all i needed was a light in the darkest place.

so it’s been a long time since i wrote a general ‘how’s life?’ post. i feel like i have no time anymore, not because i’m using that time to do actual productive things [actual! productive! things! oh my!]; just that somewhere along the day i’m losing that time and can’t take it back when all the things i really need to be doing catch up with me.

right now everything is leading up to february, and after february seems like a distant dream. in february i have prelim exams, which are a big deal because if you don’t do as well in the final exams or are ill or something you hopefully get the grade you get in your prelim. our study leave starts on friday, and then i have four days leading up to my french exam on the friday after, then the weekend, and spanish german english on the monday tuesday wednesday after that. i’m not sure whether to be worried or not about these exams, because unless something goes horribly wrong i’ll hopefully [i'm reluctant to say definitely!] get a good mark in spanish. german i can manage, although not as well. it’s my knowledge of the languages higher course from last year and not my knowledge of german that’s keeping me going. french could go either way because i’m not bad at french, i’ve just never done it at such a complex level before. [although i guess you can say that about everything.] and english will be horrific unless i somehow miraculously manage to pull it out of the bag [which i highly doubt], but at least i’m expecting it. and i think everyone in the class is thinking the same thing.

we have a half term holiday for seven days, and then after that i’m going to strasbourg in france for the trip i was chosen to go on. [i love to say chosen to go on, i've never been able to say that about anything before and i sound like harry potter .. "i am the chosen one!"] this is kind of making me worried because i have a whole booklet of things in french to translate, then i need to research all the topics, write discursive essays on them, and then get them checked before i go. and then actually do everything in french when i get there. and right now i can’t even remember how to conjugate a regular -ir verb in the present tense. i have some serious work to do.

when i come back i’ve then got to start organising the yearbook articles, because i am the head of articles and so far my team has done nothing. all the other groups like photos and design have been having meetings, but my reasoning is that there’s no point planning anything before prelims because noone is going to write us any articles before exams anyway. then, i’m also my class representative for the evening of achievement evening, so i have to make a presentation about our class to be shown at this evening where they give us all certificates for leaving school, so that’s something else to do too.

senior ball is coming up in april, which is a kind of big deal because our school isn’t like other schools in scotland or the stereotypical american school where they have dances or proms every year. we just have this one big prom at the end of sixth year which everyone takes seriously and goes out getting limos and fake tans and expensive dresses blah blah blah. i loved this dress, until i realised that not only is it a wedding dress it’s also $900! so perhaps a bit out of my price range .. anyways, i’m really not the fanciest dresser so i have absolutely no idea what i’m going to wear. i think if i turned up in a meringue-like dress everyone would just burst out laughing. i love the idea of finding a perfectly fitting beautiful and cheap vintage dress on etsy, but in real life i know there is no way this is going to happen. plus i’m not sure i can carry off vintage.

then, in may i’m going to see kiss, then we have our final exams and we leave school FOREVER. at the beginning of this school year i was horrified at the very thought of this, but now i’m looking forward to it. i think this is what the whole of life is like: you spend forever worrying about growing up and then one day you take a look into your head and realise that somewhere along the line you became ok with it and now it’s really not a big deal, and you have some other aspect of growing up to worry about. will i ever feel like i’m properly grown up? also, will i ever start looking my age?

in july we’re planning to got on a sixth-year holiday, all eight of us let loose in a foreign country together. i had nightmares of us ending up somewhere tacky like magaluf or zante, noone could agree and we were going to have to make presentations on where we wanted to go and why to persuade everyone else. i was all for barcelona, and somehow, magically, everyone has come round and we’re actually planning to go. hooray! i was victorious. i think that barcelona has everything that our group of friends could collectively want: a beach, a city, good transport links [have to admit this was my request. i love metros!], nightlife, and actual things to do and see.

then after that there’s the black hole that is going to university. i’m sure i’ve said this a hundred times before, but it really is strange how our choices in where we’re going have changed over the years. two years ago we all had these ambitious plans about how we were aiming high for the best universities and the best places and all leaving home, and now half of us have decided to stay at home and the other half are desperately jumping fences and hoping that we get accepted into the universities we want. i never realised it was so competative. i still haven’t heard back from edinburgh [or stirling, or aberdeen, or st andrews .. but i'm not so bothered about those. i was sure i wasn't going to get into st andrews anyway, i just needed a fifth choice.] so i’m kind of pushing my hopes down and setting myself up for glasgow. to be honest the course at glasgow is better for me: it’s not so literature based [and six years of english have set me up to HATE literature!], i can pair it with courses that i want to do like film studies and czech and polish and scottish history, the accomodation is cheaper, and there are more music venues in glasgow [i seem to spend half my life travelling back and forth to glasgow for bands.] plus the university looks like hogwarts. and glasgow has a metro. [yes those two points actually make it onto my list of positives!] whereas at edinburgh the course is more literature based, i would have to pair it with some fancy pants course like latin or classics, the accomodation is more expensive, and everyone i have heard from says it’s full of snobby english people [which i have recently realised i have an unfortunate irritation for!] .. so then why when i contemplate going to glasgow with all its positives instead of edinburgh does my heart kind of break a little?

things with my grandad bob up ’til now have been going as good as we could expect them to go. they’ve stopped the carers going in because miraculously he’s managed to walk again, which everyone is amazed at. he’s so strong for a terminally ill man that my mum keeps hoping that the  doctors are going to turn around and say that actually they can treat him after all, or that miraculously the tumour has disappeared and he’s as right as rain. i think this is the worst thing to think. because when/if they say they still can’t treat him she’s going to fall right back down into the depths of despair again. i’m scared of being lulled into a false sense of security when something terrible could happen all over again.

all the problems that you made in your own head.

i’ve written a bit before about how i need to get round to realising that i can’t just sit back and wait for something to make me happy, i have to go out there and find that happiness for myself. this is because when i was fourteen i was really, really unhappy for a long time; and i don’t think that i’ve ever stopped being paranoid that one day -maybe tomorrow! oh no!- things are going to turn on me and be that way again.

i felt this sense of paralysing paranoia all the time; i could burst into tears at a second’s notice [literally burst into tears. i've never done it since.]; i never ate anything, i would buy something for lunch and then realise i just couldn’t eat it and it would sit in my bag until i threw it away; i had this constant churning feeling in my stomach, like nervous butterflies and just feeling sick in one; and i acted manically happy when inside i felt terrible because i thought that if i acted happy eventually i would turn back that way. it didn’t happen.

i came home each day and shut myself away in my room and cried and cried. i listened to my chemical romance albums on repeat because i could concentrate on drum beats and guitar solos and shut everything else out. i would rather listen to lyrics about cemetaries and blood, violence and apathy, than songs about love and stuff because they would rub things in my face. i got a pair of scissors and tried to slit my wrists, not because i truly believed it was going to make me feel better but because i had read of other people saying it made them feel better and at that point i was willing to try anything. it didn’t work, the scissors were too blunt. i cried even harder when i realised that i was such a failure i couldn’t even manage to slit my wrists properly. i couldn’t say for definite that i was actually depressed, because what do i know? i’m not a doctor and i never spoke about it with anyone really, but if that wasn’t depression then i don’t ever ever want to know what depression feels like.

and everyone says that you learn from your mistakes, right?, but what scares me about the whole thing is that i didn’t learn from my mistakes because i don’t know how i got that low in the first place or how i managed to get myself out. so there’s this paranoia that i could end up back there at any point and not find the way out this time.

so anyways, the point of this post is not that i used to be really sad but that i’m not really sad anymore but i still haven’t learned to shake that feeling completely. i can be happy and i’m generally a happy person but there’s always a part of me that’s .. not sad exactly,  but i feel like it’s holding me back from being absolutely 100% happy. like everything is watered down. like i’m only experiencing half of it.

and i was beating myself up about it and wondering what was wrong with me when i realised that maybe it’s not my fault, i consider that sad time to be in the past but maybe it’s not. maybe i’m still on the road out of it and i still have to learn everything in order to be truly happy again. or maybe this is life and i’m never supposed to be 100% happy or like i’m experiencing an emotion in it’s strongest concentration. but i wouldn’t like that to be true because there was a time when i didn’t feel this way so i know i can do it. only time will tell, right?

2009.

[a new year's survey; copied from jolie who got it from linda.]

1. what did you do in 2009 that you’d never done before?
the biggest thing was probably getting a job; i worked at the holiday inn as a waitress for five months and hated almost every minute of it, and now i’m a replenishment assistant [yes that really is my job title!] at my local supermarket.
i also went on a trip without my parents to multiple places for the first time: in september me and my friends went to edinburgh and glasgow for three days for the university open days, and surprisingly we arrived back home unscathed.
i continued going to a lot of gigs and saw bands i’d never seen before: seal, bruce springsteen, green day, paramore ..
on december 30th i got my ears pierced again: i now have my tragus on my left ear and my rook on my right ear done. i worried for ages about getting them done because i really wanted them but i was worried what people would think and that they would look tacky. now i’m really glad i got them done because they’re awesome and subtle.

2. did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
my 2009 resolution was to have better posture, which it’s been for the past few years. but sometimes i can’t be bothered to, so i’ve spent parts of the year guiltily remembering my resolution and realising that i’ve failed at this one every year so far.
my 2010 resolution is to sort myself out. this is quite good, i think, because it covers everything and because it’s general i can’t really fail as long as i make some improvement!
i was at a hogmanay [the scottish name for new year's eve] party yesterday and was speaking to one of my friends, who said that his new year’s resolution is to learn all the words to auld lang syne so he can sing it perfectly next new year. [this new year we sang flower of scotland instead.] i thought that this was a pretty useful thing to do so i’ll try to do that too, along with learning the words to flower of scotland and don’t stop believin’ by journey.

3. did anyone close to you give birth?
nope.

4. did anyone close to you die?
no, thank God, apart from gerbils. sooty, belle, and twinkle died this year.

5. what countries did you visit?
england: i went to london in march to watch my dad run in the london marathon, and while we were there we went shopping and to see we will rock you on the west end. then in summer i went to ludlow in shropshire for a week.
wales: following on from the week in ludlow we camped for a week in wales, near aberystwyth.

6. what would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?
i would like to have come to realise that i can’t just wait around and wait for something to make me happy, i have to go out and actually make myself happy instead.

7. what dates from 2009 will remain etched on your memory, and why?
august fifth: the day that we got our exam results, and because i was in wales i got the results texted to me from the sqa. i got three a’s in french, spanish, and english and two b’s in computing and modern studies. i got the same results in my prelims except from computing and english were switched, and i was so shocked to get an a in english!
that day after we found out we went to the snowdonia national park to get a cablecar up mount snowdon, the highest mountain in wales. except, it would have cost £100 so we went to the welsh national slate museum instead which was free. i could see why. i just remember climbing up this hill of slate in the grounds to try and get phone signal to tell my gran and grandad bob my exam results.
october nineteenth: the day me, alex, and stuart went to see green day at the secc in glasgow. i was counting down the days for months. when we finally got there it was kind of surreal; this band i’d been watching on youtube and listening to on cd for years were actually there in front of me and it was hard to take in.

8. what was your biggest achievement of the year?
although i did pass my exams with good marks; i think that my biggest achievement of the year has been getting an unconditional offer from the university of glasgow to do spanish and french, and being picked to be part of the scottish delegation to the euroscola event at the european parliament in strasbourg in february. i’ve never ever gone forward for something competative before, let alone been picked, so this is quite a big thing for me.

9. what was your biggest failure?
the catastrophe that my english dissertation has become.

10. did you suffer illness or injury?
not really, although i had an operation on my jaw in august because it kept locking. i was the happiest patient the hospital had ever seen. i got wheeled around the hospital like on tv, got to have hospital food, had a drip, and was high on morphine. it was awesome!
now i am a high-flying replenishment assistant i have so many papercuts and bruises. right now i have about five bruises on my legs, a huge one on the back of my hand from bashing it off a milk cage, papercuts all over my wrists [it looks like i've been self harming and putting on perfume is perilous!], and two blood blisters on the palm of my right hand from trying to take a milk cage inside in the snow.

11. what was the best thing you bought?
probably my hamburger phone. whenever i phone anyone i say “hello, hamburger phone calling ..”

12. whose behaviour merited celebration?
the person i’m most proud of this year is my best friend alex, who finally found not one but two jobs at once and has spent the year working hard at them. he got his longed for b in english, was asked to be the art activities co-ordinator for kids clubs in aberdeenshire, and applied to art school. most of all he’s awesome at working with kids, and i love that he’s grown so much in it from when we first started out.

13. whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
not appalled and depressed exactly, but the discovery of alcohol this year has led to a lot of stuff we’ve regretted the next morning. after one such night my new motto is “don’t do anything that you won’t be able to face yourself with in the morning”, and i’ve stuck by it. and i might sometimes [or a lot of the time!] be the most boring person at  the party but my self-respect remains relatively intact so it’s all good.

14. where did most of your money go?
before i had a job i had a folder on internet explorer full of things i wanted to buy when i had the money. so as soon as i got a job i started working on that list. now i have my hamburger phone, green day tshirts, the rocket summer tshirts, converse, a new bag, a bunch of cds .. i also bought a lot of train and gig tickets, and i suppose a lot of money went on my green day ticket which cost £117 instead of £40 because they were all sold out and we had to get it from some random website.

15. what did you get really, really excited about?
learning to knit and knitting a harry potter gryffindor scarf.

16. what song will always remind you of 2009?
‘wherefore art thou, elvis?’ by the gaslight anthem - the song i’ve played over and over and over. it can be sad when i’m sad and happy when i’m happy and basically sums up my feelings of myself this year perfectly.
‘eet’ by regina spektor - reminds me of the day i went with alex to edinburgh to see seal. when we left aberdeen it was misty and as we got nearer to edinburgh it got sunnier and sunnier until it was positively blinding, and i was so happy.
‘m79′ by vampire weekend - i played it on repeat when my grandad bob went into hospital for the first time and we weren’t sure if he was going to make it through the night. it’s so busy i couldn’t think about anything except from the lyrics and music.

17. compared to this time last year are you:
a) happier or sadder? like i said before, i can’t believe that there has been more to this year than from october. when i think back over 2009 there has been a lot of happy times, but i think that the sad times balance them out. so it was generally a good year but with a larger amount of bad than ever before so i’ll have to say sadder.
b) thinner or fatter? probably thinner, from all the waitressing and replenishment assistanting and paper-rounds.
c) richer or poorer? probably richer, but not by much.

18. what do you wish you’d done more of?
more planning of my english dissertation in the summer holidays when i actually had time and no ever-looming deadline.

19. what do you wish you’d done less of?
worrying, but i’ll always do that.

20. how did you spend christmas?
at home on christmas day like always, taking the annual christmas dinner picture, watching loads of movies and the queen’s speech, and playing harry potter cluedo. on boxing day with my gran and grandad bob being grateful that we’re all still here and with my grandma and grandad sandy making people from balloons and stickers.

21. did you fall in love in 2009?
nope.

22. what was your favourite tv programme?
gossip girl! the discussions in modern studies with ashleigh, the will they/won’t they chuck and blair romance, the screaming at the tv every wednesday night when something even more shocking happened ..

23. do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
no, i’ve just discovered that you should never make an enemy of your boss.

24. what was the best book you read?
the time traveler’s wife by audrey niffenegger, the only book i read during my two week summer holiday because i just had to keep reading it over and over. unfortunately i didn’t think that the movie lived up to the book.

25. what was your greatest musical discovery?
the gaslight anthem. like bruce springsteen and nirvana crossed together, in a good way.

26. what did you want and get?
a way out of the holiday inn and another job, finally.

27. what did you want and not get?
a copy of the highway code!

28. what was your favourite film of the year?
500 days of summer. i saw it with my mum and then with alex in glasgow, and spent the whole time before the movie started convincing him that he was going to like it. he did, and i was victorious.

29. what did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
i was seventeen and i went with jack to the secc in glasgow to see paramore.

30. what one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
if my grandad bob was still fit and healthy.

31. how would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2009?
like ‘let’s buy a band tshirt at every single gig i go to and then rotate them through my wardrobe with two pairs of jeans, converse, and about five cardigans in various colours. and nothing else.’

32. what kept you sane?
‘wherefore art thou, elvis?’ by the gaslight anthem, and knowing that alex is here for me.

33. which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

34. what political issue stirred you the most?
well it didn’t really stir me, but i super loved barack obama’s inaugeration in january. me and my sister came home from school and proceeded to make american flags from straws and paper and then wave them energetically whilst watching the whole thing on bbc news 24.

35. who did you miss?
alex, because i don’t see him nearly so much anymore.

36. who is the best new person you met?
emma, i said to her on new year that it’s so weird because this time last year i didn’t even know her at all and now she’s one of my best friends.

37. tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2009.
that this is life, this is getting older. you can either let it break you or take it and realise that you’re strong enough to do this, and you’re not alone because you’re following in a million other people’s footsteps.

38. quote a song lyric that sums up your year.
‘i got scars, like the number of the stars; my head’s full of vipers.’