Where is Home?

Until very recently, I had always been very firm about where my home was. I had always lived in a little corner of North West London, and had only moved once in my life about 5 miles down the road. Then in the space of a month, my parents uprooted to the South Coast, and I moved again back up to the Midlands. It was a bit hectic and rather confusing, and I’m still trying to process it all.

I’ve been at University here for about 6 weeks now, and I seem to be coping relatively well so far. Things are busy, but I quite like them being busy and I’ve made a group of friends and enjoying my course. There is one thing that has been bothering me since I’ve moved here though, and that’s that I’m not really sure where home even is anymore.

For most of my friends here, it’s simple; they’ve always lived in the same area and still do, and that’s home. It’s a little more complicated on my side. For me, I think, London will always be my home. It’s my favourite city in the world, it’s where I grew up and where so many life-changing events happened to me. It’s where all of my friends are in the holidays and everything is familiar. I don’t have to think about how the tube works or the times of the buses, how late everything is open or where I need to go to get something. It’s a diverse and open-minded city with things going on all the time that I can just escape into and find something new. I’ve been to visit a few times since I’ve been at University, and every time I step off at St. Pancras station, I feel so happy and relaxed.

I did spend three weeks in that town on the south coast, and whilst I know all my stuff and some of my family is there, I just can’t call it home. The house is unfamiliar and not mine, it takes a half hour walk to get to any form of civilisation and I have nobody there besides my dad and some of my stepfamily. Part of this struggle, I think, is that I haven’t been able to go back since I moved to University, for a number of reasons. The first is that, I just find it easier to settle into a place if I don’t leave it for a while. Second is money and time; a train from the midlands to the south coast is not direct, nor cheap and I can’t really afford the train tickets nor the 5 hour journey to get there. There have been many weekends here my friends have headed off home and it’s been making me think about where that is a lot.

Last weekend I spent my first nights away from my University town, in the centre of London with a friend. I was worried that it was going to make me homesick and not want to go back, that I was going to go back to University and hate every minute I wasn’t back in London.

But, as I boarded the train due north and sat in my seat, I had an odd, comforting thought that I couldn’t wait to get back to my pokey student room and see my friends and get back to the town. I was filled with relief that my excursion back to my home city hadn’t made me incredibly sad, and in fact had made me realise how attached I had become to this little city in a few short weeks. It’s definitely no London, and I have to say I do miss being able to attend all the book events I used to when I lived in London. But for now, this little city in the middle of the country really isn’t such a bad place to call my new temporary home.

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My Sexuality.

I’ve known that I was a little different to other girls in regards to romance and sex from a fairly early age. I remember having sleepovers at 13 and we’d all go round in a circle and confess who our crush was. And when it came to me, I always drew a blank. I had no answer, and my friends thought I was being coy and no fun. But the truth was that I just didn’t like any of the boys at our school.

As a teen, I put this down to having a lot going on in my life and not having the time to focus on sex and boys. I mean, my mum was sick with cancer and a lot of my free time was taken up with that, which was a perfectly viable explanation for my lack of hormones and attraction towards guys right?

Over my school years I was asked out by a few guys, all of which I turned down. Partly because I was point blank terrified of commitment, but also because I wasn’t attracted to them. When people asked me about celebrity crushes, I grabbed for names and said the obvious ones like Zac Efron and Sam Claflin (although I’ll admit, both of these crushes were pretty genuine). When we talked about ‘girl crushes’ though, I became so animated. I had about 5 actresses and musicians ready to go in my head, and I remember having these ‘girl crushes’ as far back as the age of 12.

Turns out, they were just the regular kind of crush.

I didn’t realise I was bisexual until I was about 18. When I tell people this, they’re pretty shocked and often respond with ‘Surely you knew sooner?’ and maybe subconsciously I did. But heteronormativity is rampant in our society, and whilst I supported LGBTQ+ rights from a young age, I never let myself think that I was maybe a member of the community too.

As soon as I realised this, everything in my life made so much more sense. All that jealousy about when some of my friends got boyfriends, all the actresses I looked up to and adored, all the female characters I loved and were obsessed with. As soon as I realised I was attracted to girls, there was no way of denying it.

It’s taken me two and a half years to become fully comfortable with the label and myself. There have been many times I’ve questioned it, and I’ve spent a lot of time, especially in recent months, questioning whether I am in fact bisexual or gay, but I have and do sometimes experience attraction to men – just not nearly as much as I do with women.

I still struggle telling people in real life sometimes. There are a number of times in the past four weeks at University I could’ve just told people, but instead I sat back instead, stumbling over the words. I told myself before coming to University that I wanted to be totally open about my sexuality, but when it comes to the crunch I panic. It almost makes me angry that I even have to tell people, that people just assume I’m straight unless I explicitly state otherwise.

My journey with my sexuality has been long and one that is still ongoing. But I know that even compared to last year I am so much more comfortable and happy with who I am, and hopefully that can continue into the future.

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A Gap Year in Review: Change is Good.

I’ve been sitting in my new (and temporary) bedroom all day thinking how to put a post together talking about my time out of education. How do I summarise 20 months of working and travelling and adventures into one post? I can’t, realistically. So we’ll just talk about something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

My time out of education has taught me a lot and changed me as a person without a doubt. My stepmum even today commented on how different I was to the girl I was 2 years ago, about to go to University thinking it would be the best years of my life and would make everything better.

Well. It didn’t exactly go like that.

One Term. That’s how long I managed before all of the mental health crap I had been burying and burying throughout my GCSEs and A Levels came bubbling to the surface. It started off with bouts of sadness and self-hatred amongst other things. As I was leaving University, the crippling anxiety started that took over my life for six months. I was seeing a therapist for my grief at the time but we ended up mostly talking about my panic attacks.

And then I went to America. Three whole months of sun, summer and camping. Sounds great right? Well it was those things. But there were also tears, work reports, fighting and a lot of soul searching. My time at Camp was something I am eternally grateful for because it was what I needed, but it wasn’t all fun and games. And it was only after camp that I realised what it was that had been bothering me for so long.

I was completely stuck in the past. Long story short, and I’m sure I will make a more in depth post about this at some point, my mum died of cancer when I was 15 years old. She was my best friend. And I wanted to make her proud, even if she wasn’t here anymore to physically witness it. I wanted to be the girl I was when she was alive; bubbly, outgoing, lots of friends and very active. Since she passed away I had become more introverted and started staying in more talking to my friends online than going out on hikes and horse riding and all sorts.

I went to camp with all these expectations of making her proud, being a specialist counsellor who knew her stuff. It became apparent very quickly that after 4 years of barely being around horses, my knowledge was lacklustre and not up to scratch. They were pretty okay about it to be honest, offering me to change positions and when I look back on it I was rather rude. And it was because I felt like a failure, like I’d let her down and couldn’t be the person I was.

I know now that people grow. We change and develop and it’s just a part of life. Growing away from old friends, old hobbies and haunts is natural and perfectly okay. Yes there are things I miss about my old self and life, but things now aren’t so bad. I’m definitely not as ignorant as I once was, I’m far more confident and happy to spend time with myself too, and I’m also part of an awesome bookish community. I’m far more laid back than I was at the start of my time off (probably because I haven’t had a ridiculous essay deadline in 20 months!) and I like to think I’m a lot less judgemental of people than I was. Personal growth isn’t always something I’ve been able to deal with very well, constantly nostalgic for the past and my life before my mum died. But I know now that change is good, even if it doesn’t seem like it at the time, and I’m proud of who I am today.

The next time I write a post on here, I’ll be in a dorm room in a small city in the middle of the country I’ve visited approximately once. I know now that University isn’t going to be the best thing ever, that all those wild expectations I used to have won’t necessarily come true. But it’s a new chapter and I’m excited to see where it takes me.

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My Journey with Anxiety

About 20 months ago, I dropped out of University. There were a multitude of reasons this, but the biggest was probably my rapidly deteriorating mental health and anxiety.

I had my first panic attack on the evening of the 8th of January 2015. I won’t go into details but due to also being a hypochondriac I came to the conclusion that I was dying, went to a hospital less than 8 hours before my English exam for them to tell me that no, I was not dying, and that my body had just panicked a bit. It was probably due to my exam and other things going on in my life at the time, and that it would probably be a one off experience.

For the next 6 months, I had a panic attack almost every single day.

There were days when I would have up to five or six in a day, days when all I would do is go from my bed to the sofa downstairs and back up again in the evening. I was terrified to leave my house, terrified to be separated from my safe place and my safe people. I was exhausted all the time due to my body being constantly on edge and my appetite decreased dramatically. I was miserable and scared, and what was worse was that nobody was taking me seriously. Doctors fobbed me off with anxiety meds but no diagnosis, my dad would tell me to ‘just calm down and stop worrying’. If you have any experience with anxiety, you know this is the worst thing to say.

Over those six months, through a combination of therapy and learning to recognise my thought processes, the panic somewhat lessened. I went from 5 panic attacks a day to one. I got a job in a fast food restaurant in my local town which gave me a purpose and something to keep my mind occupied, although there were many nights I ended up calling my dad on my breaks sobbing that I couldn’t make it through my shift.

With time and therapy though, I began to understand what was happening to me. I learned that when the panic kicked in, my brain was thinking illogically and that by doing sums or counting I could force my brain to think logically to help me calm down. I figured out what my triggers were, things including large crowds of people in a small space, heights, illness and feeling generally out of control. By understanding my triggers and what to do when my anxiety was running high, my panic attacks became somewhat less frequent and more manageable.

In June 2015, I went to the USA for three months. I spent two months working at a summer camp and one month travelling. In my time there, I had one, very minor panic attack in a Walmart that I managed to get a hold of within 2 minutes. With the stress of camp dynamics and having a job where I was ‘On’ for 22 hours a day, I didn’t really have the time to panic, and so my anxiety took a back seat.

When I returned home in September of last year, everything was great. I managed to get a job within a month and I was much calmer and more relaxed than I had been before I went. Around December however, the panic attacks started returning.

They were small at first, things I could handle with two minutes and a sit down in the stock room. But then at the end of a shift in about April a major one hit. Luckily it came on about 5 minutes before I had to clock out so I rode it out and immediately went into the changing rooms to do my counting and breathing exercises that always brought me back eventually. It took me half an hour to calm down, and I spent the rest of the evening in bed because I was so exhausted.

Thankfully, I haven’t had a big one since then. I still sometimes can feel my heart racing or feel a bit dizzy, but I can usually intervene with the exercises I’ve learned help me before it escalates. However in about a month I will be returning to University, thrown into a city I don’t know with people I don’t know and I’m scared it’s going to flare up again. I’m well aware that these past few months have been a good patch and that I will probably be dealing with anxiety for the rest of my life. But that’s ok; hopefully through understanding my triggers, therapy and knowing what works to calm me down, I can take on University and life and not let my anxiety hold me back in the process.

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