Tense Around Apples

Sooo, I feel the need to blog. Here. I have been neglecting it, and yes I'm sorry, but I will be making amends and it's definitely worth getting back into this whole "think in longer sentences" business so that's what I am doing. Tick.

I'm not sure why I feel the need to blog, and here, although I suppose today, whilst it hasn't been all that eventful, has seen me feeling somewhat refreshed and quite thinky, for want of a better word. Pensive, maybe. Hmmm.

I went through a box of papers, and it had bits of everything in it. Bus and train tickets, plane tickets even, but then magazine articles about Pompeii and a purposefully tea-stained letter from my my GCSE History days. I'm fed up of having loads of tat in my room - it's beginning to look positively store-room-ish because I'm such a hoarder - and so I was harsh (ish) today. I think I ended up chucking half the box out, which is okay. What surprised me though, was just how much it became clear that I resented my time at uni. All these things about information for Freshers and receipts and even my notes... I just wanted to get rid of it. Didn't want to see it again. Hadn't liked what it had made me.

And it had made me something. Or rather, somebody I didn't like. Who just... wasn't me. It's taken so long to realise it, and I'm still not sure I'm entirely there, but university made me a bit of a monster, tbh. Not to anyone else, I'd argue (although the fights I had with Mum were pretty epic. In a BAD WAY. No lols.), but in myself. Unrecognisable, and quite possibly suffering from some sort of Winter of the soul. My education was corporised, my home limbo'ed, and my friends changed. My life moved out of the ladder-shaped routine it had been suited to at home, and fell into the quick moving river (at times getting stuck in an ox-bow lake). I had to learn to do a lot of things very quickly, not least Learn the Right Way. And learning how to learn is HARD.

Here I was, used to teaching and questions and boards and discussion, and arguably THRIVING on that for the majority of my school years, and now the goal posts are moved and actually it's "Sorry Laura, we'll have to sit this one out, it's up to you now."
"What the foof?! It's up to ME?! Since when was it up to me? I sit here quietly, have a giggle, take it all in, wow people with my knowledge and enthusiasm, give people a couple of laughs for being outspoken, tick a couple of boxes, and write an answer we just planned. Batta bing, batta boom; everyone goes home happy."
"Er, no, Laura, no bing or boom here. Or even batta. Read a book, do your work, and get on with it BYE"
"but but but... what. How do not stories books?"
"I dunno. BYE."

Yeah. It was basically that. I hardly used the library until Third Year, and even then it took me forever to learn how to properly use those kinds of books (No reading from start to finish; you just rip them apart, abuse the f**k out of them, basically). Even then, someone had to teach me. It all made me feel very stunted, behind, and all rather unclever. Added to the fact that I don't think my heart was ever truly there, and my mindset adjusted for that, shrugging everything off to stop it being important. I suppose it's not surprising I became such a shell. No heart, no mind, no matter? Not me.

I felt stupid, and I thought it was because I wasn't doing enough; because I was getting less smart, and not trying; because I was in the wrong place doing the wrong thing. I still think that now - that maybe I shouldn't have gone to uni just then, or that I should have considered a lot more unis than I actually did - but I know it in a different way now. Reading is a bit of an Old Boys Club, tbh, and I'm very much convinced it was the wrong place for me, but only because I wasn't ready for the kind of learning it wanted to give me.

I'm absolutely not putting this down to the North-South divide (I'm not that aggravated) but my previous education (and myself, if I'm honest) had not readied me for this. I didn't know what was happening, I didn't understand why it was and how to turn it around, and I didn't yet have the tools to protect myself against the only answer I saw: that it was me, and I was "too thick". I honestly don't think I'd recognise that me, if I met that me now. It's like I'm recovered, because I certainly wasn't well then.

I doubted myself. I doubted who I was and what I loved, and where I wanted to go. The little voice that had only had to whisper before about what I was doing and the kind of person I was, was getting lost in the fog that filled me, even when it was shouting. In resentment it turned nasty, started telling me things I didn't want to hear. And I didn't have the strength - or really the knowledge - to not believe it.

Now THAT was an eye-opener: That I didn't have to believe things people told me. Well, I knew that. I'd developed that skill in my A-Level classes, even before; the source was important and ulterior motives were something I had to look out for. Clare broadened the meaning of "people" though; explained that just because someone has published something in a hard, bound, heavy book, didn't mean their writing and theories were any more factual. They might say this was what truly happened, or evidence for that particular thing, but they weren't me. Sure, they had years worth of experience in the field and plenty of research behind them, but I was one lowly BA student ready to challenge them all. No, I was new. I didn't get it for a while, but as learnt a bit more here and there, and started putting things together, and realising I could put them together, and that I didn't have to suppress them, I gained a gentle confidence in my own ideas. I'm still practising not suppressing them now - a lifetime of having an emotionally unstable mother will do that to you - but as I began to see a book as something that could be wrong, I began to see a tiny passing-through thought as something that could be right. My views... could be... GOOD. They could get marks, be admired, open someone ELSE'S mind!

Tied in with my module on what was basically Myth and Dichotomy, which posited that pretty much everything could be given the response, "Says who?" this philosophy took hold and now won't let go. Sometimes I forget about it, because I think you have to, to have a good time (you can't go thinking, "Oh! That was some SEXISM!" at a comedy gala, for instance; you have to 'blinker' as I think me and 4492 call it.), but then I go back into it and it's like I'm set back from the world, and while there are *things* in the world, there's no web for them to sit comfortably *in* anymore. It's a very confounding experience that can't happen too often because otherwise I'd go mad.

It's nice to be Separate sometimes though. Helps enormously with reading the newspapers and understanding the goings on of the outer bubble, which is the rest of the world when I'm Separate. It's focused those early A-Level skills too, about seeing where something has come from and relating it to other things that are happening at the same time. Like with that Tory Party Donor happening to be recorded just at the moment he's talking about something scandalous involving the Tory government, as reported in a normally Right Wing Murdoch Newspaper. As reported in a Murdoch Newspaper during the Leveson Inquiry. It's also made me a lot more confident in myself, and secured the platform my heart stands on, the one that keeps it out of the dregs and above the smears around it; the one that enables my mouth to speak up and say "No."

I daresay I'm maybe finally ready for university.