Sometimes a week off is what we all need. A few nights spent drinking too much and laughing with friends are the most perfect things. It doesn't matter if the film is bad, as long as the person you watch it with doesn't mind you providing sarcastic commentary. Pizza is all I need to cure any hangover. Really cold coke optional but preferred. Burning incense in my bedroom is filling it with thick sweet smoke but its worth it, even just to save money on my scented candle addiction.
Christmas is beginning to feel just around the corner, and bonfire night is even closer. My favourite time of the year has definitely begun. Towns full of students are fun towns to visit - especially if they look like a setting from Harry Potter; complete with castles, gothic cathedrals and shops full of beautiful old books. Six hour train journeys are bearable with an iPod full of music and a phone full of people to text and complain to about said journey. Vodka and coke is the one. Waking up to cider spilt over your bedroom floor and last nights outfit is not.
Halloween is incredible, so is face paint, so is going to church on the night of October 31st - as an atheist - I've never felt so spooky in my life. Dracula is good reading material for giving you nightmares and skies full of stars are suddenly quite scary. The music I'm listening to changes as the nights get longer and the evenings get darker earlier. All I want to do is curl up under my duvet and wait for it to start snowing; the disappointment when this doesn't happen until February is just as much of a yearly ritual.
In other words: autumn is well under way. The high street coffee chains have brought out their seasonal specials, everyone I know is bundled up in coats and hats every time we set foot outside, I've got some new snuggly warm boots to wear and a pile of books to read. I've switched back to my "wintry" perfume, and started longing to buy new jumpers, as if Topshop needed any more of my hard-earned cash. A very happy girl really.
Memories need to be made, photos need to be taken and life needs to happen while we still have time left living here. This is how I look today. Tired, yes. Piles of work to do before next week starts, yes. Regretting not spending more time studying, definitely not. I could get run over by a car tomorrow or fall under a bus and I wouldn't want to feel like I had missed out on anything.
Today has been a weird kind of day. I dragged myself out of bed, after pressing snooze a few times, went downstairs and ate what I usually eat for breakfast, swallowed my iron supplement tablet with a mug of green tea and got dressed. I found some clean jeans and chose the rest of my outfit from the mess of clothes, make up, books and magazines on the floor of my (not-usually-quite-this) messy bedroom. Messed around with my hair, put some make up on my face, plugged my headphones in, grabbed my bag and left the house. So far, so normal.
This is where it changes. I walked into school - early for once in my life - and waited around for my appointment. My appointment to send off my UCAS form. My university application, personal statement, results, predicted grades and reference are currently being sent off to the five places I have applied to. It's all done, it's all finally finished and I can have my life back. It may sound a bit dramatic and it probably is, but I have always been someone who doesn't deal very well with even the idea of change. And this change is a big one. This time next year (hopefully/fingers crossed) I will be finally moved out and living at one of my five choices.... and no, I'm not going to tell you what they are! It's safe to say I would be extremely happy getting into any one of them but for various reasons my application had to be sent off early so, along with everyone else from my sixth form in this position, October 15th has been a big deadline hanging over my head. And now, with under 12 hours to go, it's all done and I can stop worrying. I can go back to spending too much time watching the Gilmore Girls, never quite enough doing notes and essays and coursework and dance around my bedroom or go for a run without feeling guilty that I'm not redrafting my application for the millionth time.
It's amazing to think about how much has changed in the last couple of years. Everything from my favourite books and music, to the people I'm closest with (except for an amazing few who have stayed the same) and the things that interest me most are completely different. It's really hard not to feel like a different person when so little about my life actually feels recognizable to me. When I was fourteen - aside from the fact I was still convinced I could become a ballet dancer, don't laugh too much - I thought I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life. When I was fifteen I thought having a full fringe and short hair was a good idea and when I was sixteen getting my nose pierced was the scariest thing I had ever done. Luckily that one did turn out to be a good decision, and I hope as I finish up being seventeen the good decisions are starting to outweigh the bad ones.
My friendships have changed beyond recognition, I no longer spend hours of my life perfecting barre exercises or learning solos and fixing new ribbons onto ballet shoes. I talk far more than I used to, and while my family are unsurprised as they complain that I never shut up at home, teachers in sixth form and people I had never bothered trying to get to know are surprised that I have "come out of my shell." I think change is a good thing now. I get bored if I haven't moved my furniture around in a while, constantly need new posters for my walls and feel that live isn't really worth living if I haven't got something new to look forward to just around the corner.
There are so many plans I have, so many things I want to do before this year ends. I need a new job for starters, I need to save up some money and finish learning to drive. I really really need a new phone. I need to go to Washington DC in February for my Year 13 Politics trip. I need to see Taylor Swift when the Red Tour comes to London (thank you God, for amazing people who buy me tickets for things!) I need to have a lovely Christmas with my family, the last proper one before there are only two people living in our house all the time. I need to make sure I don't worry about them too much but at the same time, set up Skype on my laptop and come home to visit every now and then. I need to go travelling next summer, I NEED to go to Reading Festival again, I need to find my wristband from this year and put it on my pin board, I need to get a new camera and take so many pictures of all the things and people I want to remember. I need my hair to grow some more, I need a lovely prom and a happy ending to being "in school." I don't particularly want to be eighteen and have to start being an "adult," but it's going to happen anyway and I might as well try and love it.
I used to say I hated where I had grown up, that it was boring, that I wished I had lived somewhere else but I think I actually might be starting to realise how much I'll miss it. I think my resistance to any kind of change comes from the insecurity I have from being moved around the world so much when I was little and being afraid to put down roots and have to leave again. I don't remember it, of course, I was one and two when we moved from England to Hong Kong and back again and three when we moved to where we live now. But I remember the anxiety I had throughout my childhood of people disappearing, of moving away and never coming back. One of my close friends in primary school moved to Italy, another to the other end of the country. Others I have lost touch with since then, Year Nine friendships break up and people move on, things change and there is nothing I can do about it. I remember waving goodbye to my dad so many times from windows and airports and trains - jobs with constant travel are really good for building abandonment issues into your children. I remember how much easier that made it to say goodbye to him permanently and how much I hated it, and tried to miss him more, on purpose. I remember all of these things and how they have made me into myself.
I hate looking through my old pictures because I hate how I used to look. I hate hate hate myself with short hair and I have still not quite gotten over it yet. I'm working on it, they were not happy years for me and maybe that was reflected too poignantly in those photos. But there are one lot I found: pictures from my trip to Italy this last summer. I spent nearly three weeks with my mum and little sister and the in photos from this holiday we look the happiest I've ever seen us. I don't know why this is, a combination of sunshine and exploring in a beautiful place? The amazing food, the friendly people, the feeling of being so far away from anything about home? Whatever it is, I intend to capture that feeling and spend as much as possible of the rest of my life being exactly that happy.
I love my blog. Writing my blog makes me feel so happy, completely unreasonably happy seeing as all I'm doing is combining a jumble of words and letters into something that (hopefully) makes sense and sending it out into the internet where it gets lost among the thousands of millions of billions of other blogs, images and videos, songs, pixels and data, people, opinions and voices that are all shouting to be heard and seen and understood. Despite this and the shocking level of insignificance that the vastness of the internet reduces everybody to, I still love it.
I don't know why I find it easy to write what I really think or how I feel about something and post it for people I've never met or spoken to, people that don't know I exist, or live on the other side of the world to read and judge. All I can say is that I've never been one of those lucky people who can magically say the right thing in any situation and apparently make friends with anyone and everyone they meet. I'm not like that - if I'm nervous I will not be able to stop talking and probably say something completely stupid, if I feel awkward you will see it on my face, and worst of all, if I really don't want to talk to someone they can usually tell, which results in some pretty embarrassing moments. Its not like this with writing. With writing - whether I have a pen, a laptop, or the reassuringly bright screen of my phone - I can take time to think about what I'm trying to say, read it back to myself, and crucially have that moment of control before hitting send, or post, or handing in an essay. That moment of knowing that I haven't written something stupid, something that I will regret, makes all the difference. The difference between not putting your hand up to say something or nodding along, not quite sure whether to speak what's on your mind.
And strangely, the release of writing, and being myself has made me a lot more confident and outspoken in my daily life as well. Maybe its the result of receiving comments from people - the same people who would be strangers to me except for the fact that they read my blog - about my writing. Their support and praise has made me keep doing this, even when I want to quit, even when I read back some of the things I wrote a year ago and cringe at the way I said something or the way I come across, even when I wonder what the point is and if anyone would even notice if I just deleted this blog and gave up. Maybe writing has made me more honest. I know I didn't like it at first when people I knew started reading what I wrote, but now I've realised that if someone takes the time to tell me they like something I said or comment on a post, then they genuinely mean it. It may sound stupid, but it really helped me to stop doubting everything I wanted to say - to disagree if that's how I feel, to argue, to type a tweet without rewording it four times, worrying if it sounds stupid, or boring. Worrying if I sound stupid, or boring.
I'm not claiming that I'm never either of these things, by any means, because we all are sometimes and we all say things we may regret the next day, when we've sobered up from the party or calmed down from the screaming fight. Everybody writes things they will cringe to read in five months or two years time - diaries, Facebook statuses, birthday cards to people we will lose touch with while claiming to be BFFs and essays written at 2 am, misspelt and rambling, when maybe we haven't actually finished the book yet. But none of these things matter - who cares if you feel stupid later: say it now. The important thing isn't to care about how you sound to people around you, but just to have the confidence to say it in the first place; to jump in with both feet; to do whatever it is that scares you.
I'd rather have a life of OH SHIT than a life of WHAT IF.... what if I said that thing that needed saying, what if I tried, what if I attempted that thing, whatever it is, that scares me?? Personally, I would prefer to make an idiot of myself now, than regret and wonder why I didn't take those risks in the first place.
So do it.
Ask yourself: what's the worst that could happen? And if the answer isn't: I might die, then its probably a good idea. (Although don't hold me responsible for anything....) xxx
Sometimes a week off is what we all need. A few nights spent drinking too much and laughing with friends are the most perfect things. It doesn't matter if the film is bad, as long as the person you watch it with doesn't mind you providing sarcastic commentary. Pizza is all I need to cure any hangover. Really cold coke optional but preferred. Burning incense in my bedroom is filling it with thick sweet smoke but its worth it, even just to save money on my scented candle addiction. 
