Growth

I put off writing this for a while. And by a while, I mean a few months. And by a few months, I mean since November time. 

It's difficult to talk and write about moving on, especially when you never chose to do so. Yesterday, I wrote about the 'hostility of G block'. G block is the building in which my friends and I have based ourselves during the college day for a good year and a half now. We started off on the floor next to the automatic doors in B block, an idea that was cut drastically short one day for reasons that are still unknown to me. 

So we moved to G. It was our comfort zone. It became the place we hid in, the place we cried in when things were too much, the place we laughed in, and the place we did nothing in. It was familiar and it was nice. 

And then year thirteen arrived, bringing a bucket load of fresh pressures and expectations that, for those of us applying to university, we had to meet and exceed. Some people rise to that challenge, some do not. That's OK, it's down to personal preference and I am certainly not saying that some are right, while some are wrong. But, when people are making conflicting decisions and acting differently, conflict starts to appear. At first, it's slow and almost lazy in formation. It establishes itself in snide comments and pointless arguments. But, like anything bad, if left untouched, untreated or unnoticed, it gets worse. 

Because, you see, much like with a family, a partner, or anybody else you spend most of your life around, you start to notice all of the irritating little details that you could really do without the presence of in your life. Somebody's too 'attention-seeking', another person 'needs to watch what they say', other people 'feel like they can't speak anymore', and others 'have no consideration for the fact that we were here first'. And I'm going to admit something...

I can't deal with it anymore. So I'm moving on.

I still love my friends. Of course I do. But I've reached that point where the atmosphere on a lunchtime or a breaktime is too damaging to me for it to be worth spending large amounts of time in G block anymore. 

Everybody seems to have split off into little sub-groups, and I seem to have drifted away from all of them. I'm kind of OK with this, though. I spend most of my free time in the language lab now, and I've found that I work better and my grades have improved just by being in there more. This does, however, come with the downside that I rarely see my friends anymore. It's true that there are the lab folks - namely Sophie, Billie, Wallis, Liz, Jess, Cory, etc etc - and they are all awesome people in their own rights. Some (Sophie and Jess), I have known for longer than others (Billie, Wallis, Liz, Cory), but our lab chats and our general shared interests mean that there is something to focus on. Jess and I: N, S, Starbucks Tuesdays, Josh and Josh, Poland, etc etc. Sophie and I: People who DD (cringe!), favourite woman, the face-eaters, etc etc. 

Yet, with the G block friends, I've found that only a few of the friendships tend to keep afloat. Fern and I share car journeys on a daily basis, Eliza and Sarah usually join us on the way home. I see Katie quite a lot as we share a few free periods together, and I see Will more than most people (which is odd, because we never knew each other before this college year).

I can't lie, it's hard to strike the balance between two groups. It's hard to view it objectively, in terms of my grades and general emotional wellbeing, rather than subjectively. It's easy to let the guilt about 'not being present enough anymore' consume me. I wonder if it's my own fault that I don't belong there anymore. I wonder if my involvement in Amnesty, SOS, college magazine, etc etc, has stopped my friendships from growing. But, then, these things have all helped new friendships to grow.

So, I'm muddling through at the moment. There is only one person who knows how I truly feel about all of this, and she knows how much I love her for sticking by me through all of this confusion. I don't really have a conclusion or a happy ending to this post, only that I know this is just the beginning. Of what? I don't know, but I'm sure I'm going to find out...

Besos ♥
Rachel    

They hoped, and hoped, and they said you would break

It's weird when something upsetting happens. I tend to go through stages...
1) The event consumes everything
2) I freak out about everything
3) I try to forget about everything even vaguely related to anything that has happened
4) I just feel permanently broken
I'm currently in stage four, and life is just hard.

For a while, I didn't write about it, I felt like I couldn't write about it. The unwritten rules of society stopped me writing about it. Well, those and my conscience. But by not writing about it, I never had the chance to address it - and when you're never able to address something, holding it in becomes quite tiresome. 

Why am I writing this now? Well, the tale starts way back, but for argument's sake, it started at about 4:05pm today, when my Spanish teacher asked if I was alright. I'm sure you can all related when I say that I knew I'd break down if somebody asked if I was OK. It seems to be (unfortunately) quite a common occurrance. I think I did a fairly decent job of holding myself together (that means I only cried a little). She spent a few minutes explaining to me that when you ''hold things inside, they only stay inside''. I understood what she meant. I've heard it for seven years now, every single time I've been upset. Except for last year, because the person who always said it was suddenly no longer there every day and rarely there at all. It was so strange hearing those words again. It didn't matter who was saying them. They could have whispered, they could have shouted, it didn't make a difference. I heard them.

And even though I heard them, I'm still exactly where I was before they were even said. Why? Because there's still nobody there. It's all well and good to know you need to talk to someone, but what about when there's nobody there? No teachers, no family, no friends, nobody who will sit with you and just listen. 

In the meantime, everything is also just bad. Christmas is coming and I no longer even care about it. I'd almost rather be at college because we're behind in Psychology and it feels like time is running out. It's as if I'm living every single day waiting for the last grain of sand to drop through into the bottom of the hourglass. I don't feel like I'm living life by my own time. 

I wish I could continue writing and try to make all of that make sense, but I have three essays to do and two books to read. I don't have time. 

Besos ♥
Rachel