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There’s a certain cachet to feeling young and lost, but in my (now infrequent) low moments, it feels more like an emptiness, a lack. It is a ridiculous thought, but I can find little glamorous or aesthetic about the way I feel. My pretentious ramblings and the veritable fashion runway that is the Sidgwick Site betray the fact that humanities students are so often creatures of aesthetic.
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“I catch myself and wonder why I am trying to reduce lovely, human experiences to arbitrary and hugely subjective categories”
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But me? I once felt a strange affinity with the tragic characters of Wedekind’s ‘Spring Awakening’ – confused and exhausted Moritz, leaving his desk to sit at the window and longing to join the spirits he imagines moving among the rustling leaves of the trees. Even the medieval texts I find myself studying seem alienating, their amorous themes fixing me with a pointed stare from across the centuries. But the nagging possibility at my core that maybe this wasn’t for me has been one of the most disconcerting and disorientating experiences of my life (evidence of my enormous luck so far – see notebook of gratitude).Īnd the thing about romantic love is its inestimable cultural clout, a collective obsession stretching back thousands of years which has inspired or featured in most of humanity’s greatest productions. I flirt, date, sleep with people and have made some brilliant connections in my ongoing (mis)adventures with romance. Society fashions romance as the logical counterpart to the satisfying platonic and family relationships which mean that, in spite of my worries, my life has always felt full. I consider myself a very social person, and am sustained by connection with others. At first, I was sure it was the pandemic, but quite suddenly, one day, the questioning began.
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And while I didn’t notice and wasn’t enormously bothered at first, the butterflies, sparks and whatever else is supposed to fly simply didn’t. I was meeting incredible new friends and having a great time, but had had most of the flurry of traditional young adult experiences before university – romance seemed the last stubborn bastion of youth. Although the ability to ease into your identity is a fantastic and privileged experience, still someone, or something, felt missing. So began the unrelenting comparison of my experience to the false comfort of what ‘should’ be - still, I brushed my discomfort off as I headed to university, excited after years of silence to be open with new people. I came out as gay when I was 18 and that moment of supposed self-realisation didn’t seem to have for me the same effect it had on others. Paradoxical, no? But when I really thought about it, I had felt like this before, despite always having been surrounded by love. “So began my unrelenting comparison of my experience to the false comfort of what ‘should’ be”Īfter about a year of university, feeling something was off, I told one of my brilliant friends about this loneliness. I tried, unsuccessfully, to remedy the superficiality of my anxieties with these rational statements - because frankly I was sometimes embarrassed by my own concern, no matter how profoundly it worried me at times: ‘I feel alone.’ With each pen stroke, I was trying to drum into my head the simple and fundamentally self-indulgent fact that it could be worse. In black biro and on neat lines I list the immense privileges life has afforded me:ġ. Much like that intangible, fairy-tale image I had of Cambridge, now beyond reach even in the pink light of the most spellbinding January evenings. Contentment: a tricky, diaphanous feeling that once you notice is missing feels as though it never existed in the first place. Gratitude is one way I tried to quiet my mind and restore a sense of contentment which I hadn’t felt for a while but is now slowly returning. A pre-emptive strikebound in green, with an elastic fastener. They were scrawled reticently in moments where I wasn’t feeling terribly unhappy, but lying in bed, contemplating the approaching, solitary minutes where I would have to confront those unvarnished and decidedly nocturnal thoughts which assail us all from time to time. It is blank except for 3 pages of gratitude – abortive attempts at perspective. There is a notebook in my bedside table, given to me on my 19th birthday.