Epiphany

It was unexplainable, really. I was seeing my younger brother off at the station after he’d spent a couple of nights staying in York, and I was standing there waving at the train when it just turned up, completely out of the blue: a sudden sense of euphoria, like every jigsaw puzzle piece had slotted into place, like every part of my life was now conspiring to make me happy.

It was perfect, I thought, walking through the slightly clichéd sunny day past the incredibly clichéd busy riverside. Not theoretically perfect, sure. No, I don’t have a job. No, I don’t have a girlfriend. No, I’m not particularly enthusiastic about my degree. And true, I have absolutely no idea where I’m heading in life. A bit of a mess, to most people’s eyes. But at the same time I’ve spent the entire last year and a half living the life I’d always dreamed of since I was that socially awkward 13 year-old whose weekends consisted of Zelda and the highlight of whose week was Doctor Who.

The wonderful friends I’ve made here (both inside the house and out)are amazing, as is the strange way in which since leaving London I’ve become closer to the ones at home than I ever was when we were at school together. The fact I’ve got a family, brother included, who are willing to all come and visit me, and whose visits I actually enjoy; the way uni lifestyle works: doing new things, meeting new people, and most importantly, having laughs. You can go out drinking the night before a 9.15 seminar and do stupid things like punch out the ceiling in Willow, and people will just have a laugh about it instead of telling you to sort your life out. When else can you do that?

We all have our little worries and neuroses. But I find it increasingly difficult to understand people who let them get the better of them and take over their whole lives, making them do nothing but angst despite their lives being actually pretty good. I came dangerously close to it the day before Valentine’s Day, the standard reaction of the unwilling bachelor every time "F*ck You If You’re Single Day" rolls around. But in the end, I manned up and just had fun: 14th February for me both began and ended in Willow. How many people in relationships have a Valentine’s Day that epic? Yes I’m still single, but why worry about it?

Symbolic of this was one morning when I went into town for a McDonalds with a couple of my female friends, both of whom had recently had troubles with men, and one of whom was having a big crisis about how much she was enjoying her course. Then there was me, equally single and apathetic to the course, who spent that journey getting increasingly more excited by the fact that I was about to have 20 Nuggets. It made me realise how much easier life is when you just don’t worry about the bad bits.

Life is such a wonderful thing when you look in the right places, but you just have to find them. And once you do, you forget about the things that are wrong with it.

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