When I started.

I tell everyone; I started to write blog posts when I was an emotional teenager who wore zip-up hoodies and black skinny jeans and ate a lot of crisps and would sit in the learning cafe at lunchtime with sandwiches in her lap, thinking about how she was so madly in ‘love’ with a boy in her Drama class and incredibly insecure about her fluffy block fringe/bob situation. Now I’m an emotional 30-something with a few too many denim dresses and a fair amount of life experience that’s created a strange mixture of wisdom and bitterness in my brain (among other things) – sitting in a writing workshop space at 7:44am, with a nail appointment at 9:30, a facial at 3:30 with meetings scheduled in between, oh, and somewhere in there I have to factor in a trip to the bank to pay the deposit on my new flat/‘first home’.

How funny, the journey life takes you on and the reflections made not just in train windows as you travel to and from college or the cocktail glasses you collect some nights against your better judgement, or the one too many mirrors in every home you’ve had along the way. I’ve been thinking a lot about the past year or so and what it’s taught me, but I’m also aware that I should zoom out further. Teenage me desperately wanted to make her own way and have her own space, but also to be seen and to be loved. Twenty-year-old me didn’t appreciate what she had until it was torn away from her. Mid-twenties me was frantically rebuilding a life every chance she got, then watching it tumble and crumble despite all her best and most naïve efforts. Late twenties me was somehow convinced to stray; she didn’t have to do it all on her own! She could let someone else assist and make her a passenger princess, buy her presents and stay up til midnight on her 29th birthday watching New Girl just like they did Way Back When but now it’s more special somehow because we’re not kids any more and we’re starting something grown-up together. Early thirties me is hurt but wise, protective but loving, jaded but still sparkling. She’s listening more closely to herself and enjoying the epiphanies. Relying on someone else ain’t it. One-sided friendships are old news. Exciting things happen but only if you want them to. And as always, the universe will intervene when it must. 

I’m excited to start whatever’s to come next. I have one eye on the clock face and an ear to the vault, but am also daring myself to think, just today, on this day of all days, when I’m creating a new anniversary to cast a shadow over an old one, what if it all goes just right? 

Thanks for reading. Wish me luck.

G. x