A Change Is Gonna Come

2011 was a strange time. It’s difficult for me to look back on the beginning of the year with an unclouded mind - things just seem to have happened so long ago. It feels like another life, another person. I know it’s cliched, and I know it makes me sound more pretentious than I usually do, but I genuinely feel as though I’ve grown or changed or matured a great deal in the past few months. I’m not the same person as I was back at the beginning of 2011, and I’m so grateful for that. I finally feel like I’m in a position to be doing something worthwhile with my life. I feel like I’m surrounded by people who are full of worth themselves, which is a real novelty to me. 2012 will be a good year, I hope. I’m not one for making grand resolutions, but I believe now more than ever that, in the words of the great Sam Cooke, a change is gonna come..

Dust to Dust

I can wax lyrical about the desire to change my life for hours. Days. A whole week, even. But when it comes down to it, the process of change isn't an easy one.. And I'm not talking about how hard it is emotionally. I haven't even gotten to that stage yet! And we'll deal with that when it comes; but at the moment, I'm trying to sort out my packing.

Admittedly bad credit found here.

Packing your life up into boxes when you have no idea what your existence amounts to is a difficult thing to do. Whilst clearing out the room that has housed all of my literal and metaphorical crap for the past five years, it's been strange to sort through what my existence has previously been made up of. It's been littered with dusty cut outs from NME, and later, Teen Vogue magazine, sprinkled with redundant keepsakes (cinema tickets and ripped After-Eight chocolate wrappers were obviously once very sentimental) and positively overloaded with self-deprecating and/or self-righteous diary entries. But what do I have to show for my life as it now? And moreover, which of those remnants do I want to take with me to university?

Faced with the prospect of a fresh start, it's very hard for me to wrap my head around the idea of there being a completely bare, completely empty room just waiting to be filled with my life. I can see my books on the shelves, my clothes in the wardrobe and my laptop - which, by and large, holds the most recent reflections of my late adolescence - on the desk.. But I suppose the thing that troubles me the most is that that room is in a house, and that house is on a campus, and that campus is in a city filled with opportunities. And the thing that REALLY troubles me is that in a year from now the girl who inhabits that room, in that house, on that campus, in that city is going to be completely different to the girl currently covered in the dust of her past. So how am I supposed to prepare for the worst - my current cautionary tactic for preparing myself for university - if I don't even know how much I'm going to change in the coming months?! I can't deal with philosophizing right now. I just need to focus on tidying my room enough so that my mum won't shout at me! It's too much!