Today I finished my compulsorily high school education officially. And with it, went my blackened soul. (Well not really. If my soul were to be a colour, it would be deep magenta, not black. Gosh, reader. Get with it. )


I am moving on. (Or whatever)

I realized today that I want to be more…worthy of nostalgia. That sounds weird, especially since I am constantly burdened with nostalgia. It’s just, it’s the wrong kind, it’s that stupid kind where your longing about memories which don’t even exist. I keep telling myself of all the people I will meet, and the new surroundings I will be in and all the memories I will have but why should you wait for the future to have memories when you can have them now? You don’t need change or time, things can happen now. I just don’t know how to make them happen now. I told myself that this year, I would be a lot more casual with hanging out with people, invite them places and do new but small things with them, but I can’t bring myself to say ”Hey, want to hang out sometime?” to anybody because I am always scared that the outcome of this will not be worth the angst I felt before approaching said person, because I am such an AWKWARD MESS.

I’ve tried with the new year to keep bettering my self, and radically change the desolate person I am, but ”tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life” applies to any day of the year. So I can even procrastinate and wait for another day, it will still apply won’t it? I don’t know. I am stuck between a haze of sadness where I feel lonely and bored and angsty, and then in a haze of rediscovering everything I love at once and feeling completely thrilled with the small but lovely wonders I find in my life. I know every teenager craves to be a teenager and fill their lives with cheap thrills and adventure, but I don’t even crave that, I just crave in-between days where everything is ridiculously normal and NOTHING has changed but you still feel happy in them. I crave to be in the arts, and I also crave a fuck ton of pizza.

I also want to feel more accomplished. Here is a list of things I want to accomplish in the foreseeable future:
Learn to not correlate self worth with ability to do well in exams. I hate exams, honestly. For all the same reasons everyone else does - confining you to a space and asking you to practically regenerate (whovian english student for life) previous information while under a time limit is no WAY a reflection of who you are and how you work. Stop it, Lucy. Your aspirations are in no way stunned because of your inability to get a C in maths. 

 

• Write and direct my own short film (Also film lots more). I love watching film, and I love screenwriting, but I want to be able to say that I can produce my ideas into reality - and actually film for myself. I have a camera, admittedly it’s quite shit, but the quality of my camera should not affect my writing and directing abilities, so I have no excuse not to. 
• Pick up french again. I took French in year 9 and managed to gain a GSCE in it even though I only technically been studying it for a year (still doesn’t reflect my talents, I was so shit ha) but I really really want to able to speak more of it. How I’ll go about this, I literally have no clue but un jour, je serais fantastique a le francais (that’s literally from memory and horrifically wrong) 
• Travel. I don’t care where and I don’t care who with, even if it’s just the train to manchester for the day, I honestly gain so much more inspiration from going to different places and picking up ideas from them. 

I don’t really like letting my mind wander into the ”I’ll be the picture of perfection next year!”. As negative as it sounds, I don’t like to shape or imagine my future to be exact, or at least I don’t like to confuse ambition with lustful ideas that might never even happen. I don’t exactly have a negative outlook on upcoming years, I just simply don’t have an outlook.

This year feels different though. It’s not picture of perfection, it's picture of reality. Instead of thinking, ''this year will be good to me”, I will be good to this year. Take care of it when it’s drunk by giving it bread or not getting annoyed at the year for when it doesn’t text me back or not getting jealous at how nice their hair is. Yup. I’m making an analogy of my upcoming year and an angsty teenage girl. But, you know what I mean. I think people put too much of the blame on time and the year, but time is just a collection of seconds strung together, it isn’t a angsty teenage girl or a ghost coming to haunt you. Its just time. Its up to me to fill it with productive things. I sound like one of those inspirational videos they put on in PSE. I should stop now.

Without trying to sound like an incoherent coming of age novel, (Spoiler alert: I totally am sounding like it) there were many reasons accumulated over the years that made highschool came to my disliking.

I hate how school show the importance of financial survival over dreams and aspirations. I think school think I’m playing the devil’s advocate just in order to ‘rebel’ but I’m not, I just know how to prioritize things. Focusing on grades rather then how much you enjoy the subject essentially means your whole education is about knowledge rather then learning, and I refuse to tame my learning to simply passing an exam so that in my future, I can financially survive. I find it annoying how your levels of intelligence correlate with how high your grades are or how obedient you are. Its never what thoughts you have, or how passionate you are, it’s how much you conform to what school want.

I am lucky to have an extremely resourceful school, and it has helped me extremely, especially with the field I want to work with. But that is down solely to the network I have in the English/Drama department, not down to my my school's philosophy of it.

Because majority of my teachers in my school’s views are that it is a very niche subject, and the possibility of actually doing something with it is slim, they drill that into students that creativity and arts can get you nowhere. They never consider that life is not simply achieving grades and requiring one job. It's not a linear sequence you fulfill and then somehow acquire happiness from that fulfillment. I'm being serous, they never ever consider passion in other things which aren't University/Acquiring a job. I want to make art because I want to make art, no so I can get money.

Another thing I hate is how making learning fun is a rare possibility. Seriously! In an educative establishment we are conditioned to believe learning is not a place for fun, but a place for work. Could you imagine the quality of students approaches if they made it a creative place where each day in and day out you learn something new, even in subjects that come to your distaste? I understand we are being trained to enter the real world - but somehow I think there is more to the real world then what High school makes out if you just accept there is more.