Epiphanies are a bitch

Well, it would appear that October has proven itself to be a remarkably eventful month since it has attracted a nice 5 blog entries so far. I doubt very much that will grow to 6 in the space of a few days, however I guess you never know quite what life is going to throw at you and so it's somewhat pointless trying to predict it.

So whilst it's impossible to see what's coming ahead, it's quite easy to look back and see what has gone before. I had quite the interesting flashback to my first year of university earlier, whilst I was in Sheffield city centre, and on one hand it made me realise something about myself - a quality that perhaps I've been trying to convince myself I don't have - and I also realised something about how I'm different from that person now. The great thing about this realisation, though, is that the changes that have happened to me are quite easily reversible and are things that I'm intent on changing anyway. As anyone who knows me will attest to, I have quite (ok, very) long hair and I didn't have quite such a flowing mane when I first arrived here. I'm beginning to suspect that the sheer amount of hair I have is perhaps pidgeon-holing me into a certain "social group" that I don't entirely fit into, whilst when I first came to uni I think I could just about blag being in one of a handful of them.

I've also realised something else today, which is again part-good and part-bad. I've realised that, over the course of the past few months, I've put someone who I care very much for through a lot of stuff I shouldn't have and I can never undo this. I can't take back what I did, how I was, or the person I turned into. I made a lot of mistakes, and did things I shouldn't have done, and as was pointed out on at least one occasion any half decent boyfriend wouldn't even have thought some of what I did. The thing that is so unsettling is that, so far as I can tell, nothing has changed about the way I feel for her or how she feels for me - but because I don't always think things through, or don't take things into account that I should, I don't think anything is going to become from it any more. I'd be over the moon if it could, I truly would, but unfortunately something I'm going to have to come to terms with is that scenario being pretty much untenable. For all I've said, and all the complaining or stubborn attitude I've given out over it in the past few weeks, one of the proverbial pennies that dropped into the well of understanding the other day represented the fact that I can't act like a kid anymore on stuff like this. I shouldn't be listening to myself and the voices in my head, but perhaps to the people who're talking to me and who in most cases I still judge as being willing to be honest with me. I need to get out of my twisted and unsettled mind, and out into the real world and actually take more things on board instead of dismissing them as outright lie or deceit. I don't expect many of the people I know, or talk to on a regular basis, to deliberately or knowingly mislead or lie to me - but from the way I've been recently, I'd expect that most people would think the opposite.

I guess that's something that not a lot of people realise about me, really. For years at high school, I was a bit of an outcast - I'm sure everyone was either one of the smart kids, or knew one of the smart kids and looked down on them for it. I spent 5 years feeling like I was good for little else than recieving derisive remarks, or being used for answers to homework or for help with other stuff. Since leaving, and thanks to going to a good college and now a good university, I'm not just stuck on the fringes anymore. There's people who seem to like me, and I'm damn sure it's not to try and blag answers any more 'cause I'm sure not one of the smartest going these days. I guess perhaps I'm still not through the transition I should've made in high school, where I should've gone from the naive child I was to a slightly more world-aware person. I don't think I'm entirely used to being liked purely by merit of who or how I am, without some underlying agenda or exchange like before, and I'm even surer that I'm still not entirely used to having some of the attention I do occasionally get these days. I'm sure I don't have to be specific on that one, but that you'll figure out what I'm suggesting. I was never anywhere near the radar at high school, let alone on it.

Maybe I'll get past this point, and perhaps one day I might end up being someone who was good enough for her. It's just a shame I didn't quite get there in time...

...and the dirt still stains me...

It's quite funny, a lot of what I do. I've been talking to someone on MSN for a while, and despite everything I wrote on here between 2 and 3 am this morning, I've already lost sight of so much of it. Evidently I underestimated just quite how much effort I'm going to have to put into sorting my head out.

So, I still haven't been able to accurately recall the quote I was searching for this morning. Whilst I may have found 3 other good ones, none of them seem quite so appropriate as this one particular quote is. I'm so definitely sure that it's an Albert Camus quote, or perhaps someone closely associated with Camus, since when it was originally cited to me the discussion had just mentioned him. It truly was a spectacular quote, an absolutely fantastic statement about self-pity and just how vile an emotion it is. It sums up pretty much everything about my current situation perfectly, far better than I ever could.

I'm also finding more and more often that, despite having a lot of it, I'm not enjoying listening to the music I've grown so fond of any more. Whether that has anything to do with the fact that, at the moment, I'm feeling very apathetic about a lot of things I don't know. A lot of the music I have sat in the library of iTunes doesn't really do much to make me feel any better. The odd track of stuff like MGMT and Keane I have here, though, with the "lighter" music for want of a better description seems to do much more for my mood than such metallic glory as Metallica or Dragonforce.

Which brings me on to the topic that seems to be underpinning pretty much everything I'm thinking about right now, and mostly what is behind a lot of what I write on here. The issue of who, exactly, I am. Who is this person, sat at a computer screen talking about the issues in his life? What do I like, where am I going in life, what do I want from it? Genuinely, I can't answer some of those questions. I came to university with no absolute direction, I still don't really have one. Partially I think this is because of the issues I'm still trying to solve; that I don't think I'm capable of any significant original contribution to the field I'm studying, or that I'm not worth anything as a scientist (or a person for that matter). Yet, at the same time, I don't know entirely what a physics degree - should I get one - would really allow me to go on and do.

So, I got to thinking about why I actually came to university. What helped, was that I found the personal statement I wrote for my application to UCAS. I think I very much lost sight of why I came here, I got too bogged down in everthing that coming to university exposed me to. Before coming here, I was very much a closed off person. I had a small group of friends, and by that I mean I knew a few people well enough to not feel uncomfortable around them and whom I felt I could talk to about things. Then I came to Sheffield. I was no longer surrounded by familiar faces, or by situations I could easily escape from. To be fair, I think I owe quite a debt of gratitude to some of the people I first met at university. Some of the first people I ever spoke to, and some of the first friends I made here, were international students. People who'd not just left their hometown, but had come to an entirely different country to get a degree. And, in all honesty, if I had to make a claim as to who I thought were friendlier - the internationals or the home students - I'd go with the internationals any day. I'm still good friends with a few of them, they're fantastic people. Whereas some of the home students I've met did nothing but remind me of what I thought I'd left behind once I left college. It's remarkable that, no matter what level of education you're in, there's still arseholes. My high school had a lot of them, and college had surprisingly more than I anticipated. I never thought so many people whose life seemed to involve nothing but drink, drugs and sex would've gone to college. Yet, perhaps that just shows how naive I was about the world, 'cause university students seem to predominantly be the people I tried to avoid. Ask anyone what they think students do, and their answer will probably be some combination of drink, drugs and sex.

I've digressed somewhat, and I'm not accurately representing in my statement the people I've made friends with at university. Granted, some of the people I know at university do seem to do very little except go out, get drunk/high/laid or any combination of them at once. But then, I know people who don't. The people who, for all intents and purposes, I suppose I could refer to as an island of morality. And I think I'm lucky, in some respects, that I have friends who fall under both categories. I know people who I can go out with, and have a laugh with - and no, before you go there I don't do drugs. Yet, when I need a quiet cuppa and someone to talk to, I know I've got friends for that too. I don't think I've quite yet shifted my opinion on drugs, to be honest. When I came to uni, I abhorred them - and, to some extent, I abhorred the people who took them. I pitied them, for being so callous as to risk throwing their life away just so they could go get high in a club toilet. Perhaps at some point, I might write another entry so I can try and make sense of my attitude towards drugs. I think if I ever do, it's probably going to have somewhere at the top a warning that it's probably not suitable for most people to read.

Part of what got me so confused, though, is that coming to university challenged so much of what I thought - and, as such, challenged how I was as a person. I came to Sheffield with all the opinions, thoughts and views that made me who I was. Perhaps, the fact that they were so wrong shows I was naive and stupid. Perhaps that goes to show they were never my opinions to begin with. As the Albert Camus quote said in my previous entry, we can't be happy with ourselves if all we're concerned about is the happiness of others. When I look back, I find many an occasion where I've not actually gone along with how I felt, but I've instead gone with another opinion. I don't know why. I don't, right now, feel that much compulsion to be another sheep in the herd. And yet I'm not happy with myself. I'm not happy because, ever since high school, I've seen everything go well for people who were nothing like me. The people who, instead of giving a damn about their education and their health went out and purposefully did the opposite. For years, all I saw was a society where individualism was to be discouraged. Where being something other than the type of person peddled by the popular media was a flaw, a mistake on your part.

So now I've been here for three years, and I've managed to wrangle with a few of my flawed opinions. I'm no longer so mindlessly anti-drugs. I don't see the point in criminalising some of them - and when I say this, I predominantly mean cannabis. That's another thing for another time. I won't ever willfully take the majority of illegal stuff - you'll never find me with a needle full of heroin, or snorting coke - but I'm not so blind as to immediately and blindly jump to the defence of the government and start spouting that they're all illegal for a reason any more.

To be fair, I think a lot of what I need to try and do is sort out what it is that I think. I need to spend more time saying damn it all to hell when it comes to other people's opinions and make up my own. I don't think that entirely failing to care for other people's thoughts when it comes to me would ever be productive - if anything I think not caring at all could swing me right to the other end of the spectrum - but perhaps I need to find a middle ground between caring what others think of me and caring what I think about myself.

I've gone all over the place in this entry, partially because I think there's so much floating around in my head that it's hard to think of one thing without invariably wandering into another topic. But, I hope that one day I'll be able to write an entry knowing more about who I am. That the day will eventually come where I can sit here, read back through these and feel content in the knowledge that I'm not this person any more. This sham facade of what I think others wanted me to be. Instead, I hope eventually I'll be what I want to be... and hopefully that person won't be hated by others.