Ode to a Different Life

Hi Readers,

It's been a while! Sorry - my absence has been due to few different things like exams, work and just not feeling very inspired to write. But I definitely want to keep up the blog because it's something I love doing, I definitely love having a creative outlet like this where I can speak about what I want, and share things I love. 

Today's post is being written in the early hours, after a night of deep conversation and thinking about the past. When I meet new people, or get to know people and start becoming friends with them, I often find myself asking them; "if you could go back to being any age, what age would you go back to?" For me, the answer to this question is 16 years old. 

I was 16 in the year 2012, about to enter my last year of high school and I was blissfully happy for the whole year. I started the year off ending my first "proper" relationsh, and spent two weeks getting drunk (my newfound favourite thing to do at the time) with a group of friends that had the exact same mindset as me. I enjoyed showing off and getting attention from the people around me. I then moved on to having a summer school trip to Paris, where I met my next boyfriend. He was a big part of my happiness, but a lot of it also came from being just old enough to have the freedom to do more without needing my parents. Me and this boyfriend did so much together - gigs, nights out in the city, long walks, parties. All of it. But the beauty of it was that we weren't quite old enough to have real responsibilities yet. The perfect happy medium. 

The point of this post isn't to tell you the story of what I all did when I was sixteen, but more to comment on how bittersweet it can be to look back at the time you felt happiest, at the age you still feel inside. And as cheesy as this sounds, when you had the whole world at your feet and everything to look forward to. I'm not saying I'm unhappy now, because I am blissfully happy, and I realise I probably look back with rose-tinted glasses on but looking back I also realise how much I lost myself in the years between then and now. For around two years after school I wasn't me anymore, I didn't keep up any of the interests I'd had when I was sixteen - watching hours of makeup tutorials on youtube turned into not even being arsed to replace my eyeliner that had run out, playing my guitar for two hours at a time completely unaware of the outside world turned into listening to the same tired songs over and over again, my thirst for new music gone, long walks in the woods turned into vodka and lemonade in the pub after work in a job that made me miserable. It seemed I didn't have a personality anymore, and I was just blending into the people that surrounded me. Whatever they were, I was too. And it would be easy to blame this on the fact that people grow up, they change. But I knew that me was in there somewhere. Things you love don't just disappear. 

16 year old me // 21 year old me

When I moved to Aberdeen in 2015, and to Edinburgh especially last year, I realised that I was in the midst of a bit of an identity crisis - I had friends dotted about all over the country, but no one really close to me right in Edinburgh that was on my wavelength like I'd been used to my whole life. I ended up adjusting a bit to find myself where I am now - feeling more like myself than I ever have since I was sixteen. I chuckled to myself when I realised this was because I was starting to show traits of myself that I'd had at sixteen. My subtle eyeliner turned into big flicks, my hair got blonder, I was super excited about music again, my dress sense changed (I gave a shit about what I was wearing, and buying clothes that actually fit me after putting weight on instead of cramming myself into the same size 12 jeans I'd had for too many years) and my motivation got to losing weight and doing well in university. 

I know I can't ever be that sixteen year old girl anymore, but I loved me when I was her and it took me realising that the things I loved then are still what I love now to realise that its okay to feel like you're going back in time. To look back and be sad that you're in a different place, but also carry the wide-eyed ambition that little teenager had into my twenties and be excited for the future, like she was. It's ok to want to look like her, because she was blonde and skinny and healthy. She enjoyed spending hours watching hauls and staying up until 2am discovering new bands on youtube. She got outside and went for long walks and drank too much and laughed all the time. I'm not her anymore, and I won't be her again, but she's not a bad person to aspire to be like. 

Thanks for reading, and as always you can find me on; 

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