I’m a romantic, but I’m very cynical, and I’m not sure how well love and me get along. I spent today in the sun with some people. Among them a couple that has been together two years, despite never having lived in the same place for longer than a couple of months. The way they were together, the easy touches and smiles and laughter and even the bickering and disagreements was incredibly beautiful. They weren’t perfect, either apart or together. But they made me feel, for the first time in a long time, that maybe it would be nice to be in relationship. I still don’t want one, but it’s nice to know that it’s the ordinary wonder that makes my heart beat faster.

A good all-round life cure: have a friend take you to a secret garden, where you have to crawl through a hole in a fence to get in. Spend a few hours lying down in a sea of daisies, in the sun, with a few friends, playing guitar, listening to the birds, exchanging stories, and making daisy chains. There’s something about being quiet and talkative in alternate spells in nature that really just opens up my heart.

Something that hasn’t happening in a long time: I have a crush on two people at the same time. They couldn’t possibly be more different than each other, and it feels kind of bizarre. I don’t actually want anything to happen, I’m happy in the little crush phase, but I think it’s funny.

I simultaneously want all my stuff to be in one place (I tire of wanting to watch a movie I’ve left in Bahrain, or read a book that’s in London, or paint when all my paints are at home), but I also want to be constantly moving, living somewhere new every year for a few years, experiencing different things and new places and people. I want the impossible: that all my friends could be with me in a couple of weeks when I celebrate my 22nd, but those I’d want to be with are currently in: London, Canada, all over the US (including LA, NY, Massachusetts), Tokyo, Bahrain, Ethiopia, India, Australia, and Germany. I want to be eighteen and beginning university again in order to avoid all the pitfalls and seek help earlier than I did. I want to graduate knowing what I’m doing (and I know practically no one does, but some of my friends have already gotten ideal jobs or graduate placements) and I want to graduate with a better degree than I will, which is a result of the aforementioned bad times. I want to be able to buy kitchen equipment without worrying about having to leave it behind in four months when I graduate. 

I can’t believe I graduate in four months if I don’t fuck things up.

I want to make a plan (that starts after I graduate) and stick to it, ‘cause I stuck to my plan for this year pretty closely and it worked out well. I want to remember to write more. I want to start trying to learn guitar again, which I totally stopped for the last couple of months. I want life to be simpler, or else be more useful in my messiness. I don’t know what’ll happen to 80% of my relationships with people at uni when we graduate. I doubt I’ll see many of them again (and I’m talking about friends here, I don’t mean general acquaintances) and I doubt many of us will keep in touch, even if we have good intentions.

How is this so mundane, so normal, so everyday, and yet so extraordinary? I’m taking it one step at a time, one breath at a time.

I’m travelling, I’m meeting up with people, I’m making new dishes, I’m talking photographs and making videos and taking walks. I’m reading books for university and books for pleasure. I’m putting on a pair of socks to save on heating. I’m listening to music and wanting to make a quilt of old t-shirts but last time I sewed was about four, five years ago. I love moving around, I love my friends moving around, I love that we have the world to explore. But sometimes it’s sad that so many of our interactions are through chats online. I miss laughing and cooking stupid things in the kitchen and eating them on the floor in my bedroom, watching movies on my laptop and falling asleep on my bed.

I miss the conversations we end up having when we switch off the lights and say goodnight, how that’s suddenly the moment our minds and hearts open up and we stay up for hours in the dark talking.

I miss falling asleep next to a friend. Being a grownup is wonderful, staying out till whatever hour you chose and coming home to your own apartment, having whomever you like over — I really love it. But I miss sleepovers and a ridiculous lack of complete responsiblity (I can’t say any because we always had some).

I love everything I’ve learnt over the last four years, I love the battles I’ve won, I love how much I’ve changed without realising I had, I love how much I’ve read, how much I’ve walked, how much I’ve seen, all the conversations I’ve had. But I also miss how much I’ve lost, what slipped through the cracks, and the always-present downside to being a traveller and having your friends be: we are always moving, but we don’t move together. 

It’s late and I should go to bed. I was just thinking about all of that and feeling nostalgic, and yearning. I must stress, however, it’s not a sadness. It’s a submission and appreciation to inevitability that we always knew was coming, without realising what it contained exactly. I once wrote a prose poem called: If this is growing up, let’s do it again.

This is growing up. We aren’t going to do it again. The life we are always waiting for is what is happening, and what a fascinating mess it is.

It’s incredibly strange to have to see my youngest brother grow up, have his secrets, his fights, his new friendships, and have to step back from it. It’s not that he wasn’t his own person before university, but I knew his friends since they were all little, I even knew their families. He’d talk to them on the phone in front of me, we’d all go out occasionally, etc. But his friends now are new to him, and strangers to me, and when he gets calls he steps out of the room to take them, and when I hear a raised voice I can’t rush over and ask what’s wrong. I have to trust he’ll tell me if he wants me to know. I understand it all, and I respect his privacy. It’s just very, very weird.

You know how sometimes there’s a moment, no matter how small, where you suddenly realise that this time will pass and you’ll miss it like crazy when it does. It could be something big or small, but the realisation that you can’t have it forever is crushing.

My 2011.

Personal post. Feel free to ignore it. I just know that quite a few people have asked when I wasn’t ready to share, so now that I am I thought I’d put it in a post.

I spoken a little about my struggles over the last couple of years. I feel much more comfortable talking about it now than I did then. When I wrote that post, I received messages from more people than I imagined I would, and from too many people who have gone through like experiences, or had loved ones go through those experiences. As much as I really incredibly appreciated these people’s hand reaching out, I wasn’t in a place where I could write back and thank them without it me suffering as a result. It sounds really strange, but it’s true, and I can only hope they didn’t hold it against me.

No matter how much I try to emphasise how differently I started and ended 2011 I will never be able to explain it clearly. I began it with a faint glimmer of hope in the sense that I wanted things to change. I was finishing up my sabbatical, and I’d done a lot of thinking in that time, as well as a lot of reading, relaxing as much as I was able, and taking a class (French) for fun instead of as part of a degree. It reminded me how much I loved learning and how much I wanted to begin learning and studying in a positive manner again.

Things didn’t go according to plan. They rarely do. We encounter things in life we don’t expect and we have to find a way to incorporate these blessings or curses into our routines. The “Arab Spring” began in February. My country, which was already struggling with people trying to make their voices heard, has fallen into a chaos of struggle. I will not be saying any more than that, because I don’t want my views on the internet. I have learned the hard way that that isn’t a good idea (despite having an activist’s heart). But as a result of this, my precarious grasp of hard work and a reasonably sound mind began to dissolve again. It wasn’t as bad as it was previously, but it was a case of destroying eighty percent of the progress I had made. I felt deflated. 

To write out my entire year would take a lot of time and it would create an (even longer, more) unreasonably long post. Suffice to say, I did badly in my summer exams (passed, but not highly enough to take the degree I wanted). However, I also spent a little over a month in my university town, seeing friends; cooking dinners; reading existentialists, nonfiction and poetry; nourishing a friendship that has become quite dear to me; spending time with a (different) friend who was here for a year abroad and was leaving, who I love very much; making bonfires on the beach and playing guitar in my living room; going on day trips around Scotland. After that I travelled to St Petersburg alone, to learn to deal with being alone and being happy simultaneously. I wanted my happiness to be contingent on no one else, and travelling alone was a great way (for me) to do this. After that, I went home for six weeks, spent time with my family, but mostly read lots and in depth and tried to figure out what I was going to do about my grades when I finally got the results. I decided on a course of action, and I knew, both rationally and deep in my heart that it was absolutely the right course of action, no matter the consequences. I followed it.

So it was that after seeing doctors, for a little time taking some medication, knowing the details of my illness as I was a psychology student, making little life changes and having some really important chats with my parents, I began to break free. From September onwards I have been great, working really hard at university and getting decent marks, spending time both alone and with good friends. 

I wish I could describe the profound, profound difference it makes on my every day living to have a clear mind. I know I still have a little fogginess, I know the disease is still there at the edges and can return, because I feel it. But mostly what I feel is vibrant, and alive, and well. There are decisions I have made in the last five months that I would not have been able to make a year ago; and even if I had, I would have seen no change. Now it’s all changing around me, because my mind construes things differently. Having GAD is not the same as being “a little anxious”. Some people (some of my dear friends included) think it’s just the same as being nervous about an exam times five or something. It is not. It is entirely different, just as being clinically depressed is not the same thing as being really sad about something times five. Having had both those illnesses in my life, I can only do my best to live my life positively and creatively and truly, and hope that the black dog, and his friends, stay away.

2011 was a year of incredible change for me. It wasn’t a good year in the usual sense of the word, but it was a bridge between some really bad times, and hopefully, some upcoming great ones. Too bad I’m graduating during a recession (heh). 

A very happy hogamany to you all! I ended up sleeping through mine, and since I don’t put much creed in it anyway, I didn’t care. I’d pulled an all nighter the night before and I needed my sleep. I ended 2011 in the afternoon, out for lunch with my father and littlest brother (he’s 19, I need to stop calling him little) at one of my favourite restaurants and grocery shopping afterwards. 

I hope the new year brings you all good things, good grades if you’re studying, good life experiences and plenty of health, both mental and physical. I hope the very best parts of this year at the very least favourites of the next; that is to say, I hope it’ll be wonderful. Understand, if you’re upset about anything tonight, that it’s a day like any other and it really doesn’t have any more importance than we attach to it. It’s mostly an easy marker.

Thank you to those who follow me, thank you to those who leave me lovely messages and questions, and thank you to the wonderful people I call friends on here.