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You were nervous about coming here.
So awkward and so nervous it was painful; each word, each motion felt as though you were pulling a push door as ten million people watched and tried to stifle their laughter. And that just about sums up your first week, your Freshers' Week. You were like a new-born foal staggering around trying to find its feet and get used to the ground beneath it.
And you basically were a new-born: you had turned eighteen less than two weeks prior. You were nonchalant about that, dismissive, even when a older student told you she was an August baby as well and decided to take a year out because she didn’t feel grown-up enough. And you weren’t grown up enough. No matter how stubborn you are to accept it, that much is true; you will buy vodka from a supermarket for the first time and (somehow) manage to leave with the security tag fixed onto the bottle-cap, you will tuck into a toastie and dine at a Nando’s for the first time, you will drop your phone down the toilet twice and learn about the all-reviving rice trick, you will throw up on a train station platform at midnight, you will melt a plastic salt bottle when you casually place it on a boiling hob, and you will almost kill your flatmates for the first time (of many) when you will refuse to read the instructions to microwave rice – the bowl will catch on fire, the microwave will be scorched, and the entire building will be smeeched out. But I wouldn’t be able to run over water if you hadn’t walked over hot coals first.
Oh, and you will go to a club for the first time. You bought some dumb wristband online but, trust me, it is absolutely not worth it – you will just end up sticking with your flatmates the entire time anyhow. You first went out on the Monday, having arrived and cried on the floor for hours like some theatrical toddler on the Sunday, to The Lemon Grove. It was quiet and dead because it was Monday and no one had really arrived at that stage. You figured that was what a normal club was like (note: it isn’t). And when more people turned up later in the week, you gave it another shot. Lo and behold, you came to love the shit tunes, the dubiously sticky floor, and the men doused in Lynx Africa who would grab you by the shoulder and yell sweet nothings (“YOU HAVE NICE TITS!”) into your ear!
But it won’t all be so whimsical and naïve and cute: your mental health will worsen in the first few weeks, you will go through your first break-up, and you will condition yourself to cope with things through self-destruction. These things aren’t linked but neither helped the other. On the breakup: it will hurt for a week or two (much Nutella will be eaten from the jar and seventeen pictures will be ripped from your pinboard with violent force) but it’s important to be realistic. You will soon rationalise and soon realise that you are better as friends and, when you taste this newfound true independence, you will realise that you miss having a person rather than that person. But even the quasi-independence you experienced in your first term overwhelmed you – it clicked that you could do any reckless or damaging thing and no one would need to know. You started to self-harm again (but you will stop soon enough) and, after the breakup, started to smoke more and drink more (you still haven’t quite ironed those vices out).
As your first year ends and your second begins, your three-year-long battle with binge-eating will develop into full-blown bulimia. This will turn you into a selfish and isolated person; you will pass up social opportunities because you would rather die than sacrifice the calories, you will avoid visiting your parents to avoid eating their food, and you will opt to take the shit windowless room just for its ensuite bathroom (think about it). But you will not be satisfied. All it will do is drain you. Oh, and your shit alcohol tolerance will be lowered even more, sub-shit: expect to sleepwalk into Emma’s room and stand there until she wakes up and notices. But wait: you sleep naked! And you will never live it down. That’s wedding speech material.
Due to this, your social circle is quite small compared to some but is, nevertheless, quite tight. This ties into your only real regret (apart from cutting yourself a full fringe again on a whim, terrible decision): choosing, at the start, to live with six people rather than eleven or twelve. It’ll be hard adjusting to a small all-girl house when you’ve grown up in large groups with blokes for mates but it will work out; you will not meet a bad person the entire time, you will learn a lot from people and grow in confidence and character (so much so that you will release a book documenting your innermost thoughts and are now applying for SALES jobs), and you will meet some of the best friends you’ve ever had. Soulmates.
You were nervous about coming here.
So awkward and so nervous it was painful; each word, each motion felt as though you were pulling a push door as ten million people watched and tried to stifle their laughter. And now you are even more nervous about leavin