A year ago yesterday (to the date), I moved to university.
(It is because of said university that I am so late in updating; I have just moved back.)
At the time, I thought I was a confident being, and knew the world, and would handle it all really very well. I was incorrect. Now that sentence and the title of this blog post combined would lead you to suspect I believe that to be true of myself now, but that isn't right either.
My first year at university was not what I expected, that is definitely true, and whilst I am honest about that, I now prefer to focus on how I've changed, and positively. My school always claimed to create confident young women (especially if you read the blurb in the prospectus) and it did, but it was a confidence not necessarily designed for the alcohol-fuelled lifestyle of the fresher. That isn't to say that people from my school don't fit into it, because the opposite can actually be true, but this first full academic year out of school and in university has actually wizened me up to the happenings of the real world much more, and how to deal with it.
In one year I have learned actually how to apply the age-old advice of "be yourself, and do what you want to do, not what everybody else wants to do" (which is why I am currently writing this blog and waiting for Dragons' Den to come on BBC Two rather than queueing for a club night out with the freshers). Not that I have ever been forced into going out and getting hammered, because my school has given me enough backbone to not be forced into things, but there is, inevitably, a sense of pressure to do something that everybody else is doing. However, when that is a very common way to spend your time, it simply is not very easy for everybody to branch out and find other things to do, and meet new people, when you're completely new to a city (as I was to Exeter) and feeling rather more alone and homesick than you had expected. It is that that one must do though if you are unhappy. I thought I knew that but did not act upon it soon enough - and so this year is that year. I have rediscovered that I like to write, for example, and that is what I shall do, in whatever way possible, and whether it is read by others or not. If you do not already feel happy with what you are doing, go and find what will make you happy.
But although I have begun to decipher things and sort others out, I'm not perfect. I worry. All the time. To try and break that a bit, I surround myself with enough things and people about which not to worry, and I prepare myself, and organise I fail in the stereotype of my star sign (Aquarius) because I cannot leave things unplanned. Right now I'm planning something... That sounds ominous, doesn't it? Of course it does not always work out that way. But another old adage comes into play here: fake it, until you make it.
So, those are just a couple of things in my head as I begin my second year, and it will be highly interesting to read this back in another year's time before I start a year in a foreign country, and the year after that as I begin my final year in university. I would not ask to relive my first year, but I no longer regret it because I am so much better-off now than I was, and it is with this new-found knowledge that I start my second year. I have learned, thankfully not too late in the proceedings, that as university is supposed to take up some of the best years of your life, it really seems a shame to waste all of them. One was quite enough.
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