I’ve been reading Lorna’s blog ‘Gin & Lemonade‘ for… I don’t know. Years. She was featured once on Freshly Pressed back when I was a spry young thing with enough time to randomly browse other blogs because I liked the titles of their posts, and I stuck around. I recently joined her blogging group on Facebook, and one of the things she’s created are weekly prompts. Lorna’s Ginspiring Writing Prompts, someone’s nicknamed them. Last week’s prompt was about sepia-toned fall…
This week was A-Level results week for students in England and Wales — the time when students find out whether they got into their first choice university. I remember it being hellishly nerve-wracking (I barely slept at all the night before my results), but even once it was over, the anxiety is only just beginning. Because preparing for university can be stressful. In the lead up to university, I read everything I could find. I read student newspapers. I researched…
Today is my graduation. In 2016, I took time out of Cambridge, because I wasn’t coping. Getting diagnosed with coeliac disease in 2015 was a lot to cope with on top of my other health problems; completely rethinking my diet while trying to keep up with the intensity of a Cambridge workload was a struggle. The medication I was on for my anxiety made me sleep up to fourteen hours a day, and I spent the few hours I was…
I don’t know whether you guys are familiar with the concept of studyspo, but I come across it quite a lot, on both Tumblr and Instagram. Both platforms have their own studyspo communities (studyblr and #studygram respectively) of people who post aesthetic pictures of their notes and schoolwork to inspire and motivate others to study — as well as to celebrate their own progress, of course. There are some particular hallmarks of the kind of things people tend to post,…
One of the most frustrating things about being chronically ill is all the little choices you don’t realise you no longer have until somebody guilt-trips you for not making them. And yes, this is (partly) about veganism. Look, I’ll put it out there before I start: I have some good friends who are vegans, and I respect their choices. Hell, I even admire them, and occasionally envy them. This is not a post saying that veganism is bad, because I…
Around this time last year, I wrote a post about how my health has got in the way of having dreams and being ambitious, and how I’m more aware of my limitations than of my aspirations. My goal was to try and make 2017 a year of remembering how to dream again, how to be ambitious even when it seems unlikely. It’s hard to assess the extent to which I’ve succeeded at that goal. Right now, I am painfully aware…
I hit 50k for NaNoWriMo on the 11th November. I didn’t say much at the time because I still have a long way to go before I finish the book and, for me, hitting 50k is not especially remarkable. It wasn’t my fastest year (2013 only took me three days), but also wasn’t my slowest (last year I hit 50k on on Day 26). It felt like an achievement, but in many ways one I only managed by virtue of…
I started writing another post in my ‘going to university’ series on Monday, this time about what to wear to lectures and so on, because that was something I worried a lot about just before I started. I wrote most of the post on my phone, so I had to leave it unfinished because I wanted to embed some tweets and have yet to figure out how to do that via the app, and figured I’d post it promptly. And…
This is a scheduled post. Right about now I ought to be in Dublin. I’m probably lost, because I lack any sense of direction, and/or trying to resist the temptation to buy a lot of musical instruments that I won’t be able to take home on the plane. However, right now I want to talk about my previous trip, which was to Cornwall. (I’m having quite the tour of places of ASNaC interest this summer, apparently.) As we were driving…
For those who aren’t aware, I used to be a competitive Irish dancer. (I’ve written about it before here. And here. And in other places. ) Maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement. I wasn’t the kind of competitive Irish dancer who is at a feis (competition) every weekend, has a huge elaborate curly wig and a dress costing thousands of pounds that seem mostly to have been spent on finding the grossest combination of neon with Swarovski crystals. I…