My First Rant (About Everything)

My computer is getting slower by the day and it is driving my crazy. Also driving me crazy? My room. I don’t have a chair for my desk so I have to bend over to use my laptop which is uncomfortable and probably bad for me. I have stuff all over the floor in an attempt to organise. My closet is still waiting for some coverage. My wall is still blank. It is not the inspiring space I wanted to spend my summer writing in. It is not a retreat in any way except that it has a door which separates me from the less-than stellar living conditions outside of it… 

It’s an improvement from dorms and terrible flatmates, sure, but I find myself missing my days in Winchester more and more. I haven’t even been back a month!

Some of my friends seem to have written me off now that I’m in another country. They make no attempt to respond to messages and at this point I’m just waiting for them to unfriend me. Meanwhile, I need to make more friends in Calgary! I have lots of cousins to hang out with, but since they’re on my mom’s side and I live mostly with my dad, I don’t really hear about things happening until either the very last minute or after the fact.

I have friends from high school who’ve made new friends since I left, I have a few friends who I see every now and again, and I have work friends. The rest of the time I have no one to hang with so I just stay cooped up in this house with family (and the guy in our basement), plotting ways of escape. Short of winning the lottery (which is impossible since I don’t even play), my best plan gets me out of here in over a year. Am I even going to last that long? I’m not sure.

Winchester was great. If I was bored, I could walk to town and along the river. Here it takes an hour on unreliable transit to get to our river, beautiful as it is. I’d love to have a car by now, but I’m still working on getting my learner’s licence. Being unable to prove with three documents that I lived in Alberta while I went to university in England, not having DNA that made me a distant relative of the prime minister, and not being able to do eighty backflips in a row has set me back a bit in terms of road mastery. Transit it is.

In other news, now that I’m back, my parents have gone right back to getting all the ammo from me they can to use against each other in the now three-year-long divorce. My sister is as tactless and contrary as she was before and our relationship was much better when there were thousands of miles between us.

I feel like I can’t make a move without being questioned. In direct contrast of Winchester, where I would hop to other countries on a whim without asking permission from anyone and telling only my bank, now something as small and petty as my choice of clothes is questioned every time I leave my room. When I’m on my laptop all day researching courses to take in September, teaching myself filmmaking methods, writing scripts, looking for short-story competitions to submit to, finding clubs to join, managing my finances, and yes, checking Facebook too, people seem to think I’m being lazy. I’m not at my part-time job every day, so maybe I should find a second part-time job, or better yet, apply for this job someone found me that requires a doctorate in Governance and Diplomacy and fluency in eight languages because it pays so much better and look! It has insurance benefits!

I get it. People, namely my parents, aunts, uncles, older cousins, parents’ friends, and the guy in our basement, are worried. With a degree in Creative Writing I might as well save myself the trouble and go straight to the nearest homeless shelter.

I know I said I haven’t changed much after three years in England, but I meant I haven’t changed much considering the three years in England! Of course I’ve changed! But I also remember being this desperate for independence and an escape three years ago, too; it was the whole reason I signed up for England in the first place. I thought the three years in another country, the solo travels, and the university degree might finally show people I am capable of living. But I get it. I’ve changed. They haven’t.

Maybe I’m being naïve. I’m only twenty-one. Barely an adult if I were American, though I’m not.

At this point of the post, I should start counting my blessings. But screw it. I know my blessings, I’ve counted them so many times ever since I escaped. I’ve looked on the bright side so many times, and I never let myself mention other shit. And you know what? There’s a lot of shit I haven’t mentioned. Bloggers can be so freakin’ mysterious, huh? I mean, I tell you guys about maybe 5% of my life? And you never hear about the bad parts. How glamorous it must’ve seemed to read about my life. Oh, a young writer going to England for university and travelling the country—and to Paris!—during her leisure. But my life isn’t perfect, although it was very close to it several times since I started this blog.

For today, for this hour, for this post, I will allow myself to be angry. Because, goddammit, I am. I’m angry and frustrated and a little bit sad and very, very annoyed and all this horribleness is just going to burn me up if I don’t get it out the only way I know how: writing.

So thanks for reading. I’m not always like this, I promise.