But I don't WANT to be a grown up *Bursts into tears*

The title of this post has been my mood for the last week.

Officially, I am starting my PhD tomorrow. This past month I was meant to prepare my materials, look at the ancient plays I want to scour for critical attitudes to gods, moments when the mortal characters turn to these Supreme Entities and express misery, irritation or anger at the gods involved. It's a subject I really am interested in, and that I think others would also be interested in. But my interest and natural desire to dig, and dig into these plays, so that I'm overcome each night with an almost Opium-like need to work until sunrise, hasn't taken hold yet - which is bad, because that's how I normally work.

Rather, this month has been taken up with a series of inceasingly surreal things that force me to retire into my head.

The first was my sister's wedding, something I was genuinely dreading, desperately trying to find a way to get out of it without causing a greater schism than what there already is. My sisters' and I are not cut from the same cloth, and more than once they have made this difference painfully (physically and emotionally) clear to me. Even while our mother was dying, neither of them could contain their innately violent nature that they direct towards me. I don't want to go into what it was they said or did here, because it's already upsetting me, just alluding to it here alone. But needless to say, despite my going to the wedding (more for my father and extended family's benefit), I would rather like to never have anything to do with these monsters ever again. I had reasoned with myself, as I was coping with the near-panic that descended as I prepared my travel, that I would just go to this one thing, just this one thing where I'll steel myself, grit my teeth and drink to ease the horror of being there. And that's exactly what I did. I got horrendously drunk, gave the bride a very brief congratulations then overshared with everyone at the table, all while I was sure it would be very long time indeed before I had to see either of these awful people again.

The next day, I found out my uncle had died. My uncle Bill, who I first met when I was not much older than 6, who I remember being gentle and patient with the little girl (me) who wouldn't shut up about the various books I was reading at the time. I remember once he visited when I was going through a phase of wanting to change my name to Violet (I thought it sounded so much more romantic and pretty than Victoria. Violet was going to have tons of adventures). I told him firmly, as I had been telling everyone who stood still for long enough, that I must now only be called Violet, and as delighted when he immediately agreed to my request - I'd been battling with my mother all week to agree to my new, exciting moniker. He also pretended that by changing my name, I had turned into a completely different person, and kept asking "Violet" where "Vicky" was, because "Vicky" was a lovely little girl who he was very fond of. I remember him saying that and it makes me feel so happy. My next memory of him is years later, when I was around 17/18. We went to Blackburn for a surprise party for his 60th birthday. He was different from how I met him, smaller, with glasses, but just as kind. I walked past where he was sitting down on my way to the bar, and I stopped to say happy birthday and he shook my hand and said thank you and kissed my hand. The memory is imprecise, but it's all I have. That was the last serious memory I have on him. I suppose we must have spoke when my mother was sick last year, but I can't remember anything in particular. I regret that I didn't speak to him more, that I only have these murky memories that I can't fully replay like other (normally traumatic memories.)

Aside from how sad I was about Bill, I was also terrified about being back in the room with my estranged gene-sharers. I booked a train up to Blackburn by myself, heading up early so I didn't have to share a car with anyone. At the funeral, I sat next to my cousin Rachael. Rachael is an odd one, but she's otherwise very kind, witty and clever. Occasionally she responds to innocuous questions like "you ok?" with terse, snappy answers, though I read into this more an inability to interact with people when feeling low. If my perception is correct, it makes me feel a kinship for her, for being unable to be polite and accommodating when feeling like shit. I mean, fair enough. We all suck when life is sucking.

Still though. Let's go. Let's see those ridiculous, awful people and let them read in my face how much I loathe them.

Ajax, ryvita and writers block

Trying to write at the minute is like trying to find my way in a town I used to know well but now can't quite find my way around. I know the main routes I need to take, but progress is slowed everytime I start. I don't stride confidently on my way, but dither, wondering if I am even going in the right direction.

Ajax is the first play of Sophocles that I'm doing, and unlike Euripides, the instances of mortal-divine antagonism (misotheism? Ouphilotheism?) are brief, understated and not quite so strongly tied to the characters' downfall. Athena has a right to act like she does (she says) and its accompanied with standard comments on the duty of mortals to the gods. Except Odysseus points out that, even though Ajax has done some pretty messed up things, even he feels bad for the guy, and as far as I see it, Sophocles has made it so that we (and his original, 440 BCE audience) have to feel the same way. Ajax isn't introduced when he's all kill crazy but just as he's thought victory has been granted to him, and as such, he ironically thanks Athena for her help. So much of the play hinges on 1) Ajax's achievements and forthcomings, and 2) his soldiers' and Tecmessa's fears of what happens next when he dies. Ajax and Athena's relationship is tangential but fascinating, mainly cos they should have been two peas in a pod. But they weren't. I have plenty material to write about, but as I said before, I can't seem to find my way.

I need to focus on an essay plan. I've come up with a rudimentary one already, focusing on the dynamics of the relationship and the shifts in expectations that occur within the first scene. I don't know how well I can execute it though.

Back to work 2017

Well, officially this is 2017, now that I am leaving the house for more than just milk and bread. The bus is pleasingly empty for 8.30 in the morning, with limited numbers of children heading back to school - or maybe that's because I'm on a later bus than usual. After my whining nihilism last night, preventing me getting to sleep comfortably, the most pressing thing on my mind now is whether to get a coffee from 92 on my way in. Yes, I'm tired and lethargic after last night's insomnia, but can I cope with the inevitable acidic reflux, should I get the coffee? Won't I end up getting it anyway? If I get a packet of biscuits, will that help? After the depression I've been in (not as bad as usual, let's call it a murky grey set of squirrels, as opposed to Churchill's famous Black Dog), I can't figure out if I should be surprised that I'm dwelling on such a mundane problem.

Got to try and keep my eating down too. I'll look into slim fast maybe, to find ways I can dull the gnawing hunger. Christ knows I'm not going to put up with my down days if I'm not able to feed my face.

On Motherhood. A Polemic.

I like Rebecca Adlington, despite all her precocious success. She comes across as down to earth, witty and all round just decent. I felt like if I met her she wouldn't be weird and distant like many famous people, but pleasant and chatty.

This week, though, I saw in the paper that Adlington had had her first baby. Good for her, she must be ecstatic and relieved that her new baby arrived safely and healthily, and is probably gurgling adorably in between feeds.

Except Adlington also described having the baby as her greatest achievement. Adlington, who earned two Olympic gold medals before she was 20, thinks the unconcious conception and automatic expulsion of a child is the greatest thing she has ever "achieved".

I should say now that I don't decry Adlington for a very normal and understandable delight in her first baby. While it may be a natural phenomenon so expected it's downright boring, nonetheless it's an important milestone for the parents. What prickled me is the way Adlington's gushing echoes a primitive and harmful mantra that Western society cannot seem to shake - the canonisation of mothers, and the glorified office of motherhood.

Women are biologically geared to carry offspring - that ability is a key defining point when determining male and female in most species. Yet human women are capable of so much more. Humans have the ability to shape the world around them, to invent, to tackle ancient dangers such as illness and natural disasters so that more people survive an earthquake than die, so that slowly we are eradicating every disease that previously thhreatened everyone at every level of society. There is also a performative aspect to "male" and "female" categories that has led to people from all points of the spectrum blossoming out of their expected gendered roles to create their own identities, perhaps linked to the stringent biological essence of their bodies, perhaps eschewing their expected gender or even the notion of "gender" completely, to realise themselves truly.

 As we throw off these repeated, boring and frequently oppressive attitudes to our biological realities, at the current end of history, mankind has been able to shake loose outdated concepts that limited and undervalued womankind's considerable contribution to this awesome progress. Women have never had as much freedom as they do now to enter whatever industry they choose, their involvement automatically increasing the brain power that comes up with solutions to make life better, creating more angles from which it is thought about, highlighting promising ideas that would not have been considered without that one, bright individual who saw it's potential, an individual who would previously have had a 50-50 chance of being frozen out of the development a mere century ago. One must consider how many potential inventors and innovators lived and died without the opportunity to operate in a field that would have thrived with their input, just because they were born with the wrong parts.

And yet the aged, rubbery superstition remains. That the greatest thing that a woman can do, for herself or for others, is to have a baby. The height of potential is always to be a mother. Don't believe me? Popular media throws out constant reinforcements of this pathetic point of view. In the last Avengers film, Black Widow (a super-assassin who can wipe out 20 guards in under a minute using nothing but back-flips) wept because she could never have children. Some commentators found the scene offensive because Black Widow mentioned that her super intense assassin training, and the fact that her assassin school had sterilised her, made her feel like a "monster," and was thus implying that being a barren woman was a sort of deformity. I found it offensive too, but my interpretation is slightly different. To me, it was clear that Black Widow was disturbed by the severity of the training she received, the things she did as an assassin, and that the assassin school had modified her (through sterilisation) deliberately to make her a more effective killer, making her perception of herself as a "monster" understandable, if not correct. This is ultimately not offensive at all to me. What is offensive, irritating and downright hackneyed, is Black Widow's apparent mourning for her lost motherhood, and the use of it in the film as a reason for us to sympathise with her.

Being a mother is seen as a state of sublime emotional integrity and honesty. The superstition holds that by having a child, and fulfilling that atavistic, primeval demand, a woman achieves a state of wisdom and kindness that all childless women are permanently locked out of. Going through a pregnancy, and then labour, apparently allows a woman to tap into an ancient, integral truth about humanity and life, the cosmic mysteries revealed to her as she slides into a Mother Goddess/Buddha-like role. Holding the baby also moulds the previously clueless woman further into a quasi-divine, sanctified role, that of a lion headed goddess, where she is allowed, nay, expected to defend her child at all costs, permitted a horrific ferocity against any threat (real or otherwise) while gaining levels of enlightenment years of meditating could never achieve.

Next time you listen to the TV, or the radio, or to the people out in the street, listen out for references to mothers being wiser or more knowledgeable, simply because they managed to do something any idiot with a working uterus can do by accident. Note how often a woman uses her motherhood to increase her authority when making a point on a topic ("Speaking as a mother...."), that frequently does not have any bearing on parenting or children. Look at how we are instantly carolled into feeling sympathy with someone just because "they have kids", and how few times that person is a man. There are groups who believe that women with children should not be put in prison, as though their crimes are mitigated by their used wombs.

Of course, we all know the truth. Becoming a parent, mother or father, does not do anything to increase your IQ, you're inherent understanding of the world, nor does it make you a better person. It doesn't make your views any more worthwhile, or an authority on anything other than your own children. These views are not stated outright, but they are there. And we all should know they are bullshit. Getting pregnant does not require a degree, any particular effort, and zero skill. Women with children do not immediately become more tuned into the world, or more sensitive to violence - if that were the case, those mothers who kill their own children, prostitute them or sell them into slavery would not exist, when they most certainly do. Indeed, talking very generally, I find that when a woman has a child she does not gain a macro, philosophising understanding of everything, but that she becomes even more selfish, petty and shortsighted. All of a sudden, everything must be judged from how it will affect her family, and everyone must modify themselves to fit her. If you dare make it clear that this selfish, unqualified twat and her growing colony of parasites don't factor in the way you live your life, being a mother seems to excuse rudeness when she takes these undeferential heretics to task. When a café in Canada posted that screaming toddlers would no longer be welcome in their business, which was for adults wanting to chill, the owner received death threats. Why? Because everyone, at all times, must be ready to welcome in the miracle of life, even when it's not their miracle, even if it isn't actually a miracle. A police officer in Liverpool recently told her colleagues that they couldn't rely on her to assist in taking down a violent offender, as "I have kids at home." As though the other officers didn't also have children, partners or lives they wanted to keep, or that they just simply didn't matter as much as hers.

Similarly, a few years ago, Mary Beard, professor of Classics and Ancient History at Cambridge University, appeared on Question Time, where she spoke favourably about immigration. She pulled out documents from a local town, and with them she pointed out that the vast majority of immigrants were young, employed, and contributing. Later on in the program, Prf. Beard was shouted down by a local woman, who indignantly yelled that immigration was actually strangling the town, and that she knew this because her friend was a midwife, and when you walked down the high street, it was like being in a foreign country.

It is possible that Prof. Beard may have cherry picked the report. That she was editing bits to portray her point, and that there was actually a considerable negative impact of immigration in the area which she had either missed in her research, or not taken seriously. However, as a historian, Beard knows the importance of evidence, how to read stats, the importance of being objective.... One thing historians have over most other disciplines is hindsight that they can draw on from hundreds, and in Beard's case, thousands of years. They are good people to listen to, even if they do get it wrong, as they draw attention to the most important factors and the most obvious logical pitfalls.

None of the papers or the media pointed this out, however. What they did point out was how this clueless academic had been showed up by a straight talking mother of three. But they did not mention any actual qualifications she had - she was not a councillor who encountered her constituents' problems, she was not a nurse or a doctor (though she apparently knew one.) At all points, the papers identified that this woman had children, and failed to mention her work or area of expertise (if she had one at all.) Why did they feel that it was important to note that the woman had children? Would they have been so delighted at Beard's downfall if it had been a woman who didn't have children who shouted her down? Either way, the headline hatefully reinforced the most ridiculous belief that women like me have to put up with. A woman with children, who emphasises her identity as a mother, as just a mother, has more interesting things to say than a woman who does not, even if the childless woman has actually achieved something of serious merit, even when the self-aggrandised mother has barely any authority and an obvious bias, even when the woman with real achievements speaks more sense, is more rational. Mary Beard actually has children too, but she has the understanding, the realism, the education not to base her identity on that - while having children is a joy, a poignancy that perhaps helps give her life meaning, it is still personal. She chooses to be judged on her actual achievements, things not everyone can do. Perhaps that's why so many women pathetically chase after that mythological, precious status of "mother." Feeble as it is, it's the only thing of note that is worth that they have done. It's not skilled, or difficult, or rare, or even remotely needed, in this age of overpopulation. But there is admittedly an element of difficulty about it, and a false sense of selflessness attached. Thus the women become martyrs of a false status that masks and flatters their innate selfishness, their underwhelming lack of achievement obfuscated by exalting the ability to produce offspring, never mind that drug addicts, children and every animal on the planet also manages it without even trying.

"Speaking as a mother, this subject...." Stop. Motherhood has no direct affect on your knowledge on anything other than what it's like to have a child, and then, only your child.

Music Doesn't Matter to Me

My mother is dying, and not in the Buddhist, Sylvia Plath "we're all dying, all the time" way.

Her body has been compromised, the messages her cells send each other got confused, and now there is rapidly developing cancer in her lung, and most horrifically, in her brain. Just typing that disgusts me enough to taste stomach acid rising, the most brutally unfair place to become ill, a desecration on the shrine to her life, her person.

I've been staying  at home a lot, obviously, and unsurprisingly, my university work has been put on the back burner while I cope emotionally and practically.

Mum has been her usual stoic self, we don't talk about it. She just wants to sleep, drink her tea, keep on smoking (as laughably distasteful that seems), listen to her radio. She doesn't want to disrupt any of our lives.

But despite her stiff upper lip, her cancer is catching up with her. First, she couldn't make it up the stairs, so she had to stay downstairs. But she still was ok. Then she had her infection, knocking her out completely over Christmas. Back then we still didn't know she had cancer, she had kept it from us. She seemed to recover a bit, she came home, she was back to normal. It wasn't until later that she began to decline.

Now, she is frailer than I could ever have imagined her to be. She moves with a tricycle/walker that we got from the NHS, which she could use by herself at first.

I stay at home as much as I can. I stay up late, listening for her needing my help. When she could move easily by herself, getting out and into bed with no problem, zooming around with her walker, going up and down the steps no bother, it wasn't such a big deal. I went to sleep without any worry.

Then she got thinner, slower, she needed more help with getting up the little step to get into the kitchen. I started staying up late, listening in my bedroom for the telltale sound of the kitchen light flickering on, coming down and making excuses, assuring my mother that I was up anyway, and that I just wanted a tea, like her.

About 3 or 4 times a night I would sit with her until she went back to bed, trying to make conversation. I still haven't talked about her cancer, or her terminal diagnosis, with her. It feels too cruel to do it, to someone I love, who is dying, who never wanted to have the difficult conversations.

I dread when people ask me how she is. She's getting worse, more confused as the tumours annex more of her brain and more of her, she's thinner, getting lighter for her final journey. The last week or two, she has had trouble getting in and out of bed. Now there is no pretense, she knows I am up for her in the night, because she calls me to come down. She knows I stay awake. Yesterday, I had the horrible thought that all of us were just waiting to be bereaved, trapped in between two points, the names of which I am too frightened to fully acknowledge with words.

Mum was adamant that I stay in university, and so I have also been thinking of all that tedious business, in the back of my mind. Now there are some deadlines coming up, and I have threadbare theories to work with, subjects that I struggle to care about. Today, I came back to my flat near the university, and headed to the university library with my laptop, intending to bulldoze my ideas and theories until I produced something. I stared into space when I tried to read, I desperately switched to Buzzfeed, Facebook, Twitter when I tried to write. Without realising it, my fingers seek distractions from when I try to let my brain out of its safe space.

About 20 minutes ago, I was finally pushing my thoughts forcefully onto the Word document, rough, shoddy work, but at least it gave me a mound of clay from which I could sculpt my argument. I had stopped, just for a second, to think, or to not think, just for a second.

I had Spotify on my earphones, on shuffle, my playlist including over 9000 songs. In that dead space, my brain briefly off-lining itself while I gain momentum to write again, Amanda Palmer came on, freezing me with her words.

"Love of mine, soon you will die,
And I won't be far behind,
I'll follow you into the dark."

I sat through the entire song, not sure if I should just have skipped it, as I felt that icy boulder I have in my gut thaw, a real, bitter taste to my throat.

Embarrassed to say that I cried there. I swallowed that mysterious lump that comes from crying. I think the Chinese guy to the side of me saw that I was crying, but I'm thankful he didn't say anything.

After I got myself together again, after I grew used to the wound that the song had created, or exposed, I felt....the same? Worse? Better? My life at the moment is like a kaleidoscope of brown and grey, even when it turns and changes, it's just more of the same aching dullness.

This whole thing with my mum at first made me scared about where would she go when she died. I was raised a Catholic, then I was an atheist in my teens, and now I confess that I am agnostic. I don't know, and neither does anyone else. I don't think the picture painted in the Christian Bible, or the Muslim Qua'ran, or any other holy book is the perfect, accurate story, I don't think it is the exact blueprint for how the cosmos works. Ultimately, these religions were created, I think, to act as an adhesive for communities, creating immutable laws for everyone, and explaining unknown things. Of course, the belief in the afterlife is part of that last thing. Even knowing this, in my cold, rational brain, I can't quite believe that a person ends completely.

Part of this lack of belief in disbelief is something I can't explain without sounding mildly insane.

I have always had this sense, that the pair of eyes I look out of is a complete fluke. That I could have just as easily be looking out another pair of eyes, and using a different pair of hands, being called a different name. I have never liked labels placed on my identity, or people assuming I like this or that because I am female, or because I am straight, or English.

Because I am well aware that there is a part of me, deep in my mind, which is neither female or male. It has no sex, no nationality, no race, no preference. I would stay awake for a long time as a child, thinking about this other me, that was looking out of my eyes, knowing they were only mine by chance, and knowing that these eyes are only mine for a limited time.

As a child, when I went to sleep, this is all I would think about. As I got older, as I absorbed the culture I grew up around, I did not have so much time to reflect on this opinionless, sexless, ageless edifice in my mind, thinking instead about how I could fit in with the others, whether I'd get a job, if I would fall in love.

But that thing still lives, it has always been there, it sits, unchanging in its appreciation in the randomness of this body and this life, a dark, hard, immortal rock in ever-changing currents, the mountain my house is built into and on.

I don't know what to call it, not entirely sure if I can call it part of me, and if that it is the "real me", and the personality I have developed is just a growth. I don't want to use the word "soul," as it is too value-laden, but it suits this rock within me in some ways - it is unchanging, it watches, it is nothing but itself. If I lose both my legs, this rock of me will not be chipped, it will not be scratched, it will remain as unmoved as it always has been. I could lose my eyes, and it will only increase in its heaviness, in its presence.

If the part of me that is me is my brain, what happens when it rots? Does it rots away around this rock of me? Does the rock of me stay?

I practise my conversations. Sometimes they're conversations I'm going to have, sometimes they're from my fantasy world. Sometimes they are things I'd really like to say to people from my past. I recently came up with one to people who minimise other people's grief, who try to shrug it off.

In my first year of uni, I wasn't that great at attending class. It was my first year away from home, I had come away from a school where I was monstrously unhappy, where I had been bullied in the typical "girl" way, social exclusion, constant mean remarks. I was living in a dorm with a bunch of very loud, obnoxious people, I am genetically pre-disposed to depression, I was having to fight for my anti-depressants with the doctor at the uni who didn't want me on them. In the second semester, I was barely sleeping, I was not doing any work and I was hardly ever leaving my room.

 Having depression, for those who don't know what it's like, is like living in a hall of crazy mirrors. All you can see is yourself, deformed, in the dark, alone, repeating yourself over and over again into oblivion, each copy more grotesque than the last. It's a state of nihilistic solipsism that, if you could apply it in the same way you can apply water-boarding, would swiftly become the US armies go-to torture of choice. Because it destroys YOU. Not your body, not your health. That is all left. It is YOU, your identity, which is ripped apart. Everything and anything that you liked and valued about yourself is stripped away, and because you don't have that fixed, gold standard to go through life by, reality itself becomes seriously frayed. What's real and what's not? What was it that made me ok before? Did this make a difference? Is that what is separating me from me being ok with myself again?

There is no reason to hold onto any information, you're bad anyway. There's no reason to put up any resistance, there's nothing to fight for. It's like being terrified and bored at the same time. Terrible things are going to happen, there is no joy anymore, the neural passage way to happiness has been cut off. There are only different degrees of horrible. Eventually, you hit a plateau. Whatever happens, happens. You become stoic against your will.

I know other depression havers have reported a kind of numbing of the emotions. The Dementors in Harry Potter were an analogy for JK Rowling's depression. It's an accurate analogy, but for me it doesn't grant the utter backwardsness of the illness, how you don't really live in the world, but in a cruel facsimile, every unkindness magnified, everyone else passing by you obliviously. When the Dementors strike, everyone falls. When depression strikes, the first thing it does is make you alone.

One moment in my first year university is very clear to me. It was a moment of brutal unkindness. I can't stop thinking of the girl who is responsible.

After a long period of insularity, of wallowing in self-loathing, I managed to get myself out the dormitory door. Miraculously I was walking outside, and even more excitingly, I was actually going to a class I had been missing for the past few weeks. I remember feeling almost mechanical in the way I did this rare and special thing, going to class, as though my brain had stopped my full registering of what was happening lest the reality of being outside, surrounded by other people, strike me and turn me into a stuttering wreck of anxiety. My feet led me autonomously to the class room, my head still in the little bubble that kept me safe.

I began to feel it when I entered the classroom, however. The desks, their proximity to each other, reminded me that there would be others there. I can't remember if I debated leaving again, because I did do that a few times for other classes, but whether I did or not, the end result was that I sat down.

No one else was there yet, so I started taking out my books, still in the protective daze my nannying brain was using to cushion any sudden interactions. I was just preparing myself mentally for how I would seem when I saw one of my fellow students or the lecturer when they arrived.

There was a boy, Alex, whose surname I don't remember, and a girl, Rebekah Benley. I don't remember if they arrived together or separately. Alex took his position in the desk in front of me, while Rebekah moved to my neighbouring desk. I smiled, asked how they were, people liked it when you smiled and asked how they were. However, they didn't smile back or ask how I was. They did look at me for moments at a time, expressionless, while they went about the business of taking out their books. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, the panic piercing my protective trance. It had been several weeks into our shared course, so they had no reason to not respond to me....unless, of course, all I suspected about myself, how I wasn't truly a person, was real.

I steadied myself as best I could, and sat there in silence for a bit. I tried to find that island within us all, the place they couldn't get me, whether they liked me or not, the island where I didn't care. But my soul crushed beneath it all, and I just wanted to cry. Go back to my room. Go back to sleep.

The silence hurt after a second or a minute, can't really remember how long it was (it was 6 years ago, after all.) I had kept as up to date with our work as was possible in my self-imposed isolation - I genuinely loved the subject, immersed myself in it as much as I could. Deciding to have another shot at human interaction, I tried to be humble, I bent the truth.

"The last few chapters were really horrible. I barely got through it."

I had no trouble with any bit of that subject, at least nothing that wasn't a natural development of the learning process. Despite my constant absences, I was pretty confident at what I was doing. Still, I lied, hoping it would make them nice to me, expecting the typical type of commiseration and sharing of viewpoints that comes from talking about a subject such as ours.

Alex said nothing, just stared silently.

Rebekah snorted derisively.

"Well if you actually came to lectures, it might help." As she spoke, she turned her head away from me, giving me the side eye. I remember the way she looked at me very vividly.

I don't remember if I said anything back. I think I just stayed silent in shock, at how unneeded her meanness was. I wish I had run out, rather than remained seated next to her. I could not understand what I had done to make her hate me; yes, I was screwing up my own degree, but to no effect on her; our lecturer never asked me if I wanted to catch up, so the lessons went at a steady pace. Why did she care if I was a bad student, as long as I was generally ok to her, which I had been trying to be?

As I'm sure you can imagine, in my then-neurotic, anxious psyche, her blasé cruelty had the effect of pushing someone over after they had just struggled to their feet. It was proof positive that the world just wasn't safe. At best people would ignore you, and yet not ignore you, staring at you with the beginning of a sneer. They will rip into you for no reason, they will crucify you for mistakes you made, because only fools not worthy to live make mistakes.

 I spent the rest of the semester and the beginning of next either in my room, or at my boyfriend's, at the other end of the country. I did well in the exam, but I dropped that module as soon as I could.

I'm nowhere near as shambolic as I used to be, my view of the world is closer to what "sane" people say it is, but I still remember how it felt to be so degenerated. My depression and anxiety have scarred over certain areas of my mind, and there are some people in this world who reopened or exacerbated these problems I had/have.

Those sort of offhand, dismissive barbs that people spit must come from a very odd place. No one who has been low could do them, empathy wouldn't let you. Thrown at unassuming, muddling people, rather than anyone of threat or repugnance, shows a pathological belief in one's own supremacy. It is easy, after all, to shoot down someone who's already struggling, easy to compare oneself to them. And, even better, the comparison is clear-cut. Removed from everything in life, literally everything that might sway you in a "who is better?" competition, friends, family, kindness, intelligence, quality of life, once you wipe all that away, and keep this one cruel observation about them, well, you win. You were mean to me, Rebekah, and you won. You may not have gave me my deeply debilitating illness, but you really helped it debilitate me.

I still have never done anything like that. So I guess I've won that.

New time.

I'm not going to wish you a "happy" new year. It's impossible to have one entire year of just happy, and there seems no point when it won't make it true. Your problems are all still there.

No, bitter truth is that there will be incredibly tough moments coming for some of us this year, mathematically there just is.

There will loss and depression and things that hurt. Some of us will hit our rock bottoms, and there will be some of us who throw other people to their rock bottoms, thoughtlessly, without understanding what we really are doing.

Parts of this year will get so bad it will be difficult to know how we will keep on going. So what I wish for you is the strength, the calmness of mind to get through these terrible parts, so this time next year, in 2015, we will have become wise with our age, tougher, ideally kinder, but ultimately I just hope you're standing on higher ground than you were this year, however you choose to interpret that.

 And I also hope you do have blissful times too, that you realise that you are enough to make yourself happy by yourself, but that you, maybe, if you like, find someone who makes you more than happy.

I hope you find the train tracks, the destination destiny, that gives you a little more capitol in your pocket and in yourself. And if not, then I wish you to have fun, to be young and free, to make mistakes even if you are old enough to know better, to muddle out your own way, and to leave behind people who would lead you to poisoned waters.

I hope you get out alive, maybe with something that will help you through 2015.

See you on the other side.