A Day of Frustration

I have had a really frustrating day today. It came about as a result of a good deed done for my friend yesterday - she took almost two hours to get home, being as she was outside of London and thus not able to make use of late-night Tube trains or 24-hour buses. I am on her network and I have unlimited calls, so I kept her company as she went home, attempting to turn away her anxieties with my dislocated ramblings. I was fatigued through inability to sleep for various reasons (stress being chief among them), and her sudden need of me meant that I am now feeling the double whammy of two nights' lost sleep.

Now I don't know what it is about me - maybe my general tendency to be a bit odd and sensitive as a writer - but certain changes of state rob me of my personhood and leave me bristling on the verge of 'animal.' Extreme hunger is one, and extreme lack of sleep is another.

I have fussed and fought with the expectations weighing down upon me as a final year student, living away from home, trying to reconcile my experiences of being in another country and leading a very different life last year with what I want from this year.

The prognosis is bleak. Things don't go how you wish they would. You move out and dream of plucking up the courage to talk to anyone and everyone, of being your own boss and controlling when you eat (at last!). The lengthy commute vanishes altogether. You can now head back to YOUR ROOM and make yourself lunch instead of buying overpriced sandwiches to nibble on, hoping they will suffice for the four hours ahead before you can even hope to grab something else.

You talk to the other early arriver at the final-year English meeting and he eyes you like a frightened mole, barely mustering the response 'I'm doing English and History.' You introduce yourself in the most friendly and personable way possible to others. They are polite and friendly, but unmistakably stand-offish: they don't need you. Nobody is going to take the time to be your friend. And why should they? What was your plan originally? You thought you could fall back on the people from 'your year,' right?

Wrong. One friend appears to have her woolly hat soldered to her head and a permanent whiff of hysteria about her. Another sports a dazed look despite her being much more organised than you are. Other people are laughing and relaxed, chatting with their Spanish-classmates or fellow students from last year, or people they have struck something up with from the start.

You think to draw strength from your work. It has always been a source of joy, a feeling of plugging yourself into a current that is both so natural and so magically electric that everything that crosses your mind can be explained away. Yet everyone is a competitor this year. They eye your mental outpourings hungrily, ears straining for the next remark that they can snatch up, and like a key, use to prise open the groaning difficulties of Modernism and Democracy.

You are no longer safe in your work, even. Every student is out for blood, and in the torrent of unspoken fear, insecurity, stress and wide-eyed disbelief ('what am I doing up so early? why am I here? can it really be that this year is worth quadruple?'), you feel that you might just fall. You might lose hope and lock yourself away, become addicted to the Internet, lose the ability to recognise what makes you angry and simply float in a limbo of de-motivation. Nostalgia is painful and dangerous and deceptive.

You see the whirlwind of hurried, stressed madness and lonely freedom that is the final year, that is London. It feels familiar to you, after a year elsewhere. And yet it makes no more sense than before. You feel cheated of something you were looking for, that you realise you have been seeking your whole life and found neither where you grew up, nor where you were forced to move.

It is a hard-won emptiness. The beginning of the end of childhood - and just when you realised that you were, in fact, a child. The sinister encroachments of adulthood look now like the reflection of gold on water - a flimsy and insubstantial promise that only your imagination will ever be able to keep to you.