Lately I’ve been feeling deeply melancholy, and I can’t even
quite figure out why. Perhaps it’s the darkness of autumn, or the rain and
clouds that hover low in the sky like a smothering blanket. Or perhaps it’s
just me, just my natural temperament. I always thought I was a naturally
positive, optimistic person, as if I could only be one thing, that how I was on
the surface was the same as who I was in my depth, but lately I have come to
realise that that isn’t the case. On the surface I seem pessimistic, and
beneath that is a layer of hopefulness, of optimism, and right at my core there
is yet another layer of pessimism. Which am I? Am I hopeful or hopeless?
Sometimes it’s hard to tell.
It’s becoming harder and harder not to become completely
embittered about life. It feels as though everything I want is just being
pushed further and further into the future, and I have nothing to look forward
to in my life (apart from the fact that the Mockingjay movie comes out in three
weeks!!! :D #justsayin’). I have hopes and dreams and plans of how I want my
life to go, but right now they’re less than a shadow – they not real to me
except in my dreams, or my daydreams.
I like to think that I have a nice firm grip on reality, but
I spend at least 80 percent of my time daydreaming and making little stories in
my head of how things will turn out, and they almost never happen the way I
want them to. I can only think of one occasion where one of my daydreams
actually happened. I had been thinking about someone I knew and hadn’t seen in
a while, and my mind just drifted off into flights of fantasy (the way it
always does). I saw him a couple of days later, and it went almost identical to
how it was in my head. But that was the exception, not the rule. Generally, if
something I want to happen does
happen, it will happen with a twist, making it something that I don’t really
want. Because life’s fair, you know?
The thing about my unrealistically optimistic daydreams is
that it’s not that unlikely that they will happen; it’s just about circumstance
and timing. I know what I want, and when I want something, I will go after it
with all I’ve got. I’m not going to use the term obsession, but that’s pretty
much it. I don’t really have any hobbies – unless you count writing, reading,
and over-thinking – so when I decide there is something I want to gain or
achieve, I will work towards it with all the strength I possess.
I know what I want to do in my life:
- I
want to go to
- I
want to travel all over the world, and go to places like
- I want to get married
- I want to have children (this is all obviously when I’m at least a decade older than I am now); so long as they’re not evil monsters.
- I want to write loads of books which will become world-renowned best-sellers that millions of people will read and fall in love with and see themselves in. I don’t want to be famous or anything, but I want my books to be famous.
- I want to have a really successful career, whether that’s as an author or as anything else I choose to be.
- When I grow old, I want to be one of those cool old ladies that are really eccentric and people are all like “oh my gosh, what on Earth has Granny done now?”
- Mostly I just want to be middle-aged. I don’t know why, but that is my life aspiration. I want to be late thirties-early forties, married, with like four kids or something, I want to write loads of books and stuff, but I just want to be settled in a nice, quiet (but still awesome and passionate) routine after having spent twenty years doing loads of amazing things.
- I also want to go to protests and wave placards in the air and fight for a better world.
Out of all the things on the list, how many of them aren’t
possible? (Marriage, maybe?) Even going to Oxford , which seems quite a challenge isn’t
that impossible. To study English, I need to get three A grades at A Level. I’m
two months into Year 12, and my current grades are this:
English Lit: B
History: D (cries a thousand
tears)
Media: B
Philosophy: A (hell yes!!!!!!!!)
Apart from the trauma that is my History grade (it
physically hurts me to get such an awful grade) I’m pretty close to three As
already. I have close to two years to get the grades I need, and, on top of
that, because I am (sadly) in a Comprehensive school, I have 80 percent more
chance of getting into Oxford or Cambridge than somebody from
a private school, because the top universities have to pay a fine if they don’t
let “ordinary” people in. So dream no.1 isn’t as impossible as it sometimes
feels.
Dream number two is probably slightly more expensive, but
still completely possible, as are all my dreams (okay, I don’t know how
possible it is for my books to become world-renowned best-sellers, but hey,
never say never).
It is my short-term goals which feel as though they’re blocked
by insurmountable obstacles, because these goals aren’t things you can achieve
by getting good grades or saving up money. My current goals are this:
- To no longer be isolated. To have friends who understand me, who hear me when I’m quiet, who accept me for me, and who choose me again and again. I want to find my tribe, the people I belong with, people who I click with.
- I want people at school to stop talking crap about me, and I want random thirteen-year-olds who I don’t even talk to to stop laughing at me for stupid things which really aren’t their business.
- I want more people to read my books.
- I want to be happy (which I’m not).
- I also want things such as: to get paid more; to be able to drive (only three months till I can start learning); to get a car once I’ve learned to drive; to do more fun things (I don’t even know what fun is); to have more spare time, rather than writing five essays a week and falling asleep the moment I get home from school. But these little things aren’t impossible, they just take time. It’s the rest of the list which doesn’t feel possible.
That’s why I feel sad: because I
feel lonely even when I’m with other people, and because so many people laugh
at me, and because I’m unhappy. I’m so unhappy. I don’t connect properly with
people my age. No matter how hard I try, I just don’t fit in. I’m not saying I’m
special, or that I’m better or worse than anyone else, and I’m not
romanticizing my differences, or anything else that people have said I
apparently do in my blogs; I am simply saying how I feel, and how I feel is
completely alone, because I don’t know how to be normal.
I hate being the age that I am (I’ve
already mentioned that I’d rather be middle-aged). I don’t want to be so young,
because I don’t feel like I am. I want to have life-experience, and I want to
have been to lots of places and seen lots of things. I still want an amazing
future, but I also want an amazing past.
I have come to realise that time
is the answer to practically all of my problems, but the problem with time is
that it’s not in the present moment, it’s something in the future, and I don’t
know when it will be, and until then I have to find a way to make the best of
what I have right now, rather than being so miserable about things that will
one-day end. Even school, which feels like it will last forever, will be
finished in twenty months, at least four of which will be half-terms/holidays,
plus two days off for weekends, so that twenty months quickly diminishes, and
isn’t half as much time as it seems. Before I know it I’ll (hopefully) be going
to University (hopefully Oxford ),
and my life will be completely different (hopefully). I have so much to hope
for, so much to wish for, and maybe my hopes and wishes aren’t real right now,
but one day they could be. So until then I shall live in my little dream world,
and revel in the fact that Taylor Swift released an album a couple of days ago
(and quote lyrics from that album on every possible occasion), and I shall strive
to get the grades I need, and when my twenty-month sentence is done, I shall be
out of here, and move on to greater things (hopefully).
And if all else fails, I can
become a hermit in the Scottish Highlands, or the Himalayas, or maybe the North
Pole, and I can get a really big cat to snuggle, and read lots of books, and
everything will be okay.
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