Four years ago today, I started this blog. Here is my first post.
I was so unhappy.
In 2011 I’d been flailing about, trying to be a writer, and totally failing to write anything for three years. Starting and abandoning novels, over and over again. Sitting down at my laptop, and writing a sentence, and giving up, over and over again. I wasn’t really over leaving uni – everything still looked bleak and difficult and frightening. I was in the process of breaking up with my boyfriend of six years (and one of my closest friends of 8). I never saw my friends from uni or home because I lived in Oxford and they didn’t and I never had any time or money to see them and URGH. I went to the pub pretty much every night, and dinner was either three cheese toasties, or nothing.
Later that month, I broke up with the boyfriend, and ran home to my parents, and cried and cried. Mum picked me up from the station, and sitting in the car together in the dark, and I told her, I had to end things with him. I felt so guilty about it – she’d always liked him, and also I’d fucked up being an adult. Where was I going to live, what was I going to do, how did I…? I knew it messed up things for everyone. And I still loved him! I was so so sad about it. But, I said, I had to. Everything had started to look grey and no fun anymore. My life had lost it’s magic.
And Mum said that I’d done the right thing. She said that I couldn’t stop believing in magic. It would be almost as bad as stopping believing in Father Christmas.
Those two weeks in Yorkshire, holed up in my room on my (actually extremely luxurious and way better than the bunk) new double bed, I wrote the bare bones of what would go on to be my first Edinburgh show, and the first thing I’d created in years that I was really proud of. And now things look different. I fell in love again. I Performed that show, and then another. I bought a house, I got engaged, I learnt how to make time for friends and myself, and how to feed myself properly and make friends with my body again. I finally finished a novel. In four months’ time I’ll be 30, and married.
Father Christmas still leaves me a stocking to this day, though. The more I grow up, the more I realise there’s no such thing.
All of this is a long winded way of saying, this year, I’m doing Blogmas again – a post a day until Christmas. But it’s not a stupid present to cheer myself up. Just, life goes fast, and I want to remember the way I thought about things, and looking back at old blog posts, no matter how silly they are, I do.
Also, I’ve got a couple of completely bitching boozy chocolate recipes to share with you guys.
See you tomorrow my little reindeers xx
