I have done a bit of a one-eighty. This is merely a result of a year full of existential questions:
who am I, what do I like, what do I believe in?
Looking for that direction I lost.
I am in my last year of my uni degree now and I find myself asking the same question all the time: what do I actually want to do? According to my casual research — aka conversations with trusted friends — this is fairly common among final year students and especially common within final year creative students.
I started university with a set goal, a bunch of ambition and a great lack of experience. Cue the experience and everything else got turned upside down. For a good while I thought I had lost all that ambition I had as an 18-year-old college student stuck in a little town, dreaming about a grand future in a metropolitan city. Now that I have lived in London for almost two and a half years I, ironically, miss the little suburban town back in Finland. I miss the trees and I miss the scarcity of people. There’s way too many here (and the Christmas tourist wave has not helped a bit!).
My degree and life in London in general have shifted my goals to a whole new perspective. I no longer want to do any of the things I was longing for just a few years ago. In fact, I have no clue of what I would like to do. I might just take that piece of advise and apply to everything and see who takes me — and then figure it out from there by eliminating all I can’t stand.
Reflecting on 2019 I complained way too much. I still complain way too much but I am starting to try to accommodate to my situation and see all the good in it rather than pining over something I had in the past. Truth to be told, I would not want to repeat all of college even though I am very reminiscent of that time. I probably wouldn’t want to move back to that little town because finding a job there was absolute hell. So I am starting to appreciate London in a more realistic manner than when I first moved here in awe of a lamppost.
Some of that ambition is being gained back and, consequently, goals are starting to form from the fog I have been staring for the past twelve months. Next week I am going back home to deliver a presentation at my old college. Building the presentation has been a great push to reflect on my time here. I don’t want to discourage anyone from coming to study here but rather to provide a disclaimer to think twice rather than jumping into something this big like I did.
I am hoping this is all just part of actually growing up (I am starting to genuinely see the appeal of a Monday to Friday office job). It is hard changing as a person. Appreciating completely different things and feeling alienated from your past self puts you on thin ice.
I stopped social media and writing my blog almost two years ago. Back then it was a conscious choice to retain my mental health to a somewhat sane level. Over time new reasons emerged and I started to pay attention to the culture and behaviour on and around social media. Why do I take all these images and post them online for everyone to see when I don’t really care about other people’s pictures of their breakfasts? Why do I need to share my thoughts on a platform like my blog? I don’t really remember why I started doing it. Most likely someone else I knew had a blog and it seemed like a fun thing to do.
There’s just so much online. There’s so much I am in constant battle trying to avoid it and enjoy something real, outside urls and hashtags. Yet here I am again. Because reading back, looking at the images from the past communicate that clarity that I yearn for now. I could just write in my diary but writing for myself doesn’t require such structure and curation as publishing online does.
I cannot really justify hating social media and writing here. It does make me a hypocrite. Being this lost demands some action, though. In the past this blog earned me an internship and help me develop my writing as well as other communication skills. That’s my reason to write again: to give me something productive (ish) to do and hopefully gives me some direction. If having a blog helps me to get a job, I’ll do it anytime.
CONTINUE READING
