-0th week - Bring it on.

It's a Saturday night. This is not just any Saturday night though. No. This is the Saturday before the Sunday that marks the start of 0th week of Michaelmas of final year. In my head I still feel like a fresher. I'm still just as unprepared and oblivious to what is to come. Or at least I'm fooling myself into thinking I am. The truth is that this time it's completely different. This time, I know. I know the horrors that await me; the all-nighters, the panics searching for rooms minutes before tutorials, the terrifying moments when your tutor asks you a question and your bind blanks, the hours of reading and re-reading, thinking and over-thinking, feeling the penny-drop and then sensing it slip away just as quickly. But before all that, I still have to overcome collections. I can imagine it already. My french tutor Genevieve's face as we enter the first class and she purses her lips together, rolls her eyes, lets out a long sigh and says, "Well I thought after the year abroad you would all have shown miraculous improvement, but it seems I was mistaken." I can already pre-empt the regret I'll feel at having wasted these precious few weeks before term begins, enjoying my freedom instead of preparing properly to make the next 8 weeks a little more bearable. It's only natural.

On the bright side, my new university house is just as I want it. I have made sure my home environment will be warm and comforting to help me through it all. I have a bike and lights and a basket. I bought a bookcase, carried it home and put it together myself (OK that's a lie - what actually happened is that I TRIED to fix it together myself, but in the end I was forced to leave the construction to my lovely handyman of a housemate, and he did it beautifully.) We now have a microwave, a toaster, a washing up bowl and drainer. The hot water works and the internet is soon to be installed. The bill-paying has been organised and I have tried to manage my finances as well as I can. All of this takes time, so much time. Simple pleasures are not so simple it seems. It's taken me two weeks to get all of this in order. Imagine if I had turned up just a few days before term began and had to deal with all that, on top of everything else. That's how I know I'm a finalist and not a fresher. I might think I'm unprepared but in fact, I'm not; I realise that last minute reading isn't going to help me now. What's more important is that I make sure that everything else in my life is in order so that when the work begins properly I can focus fully and completely on that. No distractions. Obviously I have been doing a little light reading to calm my conscience, but sorting all of these other small yet time-consuming details has kept me preoccupied for the past few weeks and now all I have left to do is reflect on what's to come. I can't deny that it's dragging on a little now and I'm tired of being worried and anxious.

Final year, I promise to give you all my focus and attention. You might scare the hell out of me, make me sick, wear me down and give me a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach, but you know what, I'm ready for you. Bring it.

The vocational crisis.

It's the summer holidays. I'm in Sicily. So why can I not sleep? Well, it's not just any old summer holiday, it's the summer holiday before finals. Which means it could potentially be the last summer of it's kind. Who knows if next summer I will have already entered into the world of work, I may not even have a summer holiday. It's definitely unlikely that I will ever have a summer holiday as long as the ones that I have been used to all my life. I didn't realize how lucky I was until now. Being a grown up is going to suck. Maybe I won't find a job though. Except then I'll have lots of time but no money, and that's probably worse. Hmm. I think I've figured out why I can't sleep anyway; Since I arrived in Palermo, everybody I have met has asked me the same questions: what are you doing now then? And what will you do after you graduate? Such a stomach churning question for someone who has no clue. I need to find a solution but every time I do, I change my mind a few minutes later. Maybe that's the beauty of life though; not knowing where you will end up or what you will do. It's surprisingly exciting.
I remember when I was little girl, being sat in church listening to a priest talking about vocations. He told the story of how he finally heard his "calling" one day. He went to mass one day and suddenly had this feeling of duty and love and that was it. He knew the only person he could marry was God. I remember wondering when I would find my calling and where? In a dream? From an old lady? From a little boy/girl? An angel? Or would I wake up one morning and just know? From then on, I carried on with my life, just kind of following the social norms, plodding along, hoping one day it would all suddenly become clear; The meaning of my life.
   I chose my GCSEs, then I chose my A levels. As time went by, my options kept becoming narrower and narrower, and then one day I found myself packing the car and going of to university. I still believed that by graduation I would know what I was going to go on to do. I took a kind of que sara' sara' outlook on life.
  Except now I'm in final year, and I'm starting to feel a little bit anxious. Nothing is any clearer. I haven't got a clue, not the slightest idea. It's starting to bother me more than ever. I feel like I should have had this calling by now. Most of my friends have, in fact, when they chose their degrees they had already pretty much figured it out. But I have a languages degree; that could be used for so many different things. That's one of the reasons I chose it in fact. It was the only course that accommodated my indecision as to what I wanted to do after university. Now all the social conventions of what people do in life can't help me anymore. There's no clear structure for me anymore. After university it's just "work" or "Masters/PhD" but work is such a HUGE umbrella-word. Finally I'm free and no-one is telling me what to do anymore, but am I happy? No. I've followed the rules all my life. Now there is no one telling me what to do now and so I'm lost without instructions. I need to step up to the plate and decide for myself. There is no other option.
   Funnily enough, I went back to my hometown and discovered the very priest that gave that sermon on vocations is actually no longer a priest. He fell in love with a woman in the parish and left the Church. So now I'm screwed. I spent all these years believing this "call" would come, only to discover it was a false alarm anyway! He might have heard his calling, but he heard a different one later. Maybe I should find comfort in this though. Maybe we have more than one calling. That would mean that even if I have missed mine, or the first one is delayed, I'll be ok. I'll fall into something for a while and then one day I'll have another calling and change the direction of my life altogether. Maybe that's what makes life exciting. Nothing is set in stone. Humans are designed to be adaptable, we can change career paths all the time.
   Right now, I'm beginning to wonder if writing might be my calling. I mean its 3.48am and I can't sleep and  felt this sudden need to write down everything I was thinking/feeling. Maybe it's what I'm destined to do? Or maybe I just need therapy. In any case, I feel better for doing it. On that note, I'm going to try to sleep now. If my 'call' comes tomorrow, I need to be awake and ready.

Beating my blog-writing phobia...

Most people write blogs when they do exciting things, like travelling, going on a gap year or starting a new venture in life; job, marriage, kids. I just finished my year abroad, and as much as I would have loved to have a blog to look back on, detailing every exciting experience and observation I encountered during my year in Paris, the truth is that I was far too busy having fun to actually keep a daily/weekly/monthly blog. I had good intentions (I set up the blog page,) but the stories I had to tell just kept accumulating and the longer I left it, the less justice I felt I could give the experience. I could never express the emotions/ excitement/ fear/ frustration/ homesickness etc. I had felt. The more time passed, the more my memory faded too. Luckily I kept a very lazy diary in which I documented the highlights of the year with all the personal nitty-gritty, girly-gossip-style stories included. So, when I'm old and wrinkly I can flick through those pages to remember what I used to be like when I was young, free and foolish.
You see, that was always my problem with blog writing; a kind of insecure, self-conscious perfectionism and indecision in selecting my target audience. A blog written for friends and family has a very different tone/content to a blog written for the general public. And so, in fear of never writing a blog at all, I have decided to ignore all of these details, stop thinking about who will read what I have written and just get down to business and write the blooming thing.
So, without further ado, here it is: my blog, for whoever wants to read it. At times it may be personal and others perhaps even useful, given that I'm about to start my finals it will most-likely often be used as an outlet for stress, there may be strong language and there will most-definitely be long-windedness/tangents, so please do bear with me and my train of thought. I hope you enjoy it, although I wouldn't get too hopeful... given my blogging history it's possible I will give up after a week. Anyway- here goes...