Second Year

Wooohoooo - it's nearly been a week since I moved into my flat in Leamington Spa and I'm loving it. Uni has yet to start but I'm very grateful for having been given time to settle into the surrounding area before starting university straight away. I've had time to unpack, buy my bus pass, and see a few friends that I hadn't seen since before summer.

Leamington Spa is the residential area that most Warwick students will flock to for their intermediate and final years. Whilst it is indeed 7 miles away from the main campus, it has everything one could wish for in a small town. I've already been to several cafés, bars, and I have even signed up to the local library!

The idea of now being a 'second year' is quite daunting for me. A silly fresher no more, and with a stack of imaginary work already piling up, I'm not too sure how I'm going to keep the balance between my academic life and personal life. I already feel quite inundated by a number of chores I have to carry out for the societies that I am part of. (SIDENOTE: I know 'of' isn't meant to go at the end of the sentence, so how can I rearrange this? help a girl out). I call Dad on a daily basis and he does seem awfully worried that I'm focusing too much on extracurricular activities rather than my studies and expanding my vocabulary. Nevertheless, I'm going to keep on doing my thing and see how it all pans out, especially as this Monday is the first day of my Freshers' Fortnight and there will be a lot going on society wise and not so much going on academically as the professors will give us time to settle in...surely?

Anyway, that's all for today folks. I'm off for a nice big breakfast at Coffee Architects with one of my good friends on my course. See you soon!

Yours,

ANNOUNCEMENTS !!

Hey y'ahll. Got some exciting news, and everything's been happening so fast that I haven't even had time to write about it in my journal, let alone blog about it on here. I'm going to do this in bullet points too, just to make it easier for you and myself to read through.

1) Sponsoring
If you know me in real life you'll know that I absolutely adore the Law of Attraction and try and use it as much as possible in life. The main idea is that if you positively think about something and meditate on what you want to achieve, the universe will respond and give it to you. When I have set my mind on something, I am often blessed with a response and I don't know how to explain it logically, but it happens. With this in mind, I have been recently wanting to get a sponsorship off of a brand in order to be able to create new and exciting content for a project I have planned. On Tuesday, I got an offer from not just one, but two companies asking me to promo their products. I can't wait to get started and order some of the stuff. New content arriving sooooon!

2) Chine Hotel
All good things must come to an end, and with this in mind, I have decided to leave one of my summer jobs. Although I loved working on reception, I need some time off before returning to university. I have some unfinished projects that I need to see off, as well as a lot of catching up on sleep. I emailed my boss yesterday about it and he said some very sweet comments about my 'kindness and absolutely outstanding customer service', which was very nice to hear.

3) Leamington Flat
So as you all know, I'm now a second year Warwick student *say whaaat*. My friend Jovita* has just moved in today and it's all super exciting as she's sending a ton of photos on the Whatsapp group chat. I've already bagsied my room and I cannot wait to move in later this month! It's my first 'real' place of my own, and I'll have to learn all about payments and bills, which brings me onto my next bullet point...

4) Fused Bills
Your girl only went and got herself a position blogging for Fused Bills! Although this is unpaid, I feel that this is a really great opportunity for me to show off some of my blogging skills, and it really ties in with what I am hoping to do in the future in terms of career. I already work for my university as a blogger, which I am paid for so obviously would be my priority, but I just feel so blessed that I have been given another page for me to write on. A lot of the posts that I write for Warwick are shared on their official Facebook and Twitter accounts and for me, this is such good encouragement for me to work even harder!

And that about sums up this blog post! Thank you so much for all the lovely messages and love, see you soon :)

Yours,

No dayz off

It's been just over a month that I've been working seven days a week, and the work load has really started to affect me. I'm drinking more and more coffee and spend my free waking hours complaining about how tired I am. When people ask what I have been up to I just start to complain about working seven days a week. My conversation varies from guests I've dealt with, to the different ways I reduce stock. I have become this broken record that just spews negative, negative, negative.

I say I'm tired, but what I need to do is reframe this statement - or at least, explain myself a bit more. I'm tired because of the long hours and the different energies I come across each day which mixes with my own personal aura. I have no time for myself, for growing, for all the books piling up on my...Kindle.

What I'm not tired of, however, is the buzz of it all. I love being busy. I love having to rush from one place to another. It provides me with a kind of excitement no roller coaster could ever give me. It makes me feel like I have a purpose, a place to be, a task that needs to be completed. I actually take satisfaction from saying that I work seven days a week and haven't had a day off since I started. It makes me proud of myself for working for my future self.

Yours,

Clean Slate

A clean slate does everything it says on the tin.

New beginnings are easy once you accept that the time is right. Everything in life happens for a reason, and everything that happens is a lesson to be learnt.

This is meant to be my personal blog where I share my experiences with you, but how is hearing about my Sunday lunch of any relevance to you? I found that writing on here became a burden, rather than a place for me to escape where I could just be myself. Originally, I intended this to be my 'safe space', and I hope that this goal will be achieved by starting afresh.

I want you to be writing directly to you, my readers. I don't want this to be like the other blogging sites that I am part of, where I have to write about certain topics and put on a front. Let's show my flaws, let's show my true colours. In this blog, I will confront the personal hurdles that I have found and tell you the ways I overcame them. I will tell you of key events in my life that I have found changed the direction of my life, and my thoughts about them. Most of all, I want to share my thoughts. I want to show you an insight into my life through my ideas and memories which I feel have shaped me in becoming who I am today.

I hope that by sharing more about myself, in turn, you will be able to learn about yourselves.


Thank you for the support as always,

Yours,

Being Alone

Currently, I am sat on the top deck of a cruise liner. There are many young Spanish students my age all around me, either splashing about in the pool, or at the bar ordering cocktails. As for me, however, I am sat alone, at a five-seater table, surrounded by nothing but my Spanish exercise books. Sounds lonely, right? Incorrect. I am perfectly content, and let me tell you why.

I have always felt that there is a stigma about being seen alone, especially in a public place such as this. Onlookers may assume that I may have no friends, or something along those lines. This is a perfectly natural thought to have, as I myself have often found myself conuring up some similar extravagant theories when I see an old man sat by himself in a bar. All of my imagined stories have the common theme that this poor, lonely guy must be heartbroken and left alone. But am I right in assuming that his wife left him and that he now spends his long days drinking his problems away? Fo course not. He is perhaps having a celebratory drink because she left him. Ha. Anyway, my point is, one should avoid assuming that a person who is alone is obviously lonely.

Indeed, someone may voluntarily choose to be alone. I recall discussing with some friends of mine their activities that one might enjoy doing alone. Watching Netflix alone in one's room? Of course, this isn't anything out of the ordinary. Reading a book in a local coffee shop all day long? Yes! How mysterious and intriguing. Going to the cinema alone?... I personally disagreed with this one, as I felt cinemas were solely for awkward first dates when a couple didn't know what to say to each other, but my friend argued that when she went to the cinema alone, she thoroughly enjoyed herself as she was able to laugh as loudly as she wanted to without the fear of being judged by anyone but strangers she would never see again.

Being content in our own company appears to be the way to true happiness. I can place my hand on my heart and say that I am my own best friend. I do not feel the need for constant interaction, as I am perfectly content in my own company. It also takes a degree of confidence to go out and be seen enjoying oneself alone, such as queuing up for the cinema (a level of confidence I have not yet achieved).

So as I sit here, getting pitying looks from the passersby, I just smile. Yes, I am happy. Although I am alone, in no way am I lonely. 

Are they nice?

How can you ask such a question?

Can anyone be simplified to a yes or no answer?

Of course not. Not in a million years could a person be summed up in a yes or no question. It is all purely subjective, depending on the person who is answering the question, how well they know them, and their multitude or lack or experiences with that said person. How can anyone be summed up by another person? Who are they to judge?

My friend asked me this question the other day. And I replied the exact same way as I have transcribed above.

I looked back at him and wondered. Could we describe the stars as 'nice', or the twinkle in the eyes of the person you love, or even the sound of a fresh stream on a summer's evening? Are those things just nice to you?

I looked back at him and smiled. Nobody knows a person as well as they know themselves. There is so much poetry out there, saying how your soulmate will know you better than you know yourself etc, but it's all just poetry. Poetry is there to make you feel something. To provoke an emotion out of you, whether it be of happiness or of sadness. It is not real.

I'm such a strong believer in loving yourself before loving anyone else. At the moment, I'm feeling lost. I'm loving, but I am so caught up in loving others that I have come to neglect the most important person: myself. No, this is in no ways selfish. Loving yourself should be the priority. In the end, you only have you. No matter how much love you have given out and how many people are around you and 'there' for you, it is only ever you who can truly help yourself out of whatever situation you have found yourself in. You must thus know yourself enough to know how to get yourself to where you want to be.

It must be 'nice' to know someone as well as they know themselves. It must be 'nice' knowing someone the way the poetry books describe. It must be 'nice' knowing how their beautiful mind works, or the reason why they smile when they see pink cherry blossoms, or why they plait one strand of hair occasionally, just to let it loose a few days later. It must be 'nice' to fall in love with someone, whether it be romantically or platonically. It must be nice to sit in a room with someone in complete silence and just vibe with them. That must be nice.

And so one final time, I looked at him and took a deep breath in.

"I cannot answer your question." I replied

"But maybe, if you get to know her, who'll realise she is so much more than a yes or no answer."