Two Years In The Capital, or Lessons From London
Another chapter of my life is coming to a close, so I figure it's worth writing about it and reflecting on what happened. I've lived here in the capital for roughly two years, which is something I have wanted to do for a while. The idea became nascent in my teenage years, and eventually I acted on it and made it reality. I will commend myself on that if not anything else. A desire that lived solely in the realm of ideas was made reality, and I lived it. That is something to be proud of -- something to look back on in the future when self-doubt is my predominate feeling and nothing feels attainable. Ideas can become reality.
I decided to move to London not really sure how my finances were going to work out. I could take out a student loan to cover my tuition costs, but there was no further help for living costs. I basically had: my savings, my mother, and a chasm waiting for me to fall into somewhere down the line. Over time my savings dwindled, my mother helped with accommodation costs, but eventually I reached the chasm. Something had to be done. I had to get a job. I got a minimum wage gig during the final term of my masters -- a customer assisstant at a corporate cinema place in the centre of London. It wasn't ideal, but it's what I needed to jump the chasm. It's what saved me from a dizzying fall. However, it proved distracting and disorienting; my primary focus ought to have been my dissertation and really smacking one out the park, but that didn't happen. I was worried about money, worried about the future, worried about personal issues (ever-worried about personal issues), and I was paralysed. I did well enough in my courses throughout the year to provide me with a grades safety-net, but I bombed my dissertation. I procrastinated; I faltered; I froze. I therefore didn't do the best I could have, but came out with a respectable classification (a merit, the master's equivalent of a 2:1). Although I don't feel bad about not quite reaching my intellectual height, I do feel bad about not setting up better for the future while I was on the course. I would play truant from classes and ultimately fail to form any kind of relationship with my dissertation supervisor. Now I want to go on to do a PhD, but I don't really have connections, and I'll need references. I had this fear going into my master's too, and I overcame it, but the fear feels a little more justified this time. I had less time to form a relationship with potential referees and I didn't act as I should have, and now it's been a year since I'd have crossed any of their minds. Getting onto a PhD might be difficult. But I'm struggling to think of anything else I want to do. Teaching and reading philosophy is just about the only thing I feel I'd like to do professionally, outside of writing fiction. The latter is the permanent pipe-dream. The former is the only thing in reality that attracts me. So what choice do I have? I don't know.
So my master's year was plagued with worries, misplanning, and my own shortcomings. I was still recovering from losing my best friend (friendship break-up) and distancing myself from the friendship groups associated with him; I was also recovering from the nail being put in the coffin of the only long-term relationship I've ever been in (I precipitated the initial break-up, but her finding somebody else truly ended any remaining potential for us). It was a hard year. I developed a crush on a new girl -- a crush I had no right in having. She had a boyfriend. I let the crush grow, though, and I distinctly remember the night I succumbed to it -- a night of beers with a couple of friends and drunken confessions. Confessing it--speaking it aloud--made it real, and it added another complication to an already fraught year. Nothing ever happened between us, but a layer of confusion and occasional saddness existed in the overall makeup of my psyche because of it.
It wasn't all bad, though. I made friends and continued to respect the importance of resilience. I've also learned that some things, even if true, are more responsibly held in the heart, quietly, not released out into the world, causing confusion for the head. Dear future self -- no matter how lovely she is, if she is in a relationship, forget it. Keep it in your heart. Tell nobody and move on quickly.
My second year in London has also been short of an astounding success. Coming out of my masters, holding onto a minimum wage job, I moved into a house with the aforementioned girl and a couple of guys she knew through friends. It's been a lowkey year of minor failures in regards to getting a "better job". I applied to a couple of things I would have enjoyed doing and got to the interview stage, but was never called back for further rounds with either company. These incidents knocked my confidence back somewhat and caused me to sit complacently with my minimum wage job that just about pays the bills and rent (providing I also use my overdraft). I didn't apply relentlessly to as many things as I should have if I wanted to get a well-paying job. Part of it, I admit, is simply down to confidence issues, but another part is that I was hesitant to enter the rat race for careers I wasn't properly interested in. The idea of applying broadly and consistently was not attractive to me. I didn't want to just get a job for the sake of social optics. However, having a crap minimum wage job when you have two degrees is a bad social look, and it didn't do wonders for my self-esteem. You gain self-esteem from doing esteemable things, and this year I have done very few esteemable things. My self-esteem has been cruising on low-power for a long time. That's not great for one's mental health, but what's better: playing to social optics and boosting one's self-esteem (by doing what seems esteemable in the eyes of others), or waiting for something that you really want to do? It's a question born of luxury, admittedly. Not many people from developing nations get to ask that question. I should be grateful that I can live comfortably on the minimum-wage (with credit), while waiting to spot something more desirable. However, my time in my current house has run out -- the lease is coming to an end -- and there is nobody in London that I'm desperate to move in with. This means I'm going to move back home. In some ways this feels like a failure, but I am more than ready to take it easy, spend less money, and take stock of where my life is going. Living in London has felt like being on a treadmill, in which I must constantly keep moving to stay upright, but also as though I'm not going anywhere in particular. I don't mind the sensation of not moving, as long as it is a considered pause; it's the feeling of having to be moving that I want to take a step back from. Going back to my family home will hopefully reduce some pressure and allow me to think more broadly about my steps moving forward.
My personal life during this second year in London has been largely uneventful. I had a brief one-night situation with a friend of a friend. It was an isolated exciting occurrence -- booze, risqué dancing, scurrying off to a nearby bedroom. The thrill of it still rings in memory sometimes -- a night of bravery, where normally I'm timid. But it was as I said: isolated. Just one night. Later on in the year, I became interested in a girl -- K -- who joined the team where I work. K was cute, slightly younger than me, and filled with an ambition that is hard to hold onto the older you get. She excited me, and although she was a little younger than me, she felt like someone whose life-approach galvanised something in me -- someone who internally lived on the same frequency as me, someone I would like to get closer to. I started flirting with her a little at work, and we expanded our friendship to messaging, and promises to see each other outside of work hours. It really did feel like we were going somewhere, but I was somewhat timid, and not absolutely forthcoming with my intentions, so I suppose it wasn't exactly clear to her whether I felt romantically for her or not. I've talked about it to friends since and there is some sympathy that it was rather obvious from context clues that I might have been interested in more than just friendship with her, and eventually it must have been unavoidably obvious, because she brought up the fact that she has a boyfriend on a date we went on just before I went to France. It was on that date that I was hoping maybe something more could commence between the two of us, and maybe she sensed that, and that's when she brought up this boyfriend. It felt like a cruelly late time to mention him, considering I had been rather flirtatious for the better part of 3 months or so with her. But I suppose I wasn't forthcoming enough. I can't tell whether she really has a boyfriend or whether it was just a ploy to terminate whatever path our relationship seemed to be travelling down, but it doesn't matter -- effectively it's the same either way. Now we don't talk as much, and there's a quiet awkwardness between us.
So what did I learn from my second year in the capital? Probably firstly that I shouldn't beat myself up so badly about professional-rejections. 1) it's not personal, and 2) it's not like the decision-making process is perfectly honed and objective. In the ultimate analysis, it's just some folks making a flip-switch decision: yes to this guy, or no. Quantity in applications is important if I want success. However, quality of application-choice is important for my happiness, so that matters too. I'll take the "quantity" lesson and apply it later, when I find a field I want to go hard in (PhD applications?).
Secondly, I learnt that I need to be more forthcoming with people I'm interested in. If I'm interested in them, I can't be scared. I thought I was forthcoming with K -- indeed, I do struggle to think of how I could be any more obvious without making a travesty of the courtship process -- but clearly I was not forthcoming enough. I don't know. I think this is good advice, but I'm not convinced I wasn't already following it. Perhaps I didn't drop the ball on this one, and she really did just string me along for a while. It's a hard shot to call when you're part of it. The only thing I perhaps should have done differently is message her more frequently in order to make it obvious earlier. Well, I seem to crush on somebody reliably every year or so, so we'll just have to see what kind of mistakes I make in 2019.
I decided to move to London not really sure how my finances were going to work out. I could take out a student loan to cover my tuition costs, but there was no further help for living costs. I basically had: my savings, my mother, and a chasm waiting for me to fall into somewhere down the line. Over time my savings dwindled, my mother helped with accommodation costs, but eventually I reached the chasm. Something had to be done. I had to get a job. I got a minimum wage gig during the final term of my masters -- a customer assisstant at a corporate cinema place in the centre of London. It wasn't ideal, but it's what I needed to jump the chasm. It's what saved me from a dizzying fall. However, it proved distracting and disorienting; my primary focus ought to have been my dissertation and really smacking one out the park, but that didn't happen. I was worried about money, worried about the future, worried about personal issues (ever-worried about personal issues), and I was paralysed. I did well enough in my courses throughout the year to provide me with a grades safety-net, but I bombed my dissertation. I procrastinated; I faltered; I froze. I therefore didn't do the best I could have, but came out with a respectable classification (a merit, the master's equivalent of a 2:1). Although I don't feel bad about not quite reaching my intellectual height, I do feel bad about not setting up better for the future while I was on the course. I would play truant from classes and ultimately fail to form any kind of relationship with my dissertation supervisor. Now I want to go on to do a PhD, but I don't really have connections, and I'll need references. I had this fear going into my master's too, and I overcame it, but the fear feels a little more justified this time. I had less time to form a relationship with potential referees and I didn't act as I should have, and now it's been a year since I'd have crossed any of their minds. Getting onto a PhD might be difficult. But I'm struggling to think of anything else I want to do. Teaching and reading philosophy is just about the only thing I feel I'd like to do professionally, outside of writing fiction. The latter is the permanent pipe-dream. The former is the only thing in reality that attracts me. So what choice do I have? I don't know.
So my master's year was plagued with worries, misplanning, and my own shortcomings. I was still recovering from losing my best friend (friendship break-up) and distancing myself from the friendship groups associated with him; I was also recovering from the nail being put in the coffin of the only long-term relationship I've ever been in (I precipitated the initial break-up, but her finding somebody else truly ended any remaining potential for us). It was a hard year. I developed a crush on a new girl -- a crush I had no right in having. She had a boyfriend. I let the crush grow, though, and I distinctly remember the night I succumbed to it -- a night of beers with a couple of friends and drunken confessions. Confessing it--speaking it aloud--made it real, and it added another complication to an already fraught year. Nothing ever happened between us, but a layer of confusion and occasional saddness existed in the overall makeup of my psyche because of it.
It wasn't all bad, though. I made friends and continued to respect the importance of resilience. I've also learned that some things, even if true, are more responsibly held in the heart, quietly, not released out into the world, causing confusion for the head. Dear future self -- no matter how lovely she is, if she is in a relationship, forget it. Keep it in your heart. Tell nobody and move on quickly.
My second year in London has also been short of an astounding success. Coming out of my masters, holding onto a minimum wage job, I moved into a house with the aforementioned girl and a couple of guys she knew through friends. It's been a lowkey year of minor failures in regards to getting a "better job". I applied to a couple of things I would have enjoyed doing and got to the interview stage, but was never called back for further rounds with either company. These incidents knocked my confidence back somewhat and caused me to sit complacently with my minimum wage job that just about pays the bills and rent (providing I also use my overdraft). I didn't apply relentlessly to as many things as I should have if I wanted to get a well-paying job. Part of it, I admit, is simply down to confidence issues, but another part is that I was hesitant to enter the rat race for careers I wasn't properly interested in. The idea of applying broadly and consistently was not attractive to me. I didn't want to just get a job for the sake of social optics. However, having a crap minimum wage job when you have two degrees is a bad social look, and it didn't do wonders for my self-esteem. You gain self-esteem from doing esteemable things, and this year I have done very few esteemable things. My self-esteem has been cruising on low-power for a long time. That's not great for one's mental health, but what's better: playing to social optics and boosting one's self-esteem (by doing what seems esteemable in the eyes of others), or waiting for something that you really want to do? It's a question born of luxury, admittedly. Not many people from developing nations get to ask that question. I should be grateful that I can live comfortably on the minimum-wage (with credit), while waiting to spot something more desirable. However, my time in my current house has run out -- the lease is coming to an end -- and there is nobody in London that I'm desperate to move in with. This means I'm going to move back home. In some ways this feels like a failure, but I am more than ready to take it easy, spend less money, and take stock of where my life is going. Living in London has felt like being on a treadmill, in which I must constantly keep moving to stay upright, but also as though I'm not going anywhere in particular. I don't mind the sensation of not moving, as long as it is a considered pause; it's the feeling of having to be moving that I want to take a step back from. Going back to my family home will hopefully reduce some pressure and allow me to think more broadly about my steps moving forward.
My personal life during this second year in London has been largely uneventful. I had a brief one-night situation with a friend of a friend. It was an isolated exciting occurrence -- booze, risqué dancing, scurrying off to a nearby bedroom. The thrill of it still rings in memory sometimes -- a night of bravery, where normally I'm timid. But it was as I said: isolated. Just one night. Later on in the year, I became interested in a girl -- K -- who joined the team where I work. K was cute, slightly younger than me, and filled with an ambition that is hard to hold onto the older you get. She excited me, and although she was a little younger than me, she felt like someone whose life-approach galvanised something in me -- someone who internally lived on the same frequency as me, someone I would like to get closer to. I started flirting with her a little at work, and we expanded our friendship to messaging, and promises to see each other outside of work hours. It really did feel like we were going somewhere, but I was somewhat timid, and not absolutely forthcoming with my intentions, so I suppose it wasn't exactly clear to her whether I felt romantically for her or not. I've talked about it to friends since and there is some sympathy that it was rather obvious from context clues that I might have been interested in more than just friendship with her, and eventually it must have been unavoidably obvious, because she brought up the fact that she has a boyfriend on a date we went on just before I went to France. It was on that date that I was hoping maybe something more could commence between the two of us, and maybe she sensed that, and that's when she brought up this boyfriend. It felt like a cruelly late time to mention him, considering I had been rather flirtatious for the better part of 3 months or so with her. But I suppose I wasn't forthcoming enough. I can't tell whether she really has a boyfriend or whether it was just a ploy to terminate whatever path our relationship seemed to be travelling down, but it doesn't matter -- effectively it's the same either way. Now we don't talk as much, and there's a quiet awkwardness between us.
So what did I learn from my second year in the capital? Probably firstly that I shouldn't beat myself up so badly about professional-rejections. 1) it's not personal, and 2) it's not like the decision-making process is perfectly honed and objective. In the ultimate analysis, it's just some folks making a flip-switch decision: yes to this guy, or no. Quantity in applications is important if I want success. However, quality of application-choice is important for my happiness, so that matters too. I'll take the "quantity" lesson and apply it later, when I find a field I want to go hard in (PhD applications?).
Secondly, I learnt that I need to be more forthcoming with people I'm interested in. If I'm interested in them, I can't be scared. I thought I was forthcoming with K -- indeed, I do struggle to think of how I could be any more obvious without making a travesty of the courtship process -- but clearly I was not forthcoming enough. I don't know. I think this is good advice, but I'm not convinced I wasn't already following it. Perhaps I didn't drop the ball on this one, and she really did just string me along for a while. It's a hard shot to call when you're part of it. The only thing I perhaps should have done differently is message her more frequently in order to make it obvious earlier. Well, I seem to crush on somebody reliably every year or so, so we'll just have to see what kind of mistakes I make in 2019.
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