I look so happy and young here! My graduation day was great and a bit emotional as everyone realised it was probably the last time a lot of people would see each other.
When I was younger I wanted to be a care worker. I studied health and social care throughout school and college, doing work experience in care homes looking after the elderly. I liked it, but I guess I still didn't really know what I wanted to do, and perhaps care work wasn't for me. As my Mum nicely put - "do you think you're strong enough to be care worker?" as I'm quite emotional and sensitive.
Through school and college I loved to write, but always saw it as a hobby. I kept a diary religiously every day, wrote countless poems, and wrote 11 novels (some which I cringe when looking back on but others that I hold a real love in my heart for - I'm hoping to start revising them some day soon). So I thought, what the hell, if I'm going to pay £3,000 a year then I'd may as well do it on something I am more passionate about than care work, and so enrolled on a Journalism and English Lit degree.
I LOVED IT. I just didn't know it at the time. I preferred the Journalism part of it and got quite good scores in some of my work. I realise now that I loved all the books I read, but probably more so now that I can read them again for fun, rather than dissecting them line for line and trying to find the meaning of everything - how do I know what Shakespeare was thinking when he wrote Hamlet??
So my life was set. I wanted to be a journalist. I did work experience on my local paper and loved it. And when I graduated, I took a trip to London taking advantage of DC's aunt's flat in Crouch End and did a fortnight at more! magazine, and a fortnight at Reveal. Spending my 21st birthday in London by myself making magazine employees tea from a laminated sheet detailing everyone's preferences was quite strange, but made better when DC and my family took a trip down for the day and surprised me. My Mum actually got in touch with the Editor at more! and planned it all between them - she is so jammy.
But after I came home and returned to waitressing, no matter how many CVs I revised and covering notes I wrote, I just wasn't getting anywhere. I tried and tried and tried, and had a list of contacts in a notebook as long as my arm, but it just wasn't happening. Competition was too fierce and I just couldn't get through the door. Then in the November after my graduation I got a job on Reception at my current place of work, and the rest is history.
I still love Journalism. I still love English and reading books. I kind of lost the time and will to write, and also abandoned by blog mid 2010 and haven't really got back into it, but if the option was there then I would absolutely jump at the chance.
Uni was a great time in my life but I am one of those who fall into the group of wishing I made more of it. Well, I can't say I didn't have fun - I moved out of home in my third year, pasta seemed to be quite high in the menu for evening dinner, I dumped my boyfriend of two years for the man of my dreams who subsequently broke my heart, and stayed up all through the night on black coffee (couldn't afford milk) every time an essay was due - and I lived for all of that. I had my first taste of independence, I found out who I really was, I started to realise that actually I don't give a crap what other people think of me, my hair or my dress sense, and it was at uni that I started to LIVE.
Sometimes I forget the carefree person I was back then. Even writing this blog post about London and journalism and black coffee and essay deadlines has made my heart leap a little. It's such a nostalgic feeling of happiness and of having absolutely no responsibility other than getting down to the pound party before the offers end. I am still that person - just with a lot more responsibility!
Dans
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