March 15th: As time goes on

Right now, students nationwide are signing house contracts. Probably students worldwide too, but I know for a fact that pretty much every student from every university in Britain is currently looking for and signing for a house to rent with their friends for the next academic year.

Not all students, of course. Some might stay in halls of residence for another year. Some might live at home and commute to university. The reason I'm not looking for somewhere to live next year is because it would be pretty pointless renting a house here in York when I'm spending the next academic year 894 miles South of here, in Tarragona, on the North East coast of Spain.

Me moving to the North East of countries seems to be becoming something of a theme these days.

(I was amused to find, when I Googled the distance between York and Tarragona (as I always like my blog posts to be as accurate as possible), that one website actually offered me driving directions... so if anybody needs to drive to the East coast of Catalonia anytime soon, I'm your girl!)

Right now, at uni, I'm "the Southern one". "The posh one". Not that I am posh; I just have a fairly strong received pronunciation-ish accent, out of which people up here just love to take the mickey. I was never really all that bothered with my roots before I came to uni, but now I do find myself clinging onto my Southern-ness a bit more. It means more to my identity than it ever did before, and because of that I find myself wondering if, despite the fact that I have never felt English in my life, moving to Spain might change that. When I move to Spain I will be both Southern and Northern, from the South of England but the North of the world, or almost at least, and it will form new parts of my identity that don't exist yet - just as every day I live here at uni continues to shape me.

All of this - going to uni, looking for houses, moving to another freaking country - it all makes us feel so grown up. It makes us feel like we're finally standing on our own two feet, actually being independent... actually being adults. But the moments where we should feel like adults make us feel even more like kids, out of our depth, and the moments where we do feel like adults only serve to highlight how much more we have to learn. It's like that moment where you successfully balance the clutch and the accelerator for the first time without stalling the car, or cooking your first proper meal, or your first time paying your rent. We still need to learn to move the car forward, and to not poison ourselves with our cooking, and to realise that the money with which we paid said rent came from Student Finance England and actually had nothing to do with us at all. We always seem to be growing but we never seem to be grown.

Do you think it will always be like this?

I think so. We're never going to know everything. It turns out that a whole load of the experiences I thought would come as time goes on have all come at once, but I guess that's the way life is. If we could learn everything, there would be nothing new to discover. There would be no new experiences to have, no new ambitions to follow, no new dreams to dream. I have dreamed of moving abroad for so long and now it's actually going to happen... keep dreaming your dreams, because even if they don't come true, at least you cared about something enough to try and follow it. At least you tried. The worst thing you can do is give up.

Molly x

P.S. This post was inspired by a conversation I had with Becky a couple of weeks ago. Conversations with old friends have a habit of giving me ideas.