Home

Thinking back over the weekend, I was only home from Friday night to Monday afternoon, but it threw me out in terms of daily living. I must be a creature of routine, there are certain things to be done every day, and nice as it is, going back home knocks these out. Plus all the turmoil it created this time over where I want to live. I love my family and my home, I don’t know though if I can live there anymore. And my friends as well. Many of them, my oldest friends (in the way of knowing them for a long time!) are established at the other end of the country. One of my best friends called round to see me on Saturday and she and my other best friend, who makes up our triumverate, had bought me the pair of slippes from Next that I had been wanting for over a year. They had been shopping and had missed me. How do I leave such friends as that to live down here?

That’s part of the challenge of postgraduate study in your late 20s I guess. It takes far more uprooting from established lives, and not all your contemporaries are doing it at the same time. I had to be different when I first went to University: most of my friends moved as far away as possible, the farthest was Emma who went to Dundee from Wirral. I chose Liverpool, not in isolation, as a few other from my year at school also did, but not amongst my close circle. It’s taken me ten years to feel ready to properly move away, but I think I had to do other things first, and be really ready for it. I’m not a confident person at all, and moving away from home at 18 was just too much, so I waited.

Having done that though, I went to an extreme just before I graduated and went to work in Wyoming for three months. It nearly gave me an anxiety breakdown in the end however, and I returned home, very homesick. It took a long time to get over, and I did safe things for a while, living at home, doing a job that wasn’t too demanding. Then I got a bit bolder and moved out, still only five miles away from my parents. The move here I think had been building for a long time: the idea of it came at my middle sister’s graduation ceremony - she got her BA in textile design at Falmouth - and I fell in love with the place that day. Then I saw the Professional Writing course, and it somehow became inevitable I would come here. I finally moved away. And now I don’t know if I can go back.