#2014BloggerChallenge What's Your New Year Inspiration?
The week before Christmas I met up with a friend during my lunch break to go for a coffee. Incidentally, we went to a lovely little cafe in Carlisle called 'Foxes' which is frankly a fantastic little place, it's quite indie so I love it (god damned hipster) and the waiting staff are lovely. Anyway, the friend I met with is going away in a few weeks to go travelling; New Zealand, America, Canada and Fiji and we both know that even though he's promised to, he won't come back. So many of my friends are going or have been travelling recently and I can't help but feel a little jealous, which is new to me. I've never really had the yearning to travel a great deal but of recent I want to see the world. I'm going away to Asia in March, hopefully coming back for a month and then staying with some family friends in Norway. I want to spend Christmas 2014 in Copenhagen or Zurich. I want to visit Paris this summer and listen to French music.
I'm so young and meeting new people who are older than me has made me realise this. They've all been away and seen the world and have stories to tell, but I have nothing. I only have 7 months and 15 days left of being 18 years old and that scares me a little, after that there's only one more year left of being a teenager however I therefore feel like it's acceptable that I don't really know what I want to do. I know that the world won't end the minute I stop being a teenager but I've always felt "Well, at least I have my youth" and it's slowly dawning on me that I won't have my youth forever and soon I won't be able to do everything I want to do. But, if I'm so young then why do I feel so old sometimes? I try to be older than I am, discuss politics with older men and drink whisky. On the one hand, I want to be old, have these conversations and treated with a respect that teenagers aren't normally treated with. But on the other hand I want to be a teenager, stay up all night with my friends and disappear to some other country for a month and explore. I have all the time in the world to do everything I want but I'm in such a hurry and I don't know why that is.
What inspired this post was when I met up with my friend, he handed me a Christmas card which I then read on the train home that day. My friendship with him is synonymous of a time in my life where I was especially confident, we met on a photography course and I walked up to him in a cafe afterwards and pointed out our matching festival wristbands. I'm starting to get that confidence back, I'm now able to hold a conversation with people again and I'm able to ask for help when I need it and I'm hoping that this will result in even more new experiences. He talked about this in his card, and told me to start having adventures. It wasn't until I read that card, with the quotation above written in his boyish handwriting at the bottom that it really began to sink in just how mundane my life is and how little I've done with all the opportunities that I have been handed. I've spent so long locked away in my room so since receiving that card I've made the effort to begin to try and change. But not all adventures have to involve travelling away..,
I'm sat at my desk in my freezing cold room, looking out the window at the drizzling rain and dying light and thinking about what I really want to do and where I really want to be. I worked as a Christmas temp in a well known, popular chain bookshop and I loved every single minute of it and whilst I was there I rediscovered my love for literature. I've actively started seeking out more poetry and discovered W.H. Auden and more of Carol Ann Duffy's work (read 'Little Red Cap' I think it's my favourite poem). A large amount of my wages have been spent on books; art; fiction; cooking. I've started taking less crap and standing up for myself and stopped trying to please those who really do not treat me well. And finally, I've said 'Yes' more to things that I wouldn't normally do or things that put me out of my comfort zone to gain 'new experiences'. Even if it's just going for a drink with the people I've recently met, agreeing to let a friend help me get over my fear of swimming or going clubbing. This past month has changed me, I've met some incredible people and it's given me the yearning to make 2014 an incredible year. But to relate all this back to the above quotation from "The Perks of Being A Wallflower" by Stephen Chbosky, I've had a bit of a rough year. I was put in some difficult situations and it made me despairingly unhappy but it's only just starting to sink in just how unhappy I was in 2013, I struggle to think of a time before December when I was genuinely happy and it lasted. And so I've made a pact with myself to gain a little self-confidence and accept that sometimes, I do deserve more than the shit I sometimes get. I've frequently settled for less or had little faith in myself and my abilities and as a consequence have ended up unhappy, so this year I vow to change that, and to me, this is a new adventure. Things do get better but only if you can actively try and make them better.
Is there anything that has particularly inspired you this year? Leave a comment in the box below. This was difficult for me to write and I'm sorry about the long rambly post, this is the first of it's kind on here and quite possibly the last, so don't worry!
Beth xxx
