather quaint about writing a post about loss on the 1 year mark of Nan's passing bless her, hope you're sleeping well Nan.

Anyway, I was always told that university would be the best years of my life, and that I didn't realise until I'd finished my degree that that was indeed true. What I was never warned of was how hard the time following university would be. Sure, there are the normal issues - finding a job, trying to afford being an adult, trying to remain independent and so on. The difficulty I mean is how to deal with leaving behind the best years of your life.

You spend 3/4 years making the best friends, learning more about the world and yourself than you ever think possible, and then you say goodbye. It didn't even feel like goodbye when I said it, not a real one. It felt more like a goodbye you'd say to someone you were going to see the next day and thinking about it, perhaps that was just denial in the most pure form.

It's not really just leaving behind university, It's leaving behind thousands of memories, people, places. It doesn't seem like that at the time, so it isn't the sudden overwhelming sadness that you realise it'll all change. It's something that chips away at you, day by day, memory by memory. This feeling of loss isn't at all helped by things like Facebook which loves to remind you of "On this day.." however many years ago. I get that it's wonderful to be able to reminisce but that feeling of longing to relive it all never truly goes.

I suppose this isn't remotely limited to university at all, it's just that that's what's really been getting to me lately. I moved home after university to save money, find a job and get it all sorted. The last thing I expected was to suddenly lose touch with so many people. It's soul-shattering. You see everyone that stayed behind having such a wonderful time without you and you don't know what to think. I guess I'm just seriously missing being independent, being able to go out to a shop at 2am because I fancy some sorbet or just deciding to go out on a completely whim. I miss it, I miss it all so, so much.

The past is the past for a reason. It's important to remember that everything that has happened, be it good or bad, has happened and there's no way to change it. We lose friends, we lose people we thought we could never lose. We walk away from things we can't handle anymore, we walk away from people we thought we'd never have to. We quit jobs, we change paths in life because we lose our way and quite honestly, it never gets easier.

I'm sure that there's a way to put some positive spin on this, but it isn't as easy as it has been previously. There's the same old saying "Everything happens for a reason." and whether or not you choose to believe that, it's a very interesting way to think about things. To think that without everything happening the way it has up until this very point, you wouldn't even remotely be the person you are now. You may be in a similar situation, we'll never know, but we can say for sure it wouldn't be exactly the same.

I never thought everything would change so much after university. I really didn't. I didn't expect to lose my way as much as I did and I didn't expect to lose touch with so many people. I know as I've said previously that I'm not the best person with communication and the like, but it's just weird to watch everyone's lives go in all different directions, and to know that at one point you spent day after day with these people, shared your darkest secrets with these people and now you hardly see them.

Despite this, however, there must always come a time to accept the past and move on. It's tough and definitely something that everyone struggles with. You rarely see a person easily accept a big change in their life easily. Sure, there are some people that may seem like they can easily breakup with someone, or easily end a friendship or something, but realistically it's never that way.

I don't like making blogs that are overly "I, I, I, me, me, me." but I feel that this one kinda is and I apologise for that. The past year has involved a lot of me accepting how things have changed and it's been a lot harder than I thought it would be. I ended a relationship, handled it all terribly, and what I thought could've been a friendship was lost and I had to remove all traces of said person from social media because seeing them happy with someone else wasn't something I could deal with and I haven't spoken to said person since and I find that incredibly sad.

Similarly, there are people from university who I thought I would be close to forever that I've drifted so far from that I think it's a mutual agreement that the friendship has simply just, well, ended. No animosity, no resentment, just a true fizzling out of a friendship that once seemed great.

I've drifted from so many people in so many areas of my life. I neglect so many people that mean the world to me but I never remember to tell them so. I guess I'm trying to say that I'm completely guilty of focusing on the past and never looking to the present and onwards.

I should probably mention that a large part of the inspiration for this post has been generated by FOMO, the fear of missing out. I'm not sure that's necessarily the case. It's not the fear of missing out as such, it's being able to physically see people having fun without you. People you thought you were close to and that you thought would've invited you perhaps. It makes you wonder why they didn't even consider you. Did you not cross their mind? Did they just not want to invite you? Is it because you've been bad at texting lately? Do they just consider you not close enough to invite you?

Of all of the things mentioned, this one hits me the most. There's nothing worse than seeing pictures of all of your friends together without you, and you never receiving an invite or a message, whatever the reason may be. I know, I know that there could be a million reasons. It was too last minute. Thought you weren't at home. So on, so forth. It still sucks.

I hate losing people. It's not loneliness, not that at all. It's that there's this weird slightly grey filter over people now almost. People that were friends of yours once, and you see them and remember every brilliant memory you've ever had with them, but for some reason you just don't feel like you can even talk to them anymore. It's as if the time has passed. The paths have split and they're just out of view now. You've officially parted ways, and it's time that you start looking forward.

I'll still have the memories, I know that, I just don't like how much things have changed.

I'll miss it all, I'll miss everyone, I'll miss making amazing memories. I'll miss having my life completely changed in a few years and I'll miss feeling so truly free that I could do anything.

Everything happens for a reason, and even though change is tough, sometimes it is necessary.

Onwards and upwards.

How late is too late?

"Hey, do you want to....."

You hesitate, just briefly, to consider all the pros and cons of the proposed idea and without fail money always crosses your mind. Can you justify spending more money this month? Should you? 

Money makes the world turn, and whilst I don't profess to even remotely know much about economics or stock markets or anything of the sort, what I do know is that we are so limited by the money we possess. 

I've seen a lack of money completely destroy someones life, I've seen someone finally get a job and prove themselves and pull themselves up from the lowest point in their life. It's so, so bittersweet but one thing remains and that is the ability for money to control every aspect of your life. 

I hate it, I hate the idea that a number dictates so much about us as a person, that this number represents so many things about our lives. I hate that it's possibly the single most limiting factor of most people's lives too. There are people with talents, people with skills that wish they could show, that they wish they could use to pay their way through life, but the sad point is that talent doesn't always guarantee you money. 

At what point did the world become so completely dependent on money that people could no longer enjoy their lives? Why is it that we are forced to slave away for 50 odd years jumping through jobs, trying to find our place, but never really feeling like we're getting anywhere? 

Money, money money money. 

The world is so vast, so wonderful and I see so few people on various forms of social media travelling the world and seeing it for all it is. I see so many pictures of beautiful, beautiful places and I get so sad knowing that I'll only get to see these places if I take some of my carefully calculated holiday days. Once upon a time people could easily save money, could easily travel the world, could easily just up and leave their job and do something completely new. 

Now? Now there's a record high of people living with their parents until they're 30+ because it's so expensive to move out. Now if you want to travel the world, if you want to quit your job and just be free for a while, you need to plan so well because you're sacrificing so much to do it. I know money doesn't buy happiness, I believe there's definitely an element of truth to that, but at the same time I fail to see how working ourselves into the ground just to be able to live is happiness either.

I say a lot that sometimes I'd love nothing more than to just delete everything and move to a new country and start life over. I'd love to just start again, surrounded by new people, taking a new career path, learning new skills and being a new person because sometimes I think that it's the best way to get out of this trap of being stuck "working for a while to save up some money" to do something I really want to do. 

I keep promising myself I'm going to do my masters, I keep promising myself I'm going to travel more and get out of the country but I'm always too worried to shoot myself in the foot by making any hasty decisions. My generation especially can't afford to NOT have experience in relevant jobs. We NEED to have a strong CV to have any hope of getting anywhere in life, so if we do strike gold and manage to get into a decent career, leaving that job too soon would be a massive risk, and one we just can't afford to do. 

So where does that leave us? How can we win?

We've got people taking degrees in things they feel they have to rather than things they love in the hope it'll get the a well-paid job so that they don't have to worry about their future. Surely that's completely backwards? People getting themselves into massive amounts of debt just to try and remotely secure their future?

How long do we have to put our dreams on hold before we feel financially secure enough to do something we really want? Hell, why the fuck is financial security even a thing and why does money control every part of our damn lives?

I guess the solution is to remember how much free beauty there is in the world, in the simple things such as exploring new local places, in hanging out with friends in their bedrooms and watching 10 films in a row. The simplest things often bring the most happiness I think.

Just don't lose yourself. Don't get sucked into the same trap that so many people don't realise they're in. Don't settle for a job you hate just because you feel like you'll never be able to get anywhere else because the last thing any of us want in our lives is to look back in 30 years and realise that we'd spent too much time working to enjoy ourselves. 

How late is too late? 

Well, I don't think it can ever be too late, nor can it really be too early. 

Money might make the world go round but stand still and you'll never get anywhere and I'll be damned if I'm going to sit around and watch the next however many years of my life pass me by because I was too scared to travel, or look into new directions for my life or because I was too worried about what would happen if I travelled for a while instead of working and saving. 

The world is your oyster, and though I've never understood that saying, I guess it's appropriate here.  

Thanks to anyone who reads this and suffers through my nonsense writing. 

When did we lose sight of our dreams?

Listen to: Ludovico Einaudi - Nuvole Bianche

At one point or another during our childhood we were all asked the question "So, what do you want to be when you grow up?" 

It's a question that has been asked of us constantly as we've grown up and also one that has weighed more and more on us each time it's asked. As children you were asked the question to respond with the most exciting thing you could think of, a singer, an actor, a dancer, a doctor, a vet. These were the jobs we dreamt of, these were the things we would run around as children pretending to be, singing into our hairbrushes, dancing around pretending to be a ballerina, operating on our teddies. 

Then we grew up.

Reality starts to hit us, and it hits hard. It's not as if we never wanted those things, all of us wanted to be some famous, talented celebrity at one point or another but we just accept we missed our chance and we move on. We keep our head down and we strive to simple be acceptable. We pass our exams, we work to even get to the point where we can choose a direction for our life to go. But isn't that the problem? Isn't the issue that we're still forced down a path? We're still forced to choose want we want to be before we even know, we spend our entire adolescent years second-guessing if we've made the right decision, if we're doing the thing that we want or if we're just picking something that we kind of enjoy and will hopefully secure our future.

I suppose I can't speak for everyone, I know many people that have put everything on the line to pursue creative degrees; drama, music, the arts. These are people that have no guaranteed future, people that have graduated and are having to work jobs alongside trying to make it in their chosen field and I have so, so much respect for them. I also know many people that have finished their degree and realised it was never something they wanted to do. It was never their dream, it was never really want they wanted and they knew that, but they felt this overwhelming pressure to study something practical, something that would ensure they would get a job when they graduated. When did this happen? When did we stop living for ourselves and start following the path we assumed we had to? 

I've recently looked around social media and realised just how many people I know that aren't even remotely where they wanted or expected to be. We're all on our facebooks and our twitters, posting about significant things that happen in our lives, be them good, bad or ugly. We're using these platforms to paint pictures of our lives that we want other people to see and I find myself constantly stepping backwards to remind myself that it's so very shallow. We see so little of each other and what we do see is so fabricated to appear how we want it to. It's no surprise we're losing ourselves when we no longer feel we can be ourselves. We're all guilty of posting things for likes or favourites or whatever, we're all guilty of wanting to feel like we're being accepted by whoever the hell we feel we need to be accepted by. 

I think the saddest part of social media is how shallow it really is. Post a joke, post a hilarious story, post a great selfie - you'll get plenty of the attention you crave. Now say you post about your mental health, you're feeling low and want to get it out of your system - a few likes at best and it'll get lost in the void. Our brains are trained to run on auto when it comes to social media. We think in simple terms - pretty = like, weird = ignore. We don't stop to think about why people are posting things, we don't stop to think what happens behind closed doors, we don't stop to consider why we don't feel we can post personal things for our "Friends" to see. We want validation from everyone, that's the bottom line and we don't realise how social media perpetuates that need and so we unknowingly do everything we can do feel like we appear as perfect as possible. We sit here, our dreams lost, our futures fractured and we try and hold our lives together when we lost where we were going years ago and it's thinking about this that makes me wish I could quit social media. It's a virus. It's taken over our lives and we can longer function without it and I hate that I'm aware of it but know that quitting it would result in me feeling far too detached.

I realise that realistically a large majority of us simply couldn't follow our dreams due to lacking a talent of some description or another. I realise that people still have their goals but when did it become so hard to just do something that you really wanted? Why is it so hard to just be the person you want to be in the job you've always dreamed of? Why do we have to drive ourselves to the brink of mental instability doing a degree just to have to fight to gain a relevant job that's underpaid and not at all what you hoped it would be? 

I wish I could answer these questions. I wish I knew why we feel like we have to sign our lives away to working jobs we may never feel are truly right for us instead of following that dream that's hidden away in the back of your mind. We instantly write off the thought of changing the directions of our lives because it's too risky, we can't afford to just up and leave. We all want to travel, we all want to try different things and find our calling but it's no longer done and so few people question that. They say the world is our oyster but we can't get out to see it. 

Our dreams were lost in our youth, our lives are ruled by social media platforms that are built to connect us and yet so many of us are more lost and alone than we have ever been and we've completely lost sight of our real dreams, replacing them instead with the dream that we'll earn enough to get by comfortably. 

So, anyone that makes it this far, I express my deepest gratitude. Now make sure you've not lost sight of who you are and where the hell you're going because if you have, it's about damn time you remembered and fought your way to get there. 

Don't let yourself disappear.

I've always been bad at beginnings.

I didn't expect it would be this difficult to start something seemingly so simple, and yet here I am struggling to find a way to begin this.

I won't pretend that I know how to write well as I really don't. I'm overwhelmingly average at best and that certainly applies to many areas of my life. I enjoy writing though, I really do. Just don't expect any Stephen King. 

You see, the thing is, I don't share my feelings, not well anyway. I hide away a lot of the things I feel because I've always tried to be the happy person that people feel they can talk to, but I promised myself I would do this. Just for a year. I want to prove to myself that I can be the person I keep telling myself I will be. 

I've been lost for a year or so. I've not really been sure of a number of things in my life and I've gone through many a change. I've learned a whole lot about myself, and about the world around me. I've been convincing myself of so many things that were so far from the truth and found myself at a point where I just wanted to be as alone as possible. I didn't talk, I didn't socialise, I just worked, got home, sat on my compute, sleep and repeat.

god damnit writing is so hard what the f

I don't know what the point of this post is. I don't know what exactly I'm going to write about each week, but what I do know is that I need to do this. I need people to see that I know I haven't been completely myself, that I've changed and so on. I plan to keep changing, for the better anyway. I've met some wonderful people, found friends that I hadn't realised were right in front of me the whole time, and lost others that I truly thought I could never lose. 

The world is a strange place and my generation has had it rough. I read a great quote somewhere about how our generation was pretty much always going to be sad adults because we had a simple childhood without technology. We ran around knocking on our friends doors instead of texting them for example and the fun we had was simple; riding our bikes, playing tag, going to the park and eating ice cream. Now, technology replaces all of that. We've become reliant on technology to do everything for us and so we have the convenience of technology alongside the memories o our childhoods which contain pure, simple happiness that we'll never get back, not in the same way anyway.

To anyone reading this, I'm not who you think I am. I've not been myself for a long time and I plan to change that. I'm sorry if at any point you've felt that I've neglected you somehow. I know I've hurt many people and a large part of that comes from me being so uncomfortable with myself but this year I aim to change that entirely. I want to be open. I want people to see my thoughts laid bare and they can choose to interpret them how they like. I've hidden so much for so long. I don't know if there's some social behavioural something or other than states that people can't talk about the things that actually go through their head. The things that they think about at night that they just couldn't possibly consider mentioning to anyone in case they thought they were weird. Those thoughts, those fears, those hopes. Those are the most genuine parts of any person and we've been conditioned to think that they must be kept to ourselves. Why?

Anyway, a word for anyone that reads this: sonder. Though not a real word, the definition provided by the creator John Koenig is as follows: n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

Take a moment and remember that you are part of peoples lives that you didn't even know you were. You have no idea how many people have you seen you walking, laughing or performing some menial task that you think nothing of. But they notice you, they acknowledge your presence and take a small moment in their day to look at you and from that moment, you are part of their life. You may be known as "the girl with the red hair whose face I just couldn't stop watching" or "the boy who laughed with such genuine joy that I couldn't help but smile".

People have so much more to them that we even consider at face value. Any number of things could be going on in someone's life and we never consider it. We get so wrapped up in our own lives that we forget to take a step back and appreciate the moment we stand in. 

For as long as I remember, one of my favourite ways to justify something that I'm not sure of is to remember that somewhere in the world, at this very moment, there's at least one other person doing the exact same thing as me, and for all I know that could be true, and I find something so wonderful about that.

The world is more than I've ever even thought about. It holds so much beauty, so much exctiement, so much wonder and love, and for some reason I never took notice of any of it. So, I choose to make more of my life, to share more of my life and to enjoy more of my life. My life is by no means the most exciting, but I'll never stop thinking about 100 things at once, and I'll never stop wanting to express myself somehow. So here it is.

Me and my dumb blog.

Something like that anyway.

Yeah.