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.