twenty two

 today is my last day as a 22 year old. it feels weird. another year has abolutely flown by and i feel like i have not done enough to turn a new age.

we have been stuck in lockdown since march, so 10 months of me being 22 was stuck inside. at first this was great in theory, i was benefitting from being stuck in one place and not having to travel into uni, and being able to keep whatever sleep schedule best aligned with work. and whilst i was mentally hit and miss, i managed to do my 5 assignments i had due within a month in the beggining of lockdown, with all but one being a 65 or above. uni gave us a blanket, any mark under our term 1 average was to be just taken away from our calculation, and lockdown meant i no longer had to do the assignments like a workshop that gave me more anxiety than i could even comprehend. 

we started to come out of lockdown in the peak of my research report. the first lockdown anyway. so whilst people were flying to different countries and living their "best lives" and seeing their friends/family (within the law) after months of being apart, i was stuck, up at night and asleep during the day, sat at my pc almost crying over my dissertation that i felt like i was doing completely alone. 

but i made it. i finished it. i handed it in and completed my presentation at the end of september.

i was okay for a few weeks, went out a few times to see people but then at the end of october i fell into a huge depressive episode and didn't talk to anyone for weeks. i was too anxious to do anything so i didn't.

a week later we went into a 4 week lockdown, which i stayed up all night, alone, missing my friends but appreciating myself because i wasn't exhausted all the time. i was worried about getting through it, but i was excited by the idea of having a somewhat normal christmas, socially distanced seeing my friends and getting to finally go out with my mum for lunch. 

we then were thrown in into a lockdown over christmas, which now shows no sign of ending.

the third lockdown has been especially hard. i don't know why but the beginning of the month i was just super low most days, my better days being at work where i had human interaction.

all these lockdowns have had one huge impact on my motivation. at first my motivation to do my degree, now my motivation to apply for jobs. everyone keeps asking me when i will be leaving my part time supermarket job to use my degrees but the idea of doing that now is so terrifying. i wanted to travel, i wanted to move out, i want to do anything but apply for a job and be worried about it falling through due to the state of the world. by now i thought i would be in a job, a job i liked, but there is few job i like the sound of and most i'm not qualified for. 

22 has not been the year i expected. it was supposed to be easy, it was planned to the tee. i would finish my masters in september, quit my job travel for a few months, have christmas off then apply for jobs. only one of those things happened, and i do not know when the rest might. but 22 brought things that i would not have had if it wasn't for all of this.

i have a masters degree. i started streaming and i am affiliated on twitch, growing a small little community and having fun. i treated myself to a new pc, a vr headset, i made SO many new friends at work or online in stream communities. I am 10 months clean, I reregistered to the doctors, I am trying to look after myself better than I have been.

the idea of turning 23 has always scared me. you see so many people doing so much grown up shit at 23, and i thought i would be so much more than i am. i thought i would be in a full time job with a partner and living my best life.

it's okay that i'm not. 

and i'm looking forward to twenty three.

Graduate

 I am officially a masters of science graduate.

This is something I have been working towards being able to say for the past 6 years of my life, the first time I realised sports psychology was a field I was able to study. Since that moment I had this exact path planned out. I was going to complete my BSc in Psychology and then complete a MSc in Sports Psychology. From that moment, I pushed myself academically, I worked as hard as my mental health allowed me and I was never taking no for a definite answer.

I have never been "naturally smart", I would put in 110% of what energy I had into my studies for a long time, but would never reach the highest grades, unlike my older brother who would get top marks with little to no studying. I had to work what sometimes felt like ten times harder than him just to even match his grades and it was always so tiring. In class I was always one of the smart ones but I was never a stand out. Sometimes it was hard to deal with, I was putting in all this work for what sometimes felt like nothing, but when I finally found what I wanted to do none of that mattered to me anymore. I knew the grades I had to get to get to each step, and through many mental health difficulties where I felt like I couldn't go on, I somehow kept going and kept going. I can't count the amount of times I nearly gave up. And maybe for a moment I should have. I probably should have taken a break, allow myself to recover from so many education burnouts and so many mental health downfalls. 

But I didn't.

 And I'm not going to say that this moment was worth it, because in truth this is not the moment I expected it to be. I expected to be excited looking for PHD's or thinking about training to become a chartered sports psychology. I expected to have left my job and be persueing what I love. But I'm not. I'm still at my part time supermarket job, no idea what I want to do. Scrolling on job sites for hours on end at 5am and making myself anxious that I will never find something that I love the sound of. Any time I do I'm not qualified. It makes me wonder what the point of this was. I pushed myself so hard in my MSc because in truth, I didn't feel like I belonged there. I was surrounded by so many hard working, intelligent people and I was barely afloat. I was working night shift two nights a week whilst trying to juggle the hardest academic challenge I have ever experienced. And then it became juggling these whilst in the middle of a global pandemic. It became somehow even harder, I was doing everything alone with little guidance on alot from my lecturers, so many missed emails or key information from lecturers about essays because I was working so much on a different schedule to everyone. It became doing a research project all alone with little guidance, and it not coming out as well as I had dreamed. 

But I did it.

I made it.

It may have not been the experience I had hoped, but I made it.

I was doing workshops, case studies, endless presentations, so many interactive things that I could never have done a few years ago. I was writing essays I was genuinely proud of when I handed them in and even though it took a few to get into the swing, I was getting good marks. I learnt so much this year and as cliche as it sounds I learnt alot about myself. Not only that, but I met some amazing and hugely intelligent people, both my coursemates and lecturers. The year flew by, and I finished an academically challenging year.

I officially have graduated with merit in my MSc in Applied Sports Psychology.

struggling again

 I do not know how long I can do this for anymore.

I wish this was a lie.

Each day now is getting harder again, just after I thought it was getting easier. I can't go to sleep without a glass of wine topped off with lemonade and rescue remedy and sometimes it needs two. Not even the sound of slowed down sad music can make the anxiety just go away for long enough to fall asleep.

And with each month it gets scarier. The pandemic is still raging and my unrelenting fear of not getting but getting and passing the virus onto my family can't slip my mind for a second, and I can't step a foot outside the house to go to work without being flooded with worry. With every lockdown it gets scarier, I can barely even leave my room and when I do it's not for longer than a second. I don't know how it will ever be again adjusting to 'normality'.  I can't even text my friends, how the fuck am I ever going to see anyone in person ever again? 

I don't know when this gets better.

I wish this was a lie.

I don't know how else I can express all the emotions I'm feeling. I feel like I'm repeating sadness then shuffling anxiety and I convince myself that this help, that this makes it easier but I do not know if it does. With every thing I write I feel scared then maybe relieved for a moment before all of this just comes back around. 

And I know I have it easier than alot of people. And that makes me feel so fucking guilty. I know that I am allowed to feel what I feel even if people have it worse and I know that someone elses story and pain does not invalidate mine but it is hard to think otherwise sometime. I am so anxious and sad and I do not know why anymore. I do not know how to live with that. Live with that in a world that feels like it is crumbling under my footsteps.

I do not know how much longer I can do this. 

2020

 December 31st, 2019. It was getting onto the time I had to leave to go out for new years. I was fucking exhausted from working, woken up an hour late and on the verge of having an anxiety attack. I didn't want to leave my bed let alone go and get drunk. My mum persuaded me to go. I got up, drove round to my friends, had to quickly get changed and apologise profusely for being so late, trying to ignore how absolutely dreadful I felt. In the car ride, I thought about 2019. 2019 was one of my better years. It started off completely terribly, but eventually I became more stable and found my feet. I graduated, started my masters degree, gone on various holidays, many music events, settled into some new friend groups and most importantly was optimistic for 2020 to continue this trend I had started of what I called my true recovery. 2019 was the year I worked on myself, I became more comfortable in my own body, I was relapsing from self harm less often and I was ending the decade happy. 

The first 6 weeks of the year where amazing for me. I went to Sweden, I celebrated turning 22, I was doing well in my masters degree and I just felt happy. I thought that 2020 was going to be my year. I have been waiting for my year and truly it felt like it was going to be. A few weeks into February I got sick. Sick as in, I couldn't get out of bed for 2 weeks or I passed out, sleeping 18 hours a day, crying because it felt like sitting at my computer was pushing myself sick. The first few days, I couldn't even sit up. That was when the year went downhill. I missed a concert I had been waiting for for so long, I missed weeks of uni and was so behind with my work, I barely spoke to anyone because I was too tired. At once point I thought I would never recover. 

By the middle of March I was around 80% better from mystery illness. In March I was back at uni all of us talking about covid19 like it was a joke, I also went to two concerts and then we went into lockdown. Suddenly I felt like I had lost everything and I don't know why. I walked into work the first night of lockdown, bare bare empty shelves, everyone joking about panic buying. It carried on like this for a few weeks, and then everything for me started to set in. Lockdowns extended, struggling to keep up with my uni work because I was too tired and completely deprived from normal life. I couldn't fix my sleep schedule because it was too hard to when I couldn't get up and go do something to combat the tiredness. I was still working, having to do overtime and still juggling my degree whilst I saw so many people genuinely having a great time, doing things, doing nothing, doing whatever they wanted whilst on furlough. It was hard. I thought I was struggling and struggling alone, because everyone seemed to be coping well with lockdown. 

Eventually it became apparent that it wasn't, and as we started to ease out of lockdown I felt better. I could see my friends again, I could go outside again and not get scared I was going to get in trouble. It took a while to be comfortable with it, the fear of corona was raging in my mind and I was worried everytime I left the house that I would get it. But I had to see people. My mental health depended on it, I was at the point where I was struggling and I needed to see my friends again. But I started to feel better. Whilst lockdown seems like a blur now, whilst I know my anxiety was struggling for the most part everything else was okay. I was fine eating, I was staying clean, I wasn't suicidal and for the most part I wasn't lonely. This all seems like a huge oxymoron, but compared to the places I have been, I was genuinely doing okay. I made more new friends, I started to be less alone at 3am when no one else I knew was awake and it got easier.

In September I completed my masters degree. I never ever thought I would ever make it, but I finished my presentation, sat down and had a huge wave of relief. I had done it. I had done the dream I had had for 6+ years at that point, through a pandemic. I had completed a MSc dissertion basically by myself and I had done it. But afterwards I just felt empty. I had been so stressed about finishing that when I did I felt lost, I had no direction, I was stressed about the idea of finding a new job and everything felt heavy. 

At the end of October it all caught up to me, and I fell into one of the worst depression slumps I had ever experienced for a 3 week period. Everything was impossible, most days I couldn't even get out of bed to turn the light on. I was convinced everyone I loved hated me, I was having bad panic attacks every few days, having intrusive and suicidal thoughts, I was just so unbelieably low that I didn't think it would get better. I eventually started getting better. I invested myself into headspace, into breathing practices, into music, into everything I needed and it slowly by day got easier. And it did, eventually, get back to normal.

I bounced back. I started twitch streaming again, really loved it and hit twitch affiliate within 2 weeks of restarting. I had gone from a high, to rock bottom and was back to a high. Things fell in place, and they stayed in place.

And here I am now. January 1st 2021. 

I know how lucky I have been to had an okay 2020. I focused alot on the negatives of the year but when I reflect, the worst times were far and few between. I had so many okay days, unmemorable days but even more so, days that I was just fine. I was fine. I used to just be up or down, I rarely had in between days but this year they happened. It truly this year felt like my mental health was improving and I was doing better. I don't say this to brag. I don't say any of this to do anything but reflect on my journey, how far I've come.

If this pandemic had happened at a different time I don't know if I would have made it through, made it this far. I count my blessings everyday that this didn't happen at a worse time in my life because who knows what would have happened then. I have had to work hard the last few years for this. This year I decided to just simply cut out people who do not make me happy or who I was holding onto for the wrong reasons. It was the year I was more important than anyone. I put myself first. I had to. I could not keep moving forward by holding onto the belief that I have to appease others and then myself. To me this meant just simply letting go of worry about cutting people out whether this was in the past or present to help myself. This was easier said than done, I am not denying that but I did it. I put myself first, even if that had consequences that maybe I did not want. 

I am proud of myself. You should be too. No matter what you did or didn't do this year, you made it through. We survived an awful awful year and hopefully this one will be better. 

For me? 2021 means recovery. It means going to get help. It means getting those piercings/tattooes I want. It means keeping on top of what I need to do. It means therapy. It means trying to start to love the body I am in. It means taking care of myself. It means continueing to put myself first. 

For everyone who is still here. Whether your year was amazing, awful or anything in between. 2021 is your year. And I hope, I pray with all my heart that it is a better year.

And finally. To all those we lost this year, whether due to covid, due to other things, due to old age, due to mental health, due to other illnesses. To every single person who we lost. We will remember you all.