#12 Turning the page to new chapters - moving on and getting over...or moving back in, I guess??

06/24

Welcome back to another blog post on Off The Record, and true to the style it’s a lil messy but very heartfelt. And it’s the first one written and published on the new self-hosted website! Took me a while to set up everything and transfer the whole blog onto this website and I’m really proud of how it turned out and looking forward to getting better and better at this as I figure it out more and more. While transferring posts, I’ve been reading through some older ones and realized that they used to be a bit more structured so I’ll try to get back to that a bit. Hope you enjoy 🙂

Where I’m at:

♫ Truth!! Dare!! Spin!! Bottles!! i could eat that girl for lunch 😉 what if he’s written MINE on my Upper Thigh?? he laughs at all my jokes and he saaays i’m sooo ameeericannn H-O-T-T-O-G-O that’s that me espressoo then you moved onnn immediately BUM BUM BUM i beg you don’t embarrass me motherfucker ♫ – That’s how I’m doing. That’s my brain right now. All. The. Time. It’s great. Good times.

The way my life has been for the last few months it’s only gonna be for another week. Isn’t that crazy? For context, I moved out when I was eighteen, right after high school, to another city for university. And I am moving back to my home town very soon. So, I’ve been starting to notice that I’m doing certain things for the last time, or at least the last time in a while. Always a weird feeling when you’re closing a chapter and opening a new one.

I’ve also had a crazy cough that would keep me up at night so now my sleep schedule is weirdly shifted, I’m awake till early morning and then sleep till noon. I’m trying to work on it now that my cough has gotten better but my disciple right now is wavering. It also doesn’t help that I have been doing late shifts at the hospital. I like late shifts but the weird thing is that, if I have multiple in a row (which is what usually happens), I’ll get home when everyone is asleep and get up when everyone has already left for work or school. So I might live in the same house as my family but we won’t see each other for days. Feels absurd, like I’m living in a parallel world.

The weather has been all over the place as well, one day it’s pouring and you might freeze with only a rain jacket and the next you die from a heat stroke if you open a window. Basically, life has been feeling a bit absurd and surreal and also so eventful. Did I mention that I almost drowned? I took a stand up paddling course and we were supposed to stay in the side leg of a river but there was so much water and a ton of current and I ended up falling into the current of the main river (longer story) right before some pillars and a ship and a bridge. Long story short, I was lucky. After a short panic the course leader calmed me down, helped me back up on the board and instructed me how to get around all the obstacles unscathed and I was just fine.

After summer I’ll be so busy with studying again. I’m excited to be a student again but now that my constant state isn’t stress and tension anymore (time really does help with that because who would’ve thought I’d get here when they saw me a year ago?), I’m also starting to feel more awareness about the fact that right now I have lots of free time on my hand and I could in fact be doing things that I have been wanting to do for so long. Like writing. Stories I mean, not the blog. Actually both, I guess. But yeah, I really want to work on writing some stories over the summer, even if I end up not doing anything with them. I’ve always wanted to be a writer and it’s time to figure out if it’s still something I enjoy and want to continue pursuing for real.

I’ve been rereading the (two thirds of a) book that I wrote as my matura project at the end of high school and it’s so good actually haha, sometimes I can’t believe that I actually wrote all that. And the best thing are all the little details that I curated with something else in mind that you’ll probably only pick up on if you’re invested enough to reread and that’s just so fun. I love all the connections, it’s a whole web of story threads and puzzle pieces and I hope that if I ever do publish anything that there will be at least one stranger that will like it enough to notice and figure out all the details. But even without anyone else involved, that might be the most fun part of writing.

What else has been happening? I started listening to the ‘the rest is history’ podcast, totally recommend. I’ve also been listening to the drama queens podcast (I’ve been watching the TV show One Tree Hill and the actresses of the three female main characters have that podcast together), which is so insightful and the three of them are so cool and inspiring, and I have also once again realized that I am so fucking young lol. And I’m so excited to be young but I’m also so excited for my 30s and 40s and 50s, isn’t that fun? It’s so fun to be a woman with other women. Women are amazing. And age anxiety is absolutely a thing because patriarchy, but listening to women that are older than me talk about their experiences and their achievements and their relationships with friends and family and collogues and so on, it’s just also so exciting that one day I might have a family of my own and be established in a job or an industry and know my shit and have friends that I’ve known forever and still meet new ones and. It’s just exciting that there are so many stages of life yet to come. And I’m trying to appreciate all the beautiful things about my age now, but a lot of it is doing things for the first time and trying to figure them out and realizing that you actually have no clue about anything and wishing you could be a kid again. Lol. I guess that is part of the fun though. Twenties are messy and lonely and confusing but that is part of their magic. Right? I guess?

Moving:

We are already on topic haha. Today I wanna blog a bit about living situations in your twenties. Or mine specifically and my feelings about ahahah cuz this is my blog after all lol.

I’m only 20, so very early twenties indeed, and I’m moving back home, maybe for the last months or years of my life that I get to live with my parents and my siblings, all of us together in the same house, and that is so so special. And I think it’s especially special because I’ve kinda let go of the idea that that might happen again. Two years ago I was so eager to move out, get away, make my own life in my own place happen. And the fact that I thought I’d never get this again, that I’d not get to a place where I’d want or consider this again, heightens the awareness that this season of my life will probably be over for real by the next time I move out. Which makes it such a special moment in time. Being aware of what a luxurious thing it is to get to be a bit of a kid again, have my parents take care of me eating and sleeping and doing laundry and everything, having them to lean on much more directly again, is so special. Having them to ask me how my day was and to just hold me because they saw on my face that I just need a hug right now and to call me on my shit when I start self-sabotaging again. And I get to just walk into my siblings’ rooms without knocking again, get to be there when they come home and break down and promise to beat up whoever dared to hurt them, get to be there when they are so excited to go on this date and help pick out the outfit and do their hair. Being home with them, I get to share my life and their life much more directly.

And it’s not like you lose your family when you move out. God knows I called my parents when I didn’t know how the laundry machine worked or when I couldn’t figure shit out and had to make a hard decision, and I called my sister when I met someone cute or when a class was driving me crazy, and my jaw dropped when my brother facetimed with a new haircut. But you also miss so much because you are not there. And so do they. You don’t share all the little details anymore because by the time you talk again they are already irrelevant again. You get told two weeks after something happened that it did in fact happen, and you think you told them about something important, because why wouldn’t you, just to find out that actually somehow you must have forgotten. Being there is so different. You are much more involved.

And while the upside of living with family is that you are much more involved, the downside is that you are much more involved. Funny isn’t it. Family. Families are so complicated. I’ve lived by myself for two years now and I love my own space and I love the fact that I just get left alone when I draw back. But when you live with family, there’s no guarantee of personal space, not with my family anyway. Knocking? Never heard of it. And I might think I have an hour of free time, and suddenly I get roped into learning French vocab with my brother, or I might be studying and trying to focus and suddenly there is some kind of family meeting happening in my room with the worst possible timing. And I’m aware that that is whining on a high level. Because it is a luxury to be close enough to such amazing people that value you and spend time with you and ask you for help and share life with you. But I’ve also gotten used to being able to leave when the drama starts. Family can get on your nerves and bring out the worst in you more than anyone or anything else. I’m a bit scared that all the progress I have made personally, mentally, with a bit of distance that was so good for me, will go backwards, will somehow be erased. That I’ll fall back into old habits and cycles of behavior.

For a while there at the beginning when I realized that this is probably the most sensible option for a living situation it also generally felt like regressing. I’ve gotten over that quite quickly though because I’ve grown and learnt so much in the last two years, I’ve experienced so much, and so has my family. I asked my younger brother if he even remembered what it was like living with me and he said I was always in my room studying, always. And I forget sometimes but I was at such a different point mentally and it makes all the difference. Because I’d still have to study a lot but I’d take more breaks and study in different places and try to still be involved with my family’s lives and have hobbies and so on. I will never go back to that place where studying was the only thing I did. That was the epitome of unhealthy.

And so, I still look forward to moving back. I’m a community person. While I love adventure and putting myself out there, meeting new people, doing nerve-racking things I’ve never done before in places I’ve never been, I need my community to lean on and come back to. Friends and family are probably my highest priority in life. Next to health. Because with them my successes are sweeter and my frustrations are milder. Being with them reminds me that life is absolutely worth living.

I’ve been feeling a bit desolate. Is desolate the right word? Maybe not, but let’s run with it for now. Like I mentioned, I’ve developed a pretty bad cough and it’s been keeping me awake at night, tossing and turning and literally coughing my lungs out. And other than that I honestly just do not have a real reason to complain. My life is great. Which makes feeling this way harder because why can’t I just get over myself. But I’ve also in this weird period where I’m kinda floating in nothing-ness, not really working towards something, just kinda existing, and sometimes I don’t give myself enough credit for how hard that can be. How hard it can be to be “in between” things. I know that my life will change dramatically over the summer and I’m both so excited and absolutely terrified but right now I’m not there yet. I’m just kinda bopping around, waiting. Waiting for life to happen again, and that’s just such a waste. Which is why I decided to do this blog for real and why I wanna start working on stories again. I need something to do, something to achieve, something that I like, something just for myself. Because I have been waiting for a season of life where I have time for so long. For as long as I remember, really. I have always been unhealthily busy and it took me a while to learn to relax in my free time now that I have some, but relaxing and wasting away isn’t the same thing. So here I am now, with some free time, trying to fulfil a dream. And I am also acutely aware that I will miss this period of my life so much, this place, the people here. But I won’t miss the loneliness.

In a weird way, I feel like I’ve never been better and I’ve never been worse. Which is probably not true, actually. I do think I have been better and I for sure have been worse. But I do not think I have ever been more lonely than I am now.

For all my life the thought of staying in my home town made me panic, and like I said, families are just f*ing complicated. And so I studied away from home for two years in a field that it turns out I can’t imagine working in now. And I miss my friends all the time because they are all in different stages of life and they live all over the world and most importantly, they are all so busy. And most of them have partners now, which doesn’t subtract from my feeling of loneliness. And I feel behind somehow in this weird way because I have never been in a relationship. And I feel so excited for the future, and so aware that there are countless possibilities, but it’s like I’ve already started grieving all the ones that I won’t live out. I’m so afraid of wasting my potential.

I used to live in this desolate feeling. I used to feel either numb or anxious all the time, and studying was my way out of that feeling. And so now that I’ve had a few months of not studying at all, I’ve had to find new ways to cope, new ways to learn to be with myself. And I’ve gotten so much better, I’ve been so much better, I’ve been feeling so many emotions, I’ve come so far. And now suddenly I’m back here, I’m home a lot more, I’m in between things, and I forgot how awful this state of mind is. And I’m so done with it.

So I painted my nails, put on some good music, and I decided that I needed to write and get some of the desolation out. I need a freaking perspective adjustment. I’m done feeling this way. It’s time to let this feeling go.

Because that’s just life, isn’t it? Especially in your twenties. And I’m not even properly in my twenties yet. I’m half a year in. Ha. Sometimes I forget that I am only twenty. There is so much that is yet to happen, hopefully. I’ve got no idea of all the people I’ll still meet and places I’ll visit, and paths I’ll follow. And it’s hard to trust that it’ll work out. But it’s gotten easier to trust myself, to trust that I can make it work out for me. That future me can deal with whatever is coming my way. That I’ll be just fine.

You know what? Billie.

Feelin’ off when I feel fine
21 took a lifetime

People say I look happy
Just because I got skinny
But the old me is still me and maybe the real me
And I think she’s pretty

And I still cry
Cry
And you know why
skinny, billie eilish

That is exactly how I feel. Lol. It’s so fun being almost the same age as a female artist that I love because the relatability is crazy. And what an artist Billie is. And what an album she dropped. ‘SKINNY’ going into ‘LUNCH’ as well?? OH!! Hell yeah. Hell. Yeah. Happy pride month btw.

I try to live in black and white, but I’m so blue
I’d like to mean it when I say I’m over you
But that’s still not true (blue)
And I’m still so blue, oh
blue, billie eilish

That might be the word I’ve been looking for I just realized. Not desolate. Blue.

~~~

So. It’s a few days later than when I wrote all of the above, and a very close friend of mine has asked whether I want to move into a shared apartment with him and another friend. It’s affordable and of reasonable distance to uni and the rooms are great, there is even a garden. The only real downside is that there is no proper living or dining room situation but that’s alright. If they’d asked a few months ago I immediately would’ve said yes. But for reasons explored above I have grown quite fond of the idea of moving back home and having that direct connection to my family again.

Then again, I’m thinking I’m young and I’m a student and I’ll be close enough to home to just come over for a coffee and a chat, and my sister’s school is really close to where I’d live and. I might just go for it. Take a risk, see what it’s like.

How lucky am I to have two such great living options? And to know that if I move into the shared apartment and it doesn’t turn out the way I hoped it would and I decide to move out again, that I will always be welcome back home with my parents for as long as I need and want it. Love you mom and dad if you’re reading this <3

We’ll see where this goes, huh. Life is exciting and terrifying and ever changing and honestly, I will be just fine. I’ve gotten a lot better at giving myself time with decisions, thinking about all aspects of import and , asking people whose opinions I value for their thoughts, and, maybe most importantly, figuring out my emotions around the topic and their root, and then following my gut and trusting myself.

Proud moment. Life really does get better the older you get. Not linearly of course, but. I’d love to tell younger versions of myself or anyone reading this that is younger – OH MY GOD. How have I not mentioned that I saw Olivia Rodrigo in concert?!? She was so good, the show was amazing, I had so much fun. My voice was gone after and that has never actually happened to me before. That was in the phase where my my cough was pretty bad, I took so many cough drops and I was so glad that by some small miracle I was somehow able to scream every word along without suffocating. I’ve never been in a relationship but by the way I was feeling it one might have been convinced otherwise. Just thought of this because of the following lyrics:

[…] When am I gonna stop being great for my age and just start being good?
When will it stop being cool to be quietly misunderstood? […]

And when does wide-eyed affection and all good intentions start to not be enough? […]
And when are all my excuses of learning my lessons gonna start to feel sad? […]
Got your whole life ahead of you, you’re only 19
But I fear that they already got all the best parts of me […]

They all say that it gets better, it gets better the more you grow
Yeah, they all say that it gets better, it gets better, but what if I don’t?
teenage dream by olivia rodrigo

She wrote that song on the eve of her nineteenth birthday, and in concert she prefaced it by saying that she was so so anxious then and now she’s just turned twenty-one and she’s so happy and has never felt more grounded in herself and she wished she could go back and tell her younger self to breathe, and not to worry as much because it does in fact get better. And that’s what I was gonna say just now as well and it’s such a universal feeling I think in your teenage years to get so frustrated and hopeless about things never getting better but they do. There were so many young girls in the audience at the concert as well and. It must have been so valuable that she said that, that she is at a point where she is doing so much better even though she evidently felt just as anxious and blue and depressed as they might be feeling right now. Olivia rocks. Literally haha, her band is amazing and that girl performed, she was screaming and jumping and singing and dancing and it was amazing.

Remember what I said earlier about Billie and it being so fun to have amazing female artists your age? Olivia absolutely also falls into that category as well 🙂

Website narration:

I’m trying to get into the habit of writing one to two blog posts a week, we’ll see how that goes haha. I’ve been thinking, one off the record and one other. Other being a review or analysis of some kind or a piece about interesting topics like black holes or antibiotics.

Did I ever explain the name ‘off the record’? Well, it’s inspired by this podcast I listen to called ‘Goes Without Saying’ and they have a series where they have a chat “off the record” every now and again and that concept really resonated with me. It takes away the pressure I put on myself. Credit to Sephy and Wing for the name, anyway.

Wrap up:

You know what? I feel like I am complaining a lot on here ahahah. More than irl, that’s for sure. But I guess sometimes I just need the reassurance of myself that it’s valid to feel this way but it’s also then important once I’ve worked through them to realize how lucky I am. I think these off the record blog posts are sometimes very similar to my journal entries in that way. Maybe next time I’ll do one with more of an open topic, an essay of sorts on an abstract topic, like ‘freedom’ maybe. How about you and me both just show up next week and see what we got haha.

Oh, and hi Rebecca! You’re the only person that I know of that is actually reading my blog, so thank you so so much!! Was so surprised when you told me, sometimes I forget that my blog is on the internet and technically anyone could read it, and I never expect people that know me to read it. But it’s you and I trust you and I think you’re great, so I’m really excited about it!! Means a lot 🙂

Lotsa love, Skye