Breaking up

I always come back to this space to process and mark the downfalls of life. The last six months have seen continuous knock back after knock back. Not even really just ‘knock backs’, but entire walls of everything I’d built crumbling down, with one bad piece of news after another being delivered relentlessly to me.

As a whole, I can appreciate the majority of 2020 hasn’t exactly been peachy for anyone. I wish I could take solace in the fact the entire globe is living the same reality of this pandemic. In my immediate circles, though, I seem to have taken the brunt of the bad luck.

I lost my job and subsequently moved out of my flat in London. I lost the life I’d built myself having finally achieved it only a year prior. In more recent times, my two year relationship ended. The worst part – though sometimes it feels like a glimmer of good (it changes every day) – is that that love was not entirely lost. To me, that seems like a great shame, to throw something away when we still had love for each other. To not consider where we might be if the pandemic hadn’t happened, that this is all just circumstantial and not a reason to throw so much time away.

‘Pretending’ by Holly Bourne

★★★★★/5 stars

Published by Hodder & Stoughton!

April just wants her happy ending. She wants to meet a man, somehow miraculously get past date number five and forget everything that came before. When yet another date turns sour, though, and her previous trauma looks to well and truly get its claws into her, April hatches a plan to become the woman every man dreams of — easy-going, effortlessly beautiful, certainly not clingy, and, of course, no emotional baggage in sight. April becomes Gretel and Gretel meets Joshua. However, when Joshua begins to challenge everything April thought she knew, and feelings start to fester, it might just be about time to face up to all the things April has been trying to keep under control

2019 – the year everything changed

Usually by now I’ve already written most of what I want to say for my final post of the year. Admittedly, I haven’t blogged an awful lot this year, which is a shame because there’s been plenty to document. But here and there there are pieces documenting 2019, the year everything changed. I also filmed short video clips, which I’ve compiled together into a sort of summary of the year. That can function largely as the highlights reel, because from that you’d think that the back and forth between Bath and London over and over again, the constant reprisals of my boyfriend and the sheer amount of food would make this year a perfect one.

Crying in London (a continuation of feeling lonely in your twenties)

If I’m being completely honest, I think I’ve cried more since I moved to London than before; before when I was stuck in a rut, in a job I felt very unhappy in, working for a man who really made me question the morals of certain individuals out there. It wasn’t a good place to be in, not entirely. And I thought that what I was working towards would be. I thought that I would move to the big city, the one I’d been pining for since graduation, and that everything would miraculously fit into place. I would be happy and fulfilled, or at least a damn sight closer to feeling it than I did stuck in the South West in my less than ideal circumstances.

But here I am, confessing that actually I’ve probably sobbed and crumbled more since I moved than…yeah, we’re dubbing it ‘before’, apparently. Like the bible timeline, but less, I don’t know, miracles. And that confession somehow feels like an admission that I’ve failed. I’m not sure you can consider it a failure, feeling a bit sad, feeling a bit lost and a lot lonely. Isn’t that what it is to be in your twenties in 2019? But still it remains that some part of me has somehow failed.