face of puzzle pieces

I shall let my silence speak for itself. My head has been all over the place the last few months, and I have had to take time out of many things that are important to me to give myself the space to heal; this blog being one of them.

9am in a diner at Euston Station, drinking orange juice after a three person 1am rave in Trafalgar square

To bring y'all up to speed, I'm currently on my gap year. I didn't get my place at my first choice university, which was a massive bummer to say the very least, but I did at my insurance university, which is super awesome. Learning that one can feel crushing disappointment and overwhelming excitement simultaneously about the very same event, is something I still struggle to comprehend and be totally chill with.

When people ask me what I've been up to so far, my knee-jerk response is to just say "nothing", which is total bs. I've written for my local newspaper, tried at waitressing for a week and was never called back to organise another shift, travelled to see friends, been on protests, tutored young and old alike, read so many beautiful and wonderful books, spent afternoons exploring parts of my hometown I never knew existed, been to countless galleries, lectures and gigs, and discovered a love of cooking. But honestly, the majority of things have happened in my head. Having an entire year off to dedicate to myself is the most wonderful thing and I don't think I had appreciated just quite how much I needed it. Learning not only how vital self-care is, but also how hard it can be to really put it in to practice, has been tough at points, and so has reconciling conflicting logic and emotions, and realising that find it hard is ok. Who knew you could learn so much about yourself just by thinking??? I'm now pretty sure I want a career centred around communication and words in some form; I have begun to recognise patterns in how I form friendships, and how important those friendships are to me; and I've realised how much I like to feel grounded and connected to my surroundings.

A painfully hipster 2nd breakfast in Camden's Falla and Mocaer

Anyway, in exactly 1 month I will be traveling to Berlin to learn German there for two months. I'm unbelievably excited as this is what my entire gap year is about. Although I went there for a week on an exchange, having never done anything quite like this before, it's hard to visualise what it's going to be life. Life changing, fingers crossed. It's one of the reasons I felt this compulsion to blog again, as I know I'm going to want to spend part of my countless lonely afternoons in Germany's capital writing furiously about my experiences out there.

Hopefully you will hear again from my soon!

July/August Disposables

 

Gwendolen

April/May/June Disposables

My Granny's favorite coffee store in London

The City, which seemed pathetic in its wealth and isolation

The final installment of Fleur in the Library

Leaving a beach party early

My last school lunch that looks just as grim as it tasted

Gwendolen

PS Sorry that it's short and sorry for my absence. However I have another set and a longer written post coming soon I promise!!

Let's go down to the tennis courts

"Beautiful girls at high school wouldn't even look at you if you didn't have a car and an allowance of twenty bucks to spend on 'em" - From 'Miss Temptation' by Kurt Vonnegut

"All through high school, people like you would look at me as if they wished I'd drop dead. They'd never dance with me, they'd never talk to me, they'd never even smile back. They'd just go slinking around like small-town cops. They'd look at me the way you did - like I'd just done something terrible" - From 'Miss Temptation' by Kurt Vonnegut

All photos of Fleur taken by me

Queen of Peace

I have written here in over month and for that I sincerely apologise. Obviously during exams I had a legitimate excuse, but they finished on the 18th of June and I don't really have a reason to explain by absence other than apathy.

Leaving school and exams ending have left in a weird place. Although year 13 itself was 12 months of weird. Everything became very real, very quickly, but by the time I felt I was beginning to get the hang of things it all ended.

So much of my identity has been built around school, which is why I guess I feel like I'm drifting in some vacuum and a bit out of touch with who I thought I was. School has just always been something I could do. Not just lessons, but the other stuff. I was always that girl on the student council, or in house drama, or being picked for this or that. Actual life, on the other hand, is a system that's not so easy to play. Who am I kidding? I've only been out of school two weeks. This hardly counts as real life. But when your oldest friend is getting engaged and being offered jobs based in Swindon, it can be hard to remember.

I'm not really sure what it is that I'm feeling. Cha, adolescence summed up in ten words. It doesn't help that any emotional responses feel rather delayed. It takes a good few days before I will feel pissed off at whoever for doing what they did, or happy for someone's achievement, or to enjoy whatever book I've been reading. I could just be tired. I turns out doing nothing is very tiring.

Gwendolen

 Photos taking by me during a walk at the Epsom Racecourse 

Words that have been out and about, on people's lips

From Tumblr

So I left school two weeks ago. I keep on expecting some big emotional reaction but it never comes. Probably because I haven't really left school yet, but am in the weird limbo that is study leave. I'm still going in for exams and the odd revision session but I'm not really a student anymore and I have done all the tradition last day stuff. However at about 3:34pm on Thursday 18th July 2015 once I leave the sports hall following the grimest day of German and Physics that really will officially be it. Then I'm sure my body will crumble and I'll start the long process of rebuilding myself into something that resembles an adult.

I plan to start my gap year by not getting out of bed until comfortably after midday. Then I will do myself a cooked breakfast before taking a shower to wash the remaining evidence of sixth form off me, before walking down to a field near my house, where I shall spend as much time as it pleases me lying under a tree looking up at the branches to sky beyond.

I have done a lot of walking lately. Even the odd bit of running, which is pretty horrible but does allow me to work off some pent up aggression that has built up towards Billy Collins for being such a boring and uninteresting poet, and towards Edexcel for making me study him. I've walked roughly the same route most Sundays for the last three years but over the last few days I have been less formulaic, allowing myself to explore the little paths made by teenagers on Friday evenings that take me to clearings that I am not quite brave enough to sit and read for hours in.

My gap year is not there for me to find myself. If I have learnt anything from physics over the last two years it is that I am a but a wavelength smeared across the universe, made of matter that will happily turn into nothing but energy in the blink of eye. But when that makes me feel too insignificant I remember that most of the particles that are in me are interacting with every single charged particle in the universe, and that those particles are in turn interacting with me.

That, and to always put units and to watch your significant figures.

But before I can start all that I need to I get revision and exams out of the way. I'm not dwelling too much on quite how much I have to do and how little time I have to do it because it will only stress me. Thinking about the probabilities of what I need and want to get this year will only make me feel inadequate and insecure so I'm just going to pretend I am what everyone thinks I am. But maybe I should think about all that stuff more if it means I will actually spend as much time as I need on integration by parts and vectors, rather than just drinking copious amounts of coffee, reading translations of Rimaud's Illuminations and watching Rich Kids of Beverly Hills. 

Mother and I went to the Royal Opera House to watch the Royal Ballet's production of Woolf Works, a new ballet inspired by the writings and suicide of Virginia Woolf. It was the most intense and moving piece of art I have seen in a long time. Attempting to describe it makes it sound a little crap as it involved a surprising amount of lasers and synths. But watching it was like reading her works, with their overwhelming intensity and the beautiful way in which her language moves and forces the plot to become secondary. The moment it finished and Alessandra Ferri was left to dissolve on stage I was hit with a sadness so overwhelming I headed straight to loos to cry.

Sorry it was so wordy and sounds a little forced but I writing this was way more therapeutic that I expected. Also Cecily's doing good. Not that I know that for sure because she hasn't been on the internet for the last two weeks and I'm seriously suffering from lack of contact with her (I hope that when she reads that she feels suitably guilty). However I believe her exams have finished.

Gwendolen

January/February/March/April Disposables

This camera took forever to fill up.

The Alan Turing memorial looking creepy

I needed to fill it up

There's a crab there somewhere

This one looks like some distant planet

Manchester doesn't photograph so well

I had nothing to worry about but grass stains on my dress

PS Cecily is still alive I promise

The waves broke on the shore

"To be loved by Susan would be to be impaled by a bird's sharp beak, to be nailed to a barnyard door. Yet there are moments when I could wish to be speared by a beak, to be nailed to a barnyard door, positively, once and for all" - from Virginia Woolf's 'The Waves'

From my tumblr

Reading Fleur's post on how she is not ready to leave school has made me realise that for me the opposite is true. I'm over the school system. From now on it's just revising and doing past papers, which when done in a classroom just drags on forever, and inevitably ends with just having rather non-consequential conversation with whoever I sit near and then feeling guilty at the lack of progress I have achieved. I'm over having to leave to my house at 7:15 each morning, because it seems like the moment I get back in the evening I have to go back to school. The routine is mindless and I want to be free of it. I'm over being aware that it's going to end soon, but it not being the end yet.

 I sometimes forget that I went to a different school from years 7-11. The last year and half has been so much more happy and tangibly significant.

Easter Holiday reading list: Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf // The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald //  The Waves -  Virginia Woolf // Dracula - Bram Stoker // The Opposite of Loneliness - Marina Keegan

Dancing in the centre of a noun

Hey Readers,

 Here are some photos I took whilst on an a 10am walk a couple of days ago

 Rather a lot has happened since I last did a written post (which I believe was on New Year's Eve) due to the terrible neglect this poor old blog has had to suffer. I turned 18 that was happily insignificant but simultaneously most enjoyable. It was wonderful when Cecily and a friend from our old school were rapid firing questions to me on the train home as the final minutes of 17 ticked into the first of 18 to establish who I was at that moment in my life.

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking

– 'Goodbye to Berlin' by Christopher Isherwood

Breathing Ritual by Globelamp

 I have an offer from my first choice of University, which is exciting, confusing and scary. There was a offer-holder's open day at my college last weekend and I have fallen in love with it. Now I am slightly regretting applying for a gap year, but at least if I don't get the grades I need I will have a whole year to mature, reflect and hopefully come to the realisation that I'm in the lucky position of being middle-class/well-educated/white/living in the West and therefore probably whatever happens my life will be ok, and I can work to make it fabulous.

 The people there were also pretty rad. There was a biologist and medic who spent a five minute conversation ignoring and interrupting me which wasn't so great, but then I found some of the girls I had met at interview as well as other English/related subjects people and we all got on so well so quickly it was a bit scary. I can't help but feeling that any friendships I make at University will not be as beautiful as the ones I have now. In a few years I'll look back at this and pity myself for lack of knowledge of the wonders that await me I'm sure. But what if I don't look back and think that?

Dann fand ich nicht die richtige Gelegenheit, die richtige Stunde, das richtige Wort. Schließlich war es zu spät

– Der Vorleser by Bernhard Schlink

 Eight weeks or so remain of school. I keep on telling myself I will write more journal entries just recording school days or take pictures on my disposables of everyday school moments, but I never do

Gwendolen