457: Hiatus

457: Hiatus

If I had been told, maybe around graduation 243 days ago, that I wouldn’t make it into dental school (for now) and would be suffering with possible depression in a foreign city surrounded simultaneously by beauty and horror…

I probably would have cried. I know I was frustrated when I didn’t make it into any, but found out I made oral health school purely because the scores required for it were so low. So I moved cities and lost my support network, had to rebuild a new one, albeit unsuccessfully, and am studying something I love. But I am trying again for dental school, with the thought in mind that I will probably be even more depressed, but hey, what gives, this is my dream career.

I realise my last post was in January, on January 5, two days before I nearly died of alcohol poisoning at a stranger’s house. I had a stormy, complicated romance of sorts for three months before I was forced to give it up due to new complications such as moving cities and realising I had fallen in love on the last day we met. Yikes. Honestly, I don’t know how to feel about everything that has happened since my last exam of high school. Looking back on my blog, it’s almost like I’ve missed so much of my own life. Not to mention that I’ve had about a hundred new throwaway email followers (my inbox is full of them). I really wish I would just close this blog and study for my finals (that are in less than two weeks), but right now, I just feel so depressed and feel the need to reflect.

I miss the summer. Summer is my favourite season. The last three summers have been incredibly memorable. Summer of 2015 was mostly spent scrolling endlessly on Vine, watching looping memes that had sound. Summer of 2016 was mostly spent poring over lines of classical Latin when I was not seeing my ex, and when I was not poring over Latin, I was going on dates, sightseeing in my own city with someone I loved very much (although now I barely remember any of those dates, just the one where we were walking in the park and on the tip of my tongue was, “I want to break up”, seemingly out of nowhere, and I wish we broke up in that park right then and there because the pain dragged on unnecessarily for about four months). Summer of 2017, best summer of my life thus far. Going out six days out of seven, inadvertently checking to dos off my post-HSC bucket list that I had written maybe a year or two in advance and added to occasionally. I made new friends. I saw new people. I…had the most whirlwind, most complicated of relationships, as far as casual relationships would go, as far as I had gone with casual relationships. Truthfully at the time, I was not exactly new to the dating scene. I was very sociable, in need of contact and communication with all kinds of people. I recall feeling lonely and unwanted if I did not have the chance to be extroverted. In the summer, he was so great that I wanted to write a whole blog post about him. I can only imagine that it would have been so blinded by love, by an impossible possibility that I am actually sort of glad that I didn’t write it, because I knew what I was getting myself into at the start of that summer.

That summer, I had very little reason, if any, to be sad or depressed. High school was over, I was going to uni, whatever. I was pretty disappointed to see that I didn’t make dental school, but I kind of knew it was going to happen and that one way or another, I would get in some other time. Maybe next year, maybe in three years, who knows. I was quite disgruntled that I had not fallen in love with anyone, as I enjoyed and relished that feeling so much in the summer before. I chose to move to a city that was about ninety minutes away from my home city so that I could attend oral health school.

Goodness me, I guess that’s where the depression began. Leaving behind my old life, my friends, my family. This was the plan all along, but some days, more often than not now, I regret that I didn’t stay back to do some shitty degree. It turned out that I was the youngest in my degree (I was eighteen at the time, but now I’m nineteen! Wow, my blog missed my nineteenth)…and my closest friend right now is about a decade older than me. So I pretty much have no friends my age except my online friend that I have now met in real life quite frequently. Expresso depresso…

The city itself is nice. There is a great nightlife (yes to staying out until 5am), awesome drinks (hello 7-standard zombie cocktail) and pretty good food, I’d say. However, I live about thirty minutes away by train from the heart of all things exciting and I am living in the equivalent of…I shouldn’t say. Terribly flat roads, you have to have a car to get around.

The freedom of living alone is fantastic but burdening. I have so much more responsibility for myself now, and some days I enjoy it, other days I resent it. I love what I’m studying, but knowing that I won’t get to study endodontics (which feels like my passion) is a bummer.

I think I’m trying to summarise everything now, so maybe I will detail everything slowly in future posts when I get around to them, maybe after exams. I haven’t written in a journal or anything creative since the summer because I’ve been so busy studying and trying to feel normal even though I know most of the big adults in my course still look down on me as a baby that graduated high school and barely knows anything about the real world. I don’t miss high school, but I do miss being around people my age.

 

~ Serendipitous