“

Leave your apartment looking terrible. Walk to the deli and see your usual deli guy’s eyes start to widen at your disheveled appearance. This would’ve horrified you yesterday but today it makes you smile. You’ve decided that everything that made you worry will now make you smile.

Walk with better posture. Order two helpings of dessert. Ask someone to take you to a doctor’s appointment and refuse to feel guilty about it. You would do the same for them so why should you feel like you’re putting anyone out? Stand by your opinion that The Shins are a good band even when your friends give you hell over it. This is thrilling. Openly loving The Shins has never felt so liberating.

Tell your father he’s a jerk because he is. Tell your mother that you love her because you do. Don’t tell anyone that you love them if it’s not true, if they don’t deserve it. It’s a privilege to be loved by you. Your emotional slutty days are effectively over.

”

—	How To Stop Caring So Much

I sleep in the middle of the bed

On Saturday I went to Brighton for a huge house party that all my friends were at; there was alcohol and drugs and Triston and Cat and all my favourite people and good music and good vibes. We had a barbecue first and then I got really drunk and had some narcotics and cried three times even though I'm not normally a crying type of drunk and I  felt awfully funny the next day.

Today I babysat a 7 year old boy for the first time; we watched teenage mutant ninja turtles and a silly film starring Vin Diesel and played with his soldier/knight/wizard figurines and some toy jungle animals and some toy cars and I let him eat some crisps even though I don't think he was really allowed. He told me about how sometimes his sister is annoying and about his trip to the beach with his cousin who can't drive because she nearly cut her hand off and about his best friend Harry B and he showed me his hamster called Humphrey and his bunk bed and where they kept their cutlery and where they kept their washing machine and where they kept their shoes.

Guess which one I was looking forward to more, and which one I ended up sort of having a better time doing?
Life is funny like that sometimes.

Graduation OOTD (sort of)

I'm graduating tomorrow, ooh er. Here is what I'm wearing because WHY NOT?

(without the belt)

They didn't have my shoes on the website but they're vaguely like this except the detailing is all over and silver

Photo doesn't really tell you much, colour in real life is a sort of pastel nude

YAY FOR GRADUATING

Write My Life: Secondary School (part 3)

It was at this stage in my life that I became close to my all time best friend, Cat. As much as I was still friends with my group at school, there was always so much drama and intensity with them, and a lot of the time I felt as if they didn't really 'get' my laid back, happy go lucky personality. I started to get frustrated with the way they would turn everything into a huge drama; the tensions between Anna and myself along with a very messy break up with Sophia (having only been together around a month) didn't really help matters either, so I essentially broke away from the group, along with two of the other girls, Laura and Rhianne. I felt that Laura and Rhianne were far closer to each other than they were to me, and although I have some great memories of the times we hung out together in that last year of secondary school, I also remember having that same feeling of not really 'clicking' with them.
So around this time I had grown closer with Cat, a super cool (if a bit weird and nerdy) girl  in the year below me at school who I became friends with at an equally super cool (if a bit weird and nerdy) teenage disco held in our local leisure centre at the tender ages of 12 and 13. Yep. However it was when she moved away to a tiny village the other side of Reading that we both agree made us realise how much fun we had hanging out together. In fact I missed it so much I would trek the nearly 2 hour journey by train and bus every weekend to go visit her, where we would generally stay up all night watching bad cheesy horror films and drinking way too much energy drink (which remain to this day probably my all time favourite memories from being a teenager).
And for the first time since I had moved out of London, I felt like I really clicked with someone. We were both kind of weird and goofy and disliked at school, we had nearly identical tastes in music and films and we appreciated doing the same things (primarily sneaking out and going on adventures around where she lived, harassing people we knew to hang out with us and trying to get our hands on booze). Somewhat unfortunately for us, the blossoming of this wacky wonderful friendship also coincided with my aforementioned mental rebellious teenage phase. As much as Cat played a part in my mischief, I genuinely feel like I would have done all that crazy stuff even if we weren't friends - I was, after all, still a hormonal sexually confused teenager with some angst and frustration to burn. However, my parents didn't see it that way, and after my infamous crazy house party of January 2008, they took it upon themselves to inhibit our friendship in any way possible (as in, literally banned us from seeing each other for six months), and didn't really reverse their somewhat misguided opinions until I left for university and it became clear that nothing was going to stop us from being the best of friends.
We're now reaching a pretty bleak part of my life, and honestly if it wasn't for Cat I really don't know how I would have coped with my first year in Sixth Form.

I'm going to take you down six feet under ground and show you around this place I've been living

So I'm gonna do that unnecessary thing where I unnecessarily show you all the things I unnecessarily bought cool okay, but first also I GOT MY TONGUE RE-PIERCED which is all very exciting and sore and stuff. Then I went and bought:

Write My Life: Secondary School (part 2)

So I don't even really know where to begin with this new juncture in my life after joining this new group. I suppose we could only really be described as 'alternative'; we were into rock and metal music, and as the emo era emerged we dived in whole heartedly into the hairstyles, the music and the cynical way of looking at life. We befriended a group of similarly 'alternative' boys from Reading and would spend almost every weekend skulking around shopping centres with them clad in black, listening to My Chemical Romance and persuading unsuspecting passers-by to buy us cigarettes.

It was around this time in my life that I also seriously began to question my sexuality; whilst the other girls in my friendship group were taking it in turns to get off with the most attractive boy we knew, I was falling for a girl called Anna. She would hang around with our group quite a lot but had other friends in the year too and wasn't really as inclusive as we were. I should probably point out that I did give the whole heterosexuality thing a go first of all; my first ever boyfriend was Lee Burkwood, a cousin of Laura who was my best friend within our group. And I was very attracted to him - in fact my first kiss was with him, in the oh so romantic setting of Woking cinema watching She's The Man. However things didn't last, mainly because we were 14 and he lived  miles away in North London.

After that brief relationship I had my very first sexual experience, which was with Anna in a hotel room on our Year 9 school trip to Barcelona. Anna and I had been very close friends up until this point; the day after it happened however she point blank ignored me and continued to do so for the next few months, which was incredibly upsetting. Luckily for me, when I told my friends they were all amazingly supportive and on my side of things, which I think made my slow and largely painful transition towards identifying as a lesbian a lot easier.

I think my subsequent relationship (or lack of it) with Anna probably deserves a separate post which I'm not sure I have the will power to write, so suffice to say that from that moment up until we left for university, we consistently went through these three general phases (with varying degrees of intensity).

 1) Anna avoids all contact with me, Anna is nasty to me and those who associate with me, Anna spreads various rumours at school about me, mainly me being a lesbian.
2) Anna starts being friendly to me at school. Anna starts sending me suggestive texts, to which I largely respond. We largely text about creating scenarios where we have a chance of getting together again. We never talk about these things in person; we don't even really flirt in person. Texts become more and more provocative. We eventually reach a stage where we've decided a time and a place where we can get together.
3) Anna freaks out. Anna texts me calling the whole thing off, or saying that it was all a joke, that she isn't really gay, that I'm being too clingy, that we need to pretend none of this ever happened. Repeat from stage 1.

Stage 2 could (and did) crop up at any time, but it was generally when I was in another relationship or made it apparent that I had a crush on somebody else. After Barcelona I began a relationship with a Leigh Pooley who I met through Felicity; I think this is the only relationship that I'm quite ashamed of - not because of what Leigh was like, if anything he was wonderfully kind and caring towards me, but because of how I acted. I was confused about Anna and I only really went out with him so I could say I had a boyfriend, so I had someone to make out with at the back of Reading station like all my other friends. However the attraction just wasn't there for me, and despite giving it a go with him twice (I think in total we were together around 6 months) I ended it both times because I just didn't fancy him. I also had a very brief relationship with Sophia, who was one of the girls in our group. Now she I was desperately attracted to; I think you could say she was my first love. Again I don't really want to go into the details and there'll be more on her later, but we were together for around two months before she essentially shattered my heart.

We've now reached around halfway through Year 10 (age 15), so I should probably put relationships on hold for a moment to say that this was the beginning of my pretty mental rebellious teenage phase. I was doing very badly in school; I had been kicked out of both my German class and my ICT class, was put on report (essentially close surveillance in each class with reports back to your parents) and was generally rude and abrasive to all the teachers I didn't like - which was most of them.

By the time Year 11 came around I was on pretty low rapport with my parents too; I was getting consistently bad marks in everything except English, I got my nose pierced without telling them, I started bleaching and straightening my hair, I would disappear every weekend without so much as a goodbye, and most significantly, I held a huge house party while they were away in France culminating in a lot of broken/smashed objects and the police being called.

Write My Life: Secondary School (part 1)

By the time secondary school rolled around I was desperate to attend Charters School which was where most of my friends from St Francis were going, but instead my parents enrolled me in the Marist Senior School - an all girls Catholic school. My first day was very nerve racking as nobody from my old school was going there, and as I arrived it seemed that everybody had at least one other person from their primary school to hang around with, and often whole groups of girls stayed huddled together uninviting to anybody who tried to join them.

Fortunately enough for me, we were sat alphabetically in our first class, and I met Felicity Carpenter, who also had nobody from her primary school with her and who subsequently became my best (and only) friend throughout Year 7. We hit it off straight away and I have to say I only have fond memories of my first year at the Marist, despite the fact that for the first time in my life I was both incredibly unpopular and picked on incessantly. I think the reason it didn't really bother me was that Felicity and I knew that we were different but we didn't really give a shit, because we had each other; I remember it getting to the point where we would deliberately act weird and mental (once we announced to the class that we had converted to Buddhism, promptly sat cross-legged on the floor and started meditating and chanting loudly and if anyone came near us we swatted them with the blackboard eraser) just because we could and it was highly entertaining to see the popular girls' perplexed looks.

The main thing that Felicity and I had in common were our huge imaginations (something which I really miss now); most of our time together was spent writing our own books and play scripts and then acting them out together, and it was honestly some of the best fun I've ever had. In our breaks at school we would pore over chapter drafts and scene settings and our character developments in notebooks, and at weekends we could spend all day in the park running around acting a particular scene over and over again until we had it perfect. They were mainly fantasy based stories; we would be witches casting spells on the evil girls at our school, or adventurers on a great quest, or pirates sailing the seven seas, or wise elves destined for greatness but hindered by the wicked trolls of the east... you get the idea. We even wrote a whole novel and an  uncompleted sequel which was some wonderful amalgamation of all the things we read and loved; there was the Faraway Tree from Enid Blyton's stories with different lands, I think my character was half pirate and half pixie, all our family members were plucked out of various books (Felicity's character's father was Remus Lupin, for example) and two of the main girls we disliked from school were turned into evil world-conquering monsters that could only be defeated by some kind of magical highlighter pen and the fact that my character could morph into a dog, or something.

Anyway, I digress. Unluckily for me Felicity transferred schools at the end of Year 7; we remained close until the age of 14 or so when unfortunately we seemed to mature at very different rates. Whilst I had started veering towards the world of relationships, make up, drinking, and well, being a teenager, Felicity seemed stuck in our make believe worlds and refused to talk about anything else whenever we met up. I went along with her for as long as I could, but began to find it all a bit childish and difficult to really immerse myself in make believe as I had before, and so our friendship fizzled out.

Year 8 was pretty tough for me; with Felicity gone I was left with approximately 0 friends and a 'weird girl' reputation. I was bullied by a gang of girls in my year who called themselves 'The Pinks'; they would throw my exercise books all over the classroom during break times shouting 'geek!' and take the piss out of my curly hair and braces.

However, after a couple of months luck struck me when a girl called Molly Nye sidled into our classroom one day and asked if I wanted to hang out with her group of friends. And thus, my very own  teenage 'clique' was born, and the girls in this group remained my closest friends (give or take a lot of hiccups and drama) pretty much until Year 11. I wouldn't say we were the most unpopular crowd in the year, but we weren't far behind. However, again, I didn't really give a shit about being picked on anymore because I had like-minded friends.

can't stop addicted to the shindig

I DID ALL THE SHOPPING AND I DON'T EVEN CARE LOOK HERE LOOK AT ALL THE THINGS I UNNECESSARILY BOUGHT ISN'T IT GREAT

(in case you can't tell this is a brown eyebrow pencil)

(got this in the shade 'Gothic')

For the next 3 conditioners before you're all like HOW CAN SHE AFFORD 3 FULL SIZE EXPENSIVE CONDITIONERS I bought mini 100 ml versions of each one cos they were on offer breh (like a quid each) but I can't be bothered to find images of the small versions

And the reason I bought such an obscene amount of conditioner was because I also bought these:

And saving best for last...

A gorgeous silver lion ring from the North Laines; oh, I also spend 15 quid on lunch at Wagamamas. YAY FOR BUYING THINGS YOU DON'T NEED WITH MONEY YOU DON'T HAVE.

Write My Life: Primary School

I attended Vita et Pax (Life and Peace) primary school in Southgate. On my first day I remember feeling very sad as I arrived, because my cousin Mikey who was a few years above me had walked me to school and promptly left me outside my classroom door. As I walked inside I saw all the other children being hugged and kissed goodbye by their parents. I'm not going to lie, to this day I still begrudge my parents for not taking me to my very first day of school and I swear to god I'm going to hug and kiss the hell out of my children when I take them. Anyway, I soon cheered up as I saw my friend Matthew who had been to my nursery school and my teacher announced that we were going to be watching The Lion King (my all time favourite).

I'm not sure how to say this without coming across as insanely immodest, but throughout my primary school years at Vita I was consistently top of the class at pretty much everything - especially french, music and reading. Looking back now as an extremely lazy and unmotivated student, it's hard to believe I'm the same person; my parents always proudly tell me the story of how my teacher called them in specifically to tell them in hushed tones that at four years old I had the reading age of a ten year old. I was in French club, music club, speech and drama club and reading club; I played the lead in most of the school plays and after we moved before my last year there, the headteacher told my parents I would have been chosen as Head  Girl.

My first best friend at school was an Irish girl called Caitlin McIntyre; until she moved to Ireland in Year 3 we were inseparable. To be honest the only real memories I have of the time we spent together were when we were naughty, which was pretty frequent particularly in my first few months at school. We had a habit of running around the playground, picking up other people's jumpers left on benches and throwing them in the outdoor bins. We were never caught, but the headteacher once mentioned it an assembly and I still remember looking gleefully at each other and whispering 'that was us!'. My parents were also called in during my first year because we had picked up another lovely habit of filling out mouths with water from the drinking fountain and then spitting it at other children. After she left I guess I didn't really have a best friend, but I had a good group of friends and I remember always feeling popular, loved and fulfilled. Sigh, what happened?

Well, we moved out of London. When I was 10 years old my mum was offered a new job in Windsor, and a couple of weeks before my 11th birthday we moved to Ascot in Berkshire. And oh wow, was it a change and a half. Being so used to the vibrant, multicultural hustle and bustle of North London, walking down Sunninghill High Street with my mum on our first day there was a massive shock to me. The main things I remember noticing were a distinct lack of any race or ethnicity other than white people, and a lack of cinema/shopping centre/swimming pool/ all the things I had come to take for granted being within a 10 minute walk from my house.

My first day of my new school, St Francis, wasn't much better. I was bullied for my accent, bullied for having curly hair, bullied for having no friends yet (yes, on my first day), bullied for being clever and bullied because, well, I was the new girl. It's hard to explain but there was just something different about the children in London and those in Ascot. My classmates in Ascot, although the same age as the friends I had just left, were coarser, cruder, already growing a sense of what I can only describe as 'bitchiness'. They swore more, they knew more about sex (on my first day one of my male classmates shouted 'Jack wants you to suck his dick!' at me, something which I had literally never heard of before), the girls were already starting to wear make up and style their hair, the boys talked about pornography and the size of their dicks.

I think the bullying for my curly hair and being called fat within my first week strikes me as interesting now. In London I went to a pretty diverse school; there were black children, Muslim children, Greek children, fat children, thin children, disabled children... and it was literally never commented on. It wasn't even something I was particularly aware of; so coming to a new school and my appearance being immediately commented on really confused me at the time. I was like, what is your point?

Things gradually got better; I eventually made some friends, I still excelled in the first part of my year there but by the end I was being sent to the headteacher's office every other day for some rebellious act or other. I guess I was just rebelling against the situation, rebelling against being forced to become self-aware and conscious of my body at 11 years old, rebelling against growing up in such a negative environment. I really think that if I had stayed in London I would have become a completely different person.

take me to the finish line, oh my heart breaks every step that i take.

I was in France on holiday with my parents; on a visit to one of the markets we used to frequent I persuaded them to buy me a new top from one of the stalls. It was cut off the shoulder, cotton and a khaki green colour with a camouflage pattern; I loved it because I thought it made me look grown up and sophisticated.

The next day, proudly sporting my new top, we went to the supermarket, and I wandered off to look at the make up aisle. As I was browsing, I felt a hand patting my bum and I turned around smiling, assuming it was my mother. I remember exactly how it felt for my smile to instantly fade as I was faced with a middle aged man, leaning in towards me, stinking of booze. As I reeled back, he kept his hands groping my bum and thighs and whispered something in French that I didn't understand. All I managed to do was stutter 'Je suis Anglaise' and run off to find my parents.

When I told my mum about it, she laughed at me. She told me, in so many words, it happened because I had wanted to wear a top that made me look older than I was, and that my tits were growing too fast. I was nine years old.

Part of me often thinks that this might be the main reason I find it so fucking difficult to like or appreciate my mother.

Write My Life: The Early Years

I was born on Friday 29th November 1991 at Chase Farm Hospital in North London, all screaming kicking 6 and a half pounds of me. These are the things I know about my birth: because I had both jaundice and was REALLY FRIGGIN' COLD (it was November and I was born at 4:30am after the hospital heating had been switched off all night) I was a slightly green-ish colour, yum; I was very long and very thin (always an attractive look for a baby), and I spent the first few hours of my life in one of those incubators to warm up because of aforementioned freezing conditions.

I suppose I have two earliest memories, I'm not sure which came first but in both I must have been about 3 or 4 years old. The first was a time we got burgled; it was the middle of the night and two policemen walked into my bedroom. They asked me where mummy and daddy's room was, and I pointed upstairs. I remember feeling as if it was all a terrible nightmare at the time, but the next day feeling very proud that I had in some way 'helped to solve a crime'.

The second earliest memory I have was also at night. I should probably point out now that something which pretty much defined my early childhood is the fact that I could lucidly dream (i.e. have dreams where I knew I was dreaming and could control it in some way). These were often nightmares and often extremely vivid; it came to a point where I even taught myself tricks to wake myself up when in a nightmare. I still remember most of the nightmares I had as a young child, probably even more so than things that happened in reality (I might do another blog post about these dreams in more detail later). Anyway, so I used to get this recurring nightmare where I'd be chased by a huge wolf, usually in some woods. I'd realise I was dreaming and wake myself up, and find myself in my bed at home. The second I then realised something wasn't right, I see the wolf crouching in the corner of my bedroom. I scream, he pounces, I wake up.

 It was after I'd had one of these dreams, and I must have been screaming whilst awake because my dad came into my bedroom to see what was wrong. He then proceeded to lie down next to me and hush me to sleep, and when I woke up the next morning he had fallen asleep there. My dad was never (and still isn't) the most affectionate of parents; I can count the number of times he's hugged me on one hand. He was also very strict when I was younger and I was very afraid of him, and so I think this has stuck with me because it's one of the only times I felt genuinely safe around my dad, and loved.

I only remember a few bits and pieces about my time at nursery school, and in retrospect they all pretty much point to me being very rebellious, jealous and sexually confused, so YAY HERE GOES.

1. My best friend was a boy called Antony; he had brown curly hair and always wore a dark green jumper, and I was very jealous of him because he was a boy and I was a girl.
2. My other best friend was a girl called Scarlett. She had very long hair and I was jealous of her because she had a plastic lion king play set. Once I went round her house and I stole the little plastic Scar lion, and then for months afterwards every time I heard a police siren I was convinced they were coming to get me for stealing it.
3. We used to have dress-up time once a week with a huge box of costumes to choose from, and my favourite by far was the Spiderman one. I remember even then feeling different from the other girls, because all the girls would choose princess dresses and it was the boys who chose superhero costumes. I've also just remembered how my parents would always try to make me wear dresses, and I once refused to go to a classmate's birthday party unless I was allowed to wear my old jeans and lion t-shirt.
4. We had a nursey teacher called Debbie and she was tall and thin and wore her hair in a very short boy cut. All the children (including me, I'm ashamed to say), used to giggle at her and always ask her if she was a man or a woman. But secretly I held a weird fascination with her; I used to think about her all the time and even named one of my teddy bears after her.
5. I used to be deliberately naughty right before tidy up time so that I'd get to sit in the naughty chair instead of having to tidy up hehehehehe.

So I think that's pretty much all I remember before starting primary school, other than my dreams/ nightmares which as I said, I'll probably write about in a separate post.

this all was only wishful thinking.

Things That Make Me Anxious

Beautiful women
Phone calls from strangers or people I don't know very well
Eating in front of strangers or people I don't know very well

Having to be in a certain place at a certain time, especially if it's somewhere I've never been before
Being late/ having to rush
Deadlines
Large crowds/ strangers
Lifts
Driving in places I haven't been before
Speaking in university seminars
Children


My Biggest Fears

Going blind
Losing a limb
Being trapped somewhere small with no means of escape, especially a submarine
Abandonment
Being boring/ ordinary/ nondescript
Death of loved ones
My own death
Going crazy
Not being able to travel as much as I want to because of money etc.
Beautiful women

Things That Turn Me On

Pointy teeth
Lesbians with those curly sideburns
Girls' legs in tights and converse
Piercings
Angular features
Introverts
Dark hair with light eyes
Skinny jeans
Men in shirts
Dreadlocks (on men and women)
Attractive laughs
Husky voices
Girls with 'dyke' hair
Collarbones
Boobs
Men dominating women during sex (but in a very specifically sexy way and not a rapey way)
People in authority e.g. teachers
French women
Mens' arms and hands
Womens' stomachs
Leather/motorbikes/tattoos etc.

On YouTube right now there's a 'Draw Your Life' tag which I was really tempted to do except I can't draw, I don't make YouTube videos and I don't have the motivation or patience. BUT it did inspire me to do a 'Write Your Life' thing on here which I'll start soon; I'll probably divide it up into sections to avoid me just rambling in a self-centered fashion for ages, but it will give me something fun and vaguely creative to do so yay.

i love you more than i did when you were mine

  So I'm back; initially created a new blog but then deleted it almost straight away because I realised I'm not quite ready to leave this one yet. I'll probably be more subdued than before, everything is a bit hollow right now. But today is very sunny and bright and I spent some of the weekend with friends and I'm feeling okay, so I thought I'd give this a shot again. I've been getting quite into drawing again; I've been getting a lot of social anxiety which has been making leaving the house and being in public places/ amongst strangers quite difficult, but having a bit of a creative outlet is helping a lot.