It’s finally November, which is the month which sticks out in my head as the month I have to sort out where I’m living next year even though it feels like I’ve only been living in halls for 2 minutes. I do want somewhere nice to live next year, obviously, but I hope I can’t be the only one thinking ‘how on earth do I find a house?’ I thought booking accommodation for first year was hard enough but now I’ve actually got to look around, compare rent prices, decide who I want to live with and do it as quickly as possible to avoid living on the street. It all seems a bit overwhelming, and I honestly don’t have a clue how to do it.
A big part of first year is moving away from your parents for the first time and each person handles that differently. For me, I’m finding the whole process quite easy, but keeping up with my mother’s phone calls isn’t. I think it’s unavoidable when you’re upset to think if your parents were here or if you were at home the problem that you have wouldn’t seem as bad. You do change a lot as a person when you come to university and you adapt to the people around you, so another thing I’m struggling with is making sure my old friends still understand (and like) the new me. I went home for the first time the other weekend, since being at uni, for my birthday and it really opened my eyes. The fears that I had thinking maybe I should have waited longer before coming to uni or maybe I was happier at home all melted away because of the massive realisation that I had outgrown the place I’d grown up in. Nothing had changed about my home town, it just seemed smaller. I know I’m not speaking on behalf of every first year, and there are some people that could be experiencing home sickness really badly, I know plenty of people that have gone home as much as they possibly could, and spend hours on the phone to their parents every day, and that’s completely normal, everyone experiences moving away from your family differently.
Another thing I experienced this week was a break up, joyfully enough. I am a prime example of someone who came to uni thinking their relationship would survive the train journey that separated us and a long distance relationship would be easy. In this case I was wrong. I’m quite a stubborn person and even though everyone was telling me it would be harder than I thought and the chances of a break up would be on the cards, I still believed we’d be able to do it and was not going to let everyone else be right. If you are in the same situation as myself, which some people definitely will be, don’t be disheartened by other people’s experiences but also don’t let yourself be unhappy just for the sake of staying in, what used to be, a good relationship. Now I’m single I haven’t a clue what I’m doing so if a girl approaches you talking about her cats at least you know that could be me and all I’m trying to do is socially interact with you.
