Sunday 1 January 2012

My 2011

This is the first time I have written this on the first day of the new year, I usually sit down an hour or so before getting ready for a party or a night at home with my brother and his friends, this year however, I approach this slightly differently.

You could say the way I start this reflects my 2011. New.
It has been a year of new adventures, of falling in love, of finishing one story and starting another, of saying goodbye to friends, both positively, negatively, expectedly and unexpectedly, of growing my hair and then getting it all cut off, of dying it on a monthly basis, and of betting not to dye it again until Christmas and finally of facing my fears of growing up.

It started in a ten bedroomed house, filled with friends and strangers, kissing two of my lifers at the stroke of midnight in a 3 way kiss before heading out into the garden to watch the cheap fire work I'd bought just hours before. It ended in the living room of my new (yet never replacing the original) family, watching the fireworks on the BBC and toasting a drink to the new year.

It has been a year of finally getting the courage to speak up - or rather, finally allowing my friend to medal in the way she had wanted to for months! Of stressing out over the final essays I will ever have to write, of watching best friends fade out of my life and of saying goodbye to others with the belief that we will, at some point, cross paths again.

It was the year in which our uni house got broken in to. One of those moments that you always imagine you'd to act one way should it ever occur, but when it does happen you soon find you act another. Crying down the phone to 999 while a house mate gets hit over the head with a brick from your own garden and your boyfriend gets punched while trying to push strangers out of the house they have just broken in to, followed by a month or so of living in a house only accessible by a wobbly cracked back door with two boarded up windows and a boarded up front door covered in the forensics finger print dust.

It was the year when a tutor told me my dissertation wouldn't even pass for an essay, let alone a dissertation. Where I saw a performance that gave me back a little bit of the passion for acting uni had previously beaten out of me, of watching my house mates enjoy the pleasures of the paddling pool situated right outside my patio doors, only for me to ever go in it once, fully clothed, during a drunken game of truth or dare. It was the year we all finished our dissertations and sat in the appropriately named, Dive, celebrating and showing each other pictures of the finished product. And finally it saw friends pack up their rooms for one final time as we each took the plunge to move, not only out of our student houses, but out of our student town.

I started writing my blog on one of the last days of my first year of uni, sat on a friends bedroom floor surrounded by boxes, silently crying to myself. That memory seems like a life time ago. It seems so surreal that I shall never experience that sense of moving ever again, that I shall never be with those people on such mass ever again. That is a story, a long list of chapters, that finally came to an end in 2011.

A month later however and I was back in Worcester, living in the University halls I had three years previous missed out on as I embarked on a new job, teaching and supervising young people during a five day summer school. Next I set off to Spain for my best girl's hen party and three glorious days in the sun, followed by her wedding where I was blessed with the position of bridesmaid in a strapless dress with, amazingly, not a strap mark in sight!

My summer then continued with the possibility of me performing one last show in the West Midlands with the company that has played such a prominent role for the past 3 years. I decided however, to turn down this opportunity in order to spend a week sleeping on my friends sofa, fashioning a teepee, watching films, walking the dog, making doughnuts and eating a picnic indoors before I finally set off on my new adventure of moving in with the boy who kissed me in January.

Moving day came, as did the nerves. Nerves of moving 200 miles across the country, nerves of saying goodbye to my friends and family, nerves of living with someone else's family, nerves of living with a boy, my best friend, my boyfriend, after just 9 months of dating.

Within a week I had got a job at a pub that I hated and was volunteering at a charity shop, wishing I could only get paid for it so I could leave the pub. Little did I know the answers to those wishes were just around the corner.

In the mean time I spent some wonderful days in Brighton, went back to Worcester for one last time to graduate and to see the friends I had had to say goodbye to a few months previous, and spent an afternoon with some owls, flying, petting and feeding them one-day-old chick heads.

And finally in November I got offered a paid position with the charity I had been volunteering for, I handed in my notice to the pub and later found out that they had just found the unopened answer to their questions as to why I hadn't been to work for the past two weeks.

Christmas 2011 was very differently from last year. Last year it came with the shock, upset, worry and gratefulness of Mom having and surviving a stroke. This year it came with me wining the bet and getting to dye my hair pink in time for Christmas, mainly in the aim of annoying my Nan, followed with me away from my family and all the friends I had spent New Years 2010 with, as I instead spent it with the person 2011 had most of its adventures with.

And so as I write this, a day later than usual, 2012 begins with the rain pouring outside. It is, I am sure, going to be a year of even more adventures, of saying goodbye to even more people, and of welcoming even more people into my life, of making plans for the future and of beginning to see other plans start to take shape, of visiting friends and of making the most of the sadness that comes from leaving uni for the last time - that now I have lots of new places across the country to visit!!

Hello, 2012.

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