Not to be Dramatic – But I think I’ve Found the Secret to Life

So it was A Level results day this week here in the UK, and it’s GCSE results next week which means we have a whole fortnight of celebrities tweeting variations of ‘it’s okay if you don’t get the results you hoped for, I failed x, y and z and I’m still happy/successful’. Personally, I find this so completely unhelpful and frankly hypocritical. With the exception of those two days, we spend the rest of the year beating ourselves, and other people, up for not being exactly where we should be in the life plans we’ve set out for ourselves. I definitely think this is getting worse with the whole ‘millenial’ culture of ‘oh Milennials are such snowflakes and don’t work for anything, when I was your age I worked 7 jobs and walked 25 miles to each of them and still had time to find a husband’, and you know what? It’s A, pissing me off and B, so completely and utterly inaccurate and not the case for anyone.

Here’s the thing, I don’t consider myself to be some wise, life affirming, philosophical guru, I got an A in AS Philosophy and even that was only because I memorised the textbook and regurgitated it word for word on the exam paper. But, and I don’t mean to be dramatic, I think I legitimately might have just discovered the single most useful bit of life advice ever; I mean, this is like the boolprop cheats in Sims, this is *the* hack, something more useful than the elastic bands in Spy Kids 2 (still not convinced they ever found 99 uses for those). Are you ready for your mind to be blown? Here it is. *Clears throat*:

If you are happy in an overall, all things considered, general sense, you are fine.

I’ll say it again for the people in the back:

If you are happy, you are fine.

“Thank you, Captain Obvious” I hear you say, but this is something that I went twenty four years of my life without realising. I spent three years at a really good university, the best university in the country for my subject area actually, and although there were pockets of happy times in there, I made some great lifelong friends, it was overall a very negative experience. The people who attend this university are generally not very nice, the culture is not very nice, and if the only thing ‘Eton’ means to you is a messy dessert, they will make it very clear that you are not welcome there. I finished that university with a first class degree, which I am exponentially proud of, but all people say to me is “oh my god you got a first from x, that’s amazing”. Is it? Was it worth needing counselling and feeling generally miserable for three years? In a word, “no”.

Fast forward 2 years, I’m on my second job out of university and my career is exactly on the path I want it to be, it’s all mapped out and everyone is telling me I’m amazing for doing what I do. But again, I am miserable. The job I was doing was very psychologically challenging; I had to accept some really quite disturbing things as normal, things that if they were portrayed in a film people would say “well that wouldn’t ever happen in real life”. And, great for the people who can handle that, seriously well done to you, but for me I didn’t like the person I had to become to be able to cope with doing that job. Also, the company I worked for was not right for me. There was a general bullying culture, immense pressure to do a difficult job with few resources and not enough staff, and people in my imminent team who were just generally not very nice at all. That’s about as far as I can politely go without really offending certain people, much as many of them 100% deserve it. It took me getting to a point of genuine mental breakdown and being unable to leave my house without having panic attacks that caused me to collapse, to realise that having my career in the ‘right’ place was just not worth it at all. You are not successful if you are coming home most days in tears and unable to sleep from the stress. It does not matter what your salary is or how much fantastic experience you are getting, if it’s affecting you negatively, that is counter-productive and you are actually unsuccessful.

Once I learned this, I realised it was applicable to basically everything. Not to go completely Charlotte York about this, but a question people often ask me is why I’m not married or engaged, because of the length of time I’ve been with my boyfriend. I’ll say it again, we are happy, ergo we are fine. I’m not saying it will never happen and I’m not a feminazi ‘men are the devil and marriage is oppressive’ type, but for now, things are completely fine. We are happy and, as they say, if it ain’t broke…

So here I am, at 24, working a fairly mundane job which I know is a beneath my degree and experience, unmarried despite being in a position where I easily could be; but here’s the plot twist, I AM HAPPY! For the first time in about a year I am, overall, happy more often than I am unhappy. Yes, things aren’t perfect, nothing ever is – I do sometimes get stressed at work or argue with my boyfriend or feel upset when something goes wrong, but on balance things are good. I honestly think this is the secret to life, and I’m not going to lie – I feel like I’ve found the Holy Grail. ‘Success’ is such an arbitrary term and you’re realistically never going to feel like you’ve achieved everything you meant to, so just stop stressing about it and do what you enjoy – I absolutely could’ve saved myself so much turmoil and mental distress if I’d known this earlier.

Why it’s Not Cool to Be a Book Snob

To say I’m an avid reader is very much an understatement. I’ve read everything I could get my hands on since I was three years old – eat your heart out, Matilda – and I recently started a job in a building which has a library inside so my love affair with literature has been ignited like petrol on a bonfire; I’ve read four books this week and somehow still have an unread pile by my bed.

I was at a book signing last weekend which featured Paige Toon, Lindsey Kelk and Giovanna Fletcher (all authors which I love and admire), and although I completely fangirled and revealed way too much about my personal life to Giovanna (sorry Gi, still hoping we can collaborate some day), the take-home message for me was Lindsey’s argument about ‘chick lit’. Earlier in the day, Lindsey Kelk had been on a bit of a Twitter rant about ‘chick lit’ and how books written by female authors are generally seen as inferior and not taken as seriously as those of male authors, especially the ‘classics’. Obviously I’m paraphrasing a lot here, and Lindsey I am very sorry if I’m messing this up, but I have to say I completely agreed with her and the stigma attached to ‘chick lit’ totally baffles me. I read everything, and I mean everything, and I do not understand why or how a book could be seen as more worthwhile if the author is canon and it has therefore become a classic, especially if it was written by a man.

‘Chick lit’ is such an ambiguous term in itself anyway, I always took it to mean books written to appeal to women, usually featuring a romance, but does that then mean that Wuthering Heights is chick lit? What about Romeo and Juliet? Both of which, incidentally, I have read, and despite being regarded as great works of literature, I personally thought they were both absolutely bloody terrible. If you ask me, I don’t think Wuthering Heights would get published today, Cathy and Heathcliff’s ‘romance’ is about as warm as Elsa’s ice palace in Frozen, but because it’s a classic it has to be inherently better than, say, Me Before You? If all that makes a novel ‘classic’ and a must-have on the ‘serious’ reader’s CV is that the author is dead, then is it beyond the realms of possibility that Me Before You is going to be in the GCSE Literature anthology in fifty years?

And if we’re following this definition of ‘chick lit’ as exclusively including romances which appeal to women, where does this put Romeo and Juliet? Teenagers killing themselves because they can’t be together? I think I read that one somewhere else, oh yes, hello Twilight saga! Nancy and Bill in Oliver Twist? Hello Christian Grey! I am mortified to have had to make reference to such an appalling attempt at erotic fiction, but you get the idea.

If you ask me (despite the fact that nobody actually is), people who are snobby about ‘chick lit’ are not actually very passionate readers. A true book lover will give anything a try and, sorry to be so cliche, will not judge a book by its cover or the position it holds on the shelf. Just because the title is written in pink and it has a picture of a woman outside a seaside cafe does not in itself make this book any less worthy than whatever is next to it on the bestseller list. What makes a great book are relatable characters that you can’t help but become really invested in and an engaging story that transports you into someone else’s world, and I’ve personally found great examples of such things right across the spectrum of Waterstones’ shop floor.

In summary, I think we all need to get over ourselves and just read whatever we find interesting and enjoyable. Last week I cried real and proper tears over a Paige Toon book, a reaction which neither Dickens or any Bronte sister has managed to get out of me. Life’s short, read what you want. And if you *really* want to seem clever and well read, just watch the BBC adaptations – they’re usually basically the same as the book.

 

P.S. I’m so sorry to Dickens and the Bronte sisters, I still love you all I’m just making a point. Except you, Emily, because Wuthering Heights really was appalling.

Book event.jpg
Just me fangirling so hard to have met these three!

 

Here goes!

Hello!

Wow, this is intimidating. For someone whose biggest fear is the phrase “now we’ll go round the room and everyone can introduce themselves”, starting a blog is absolutely terrifying. But, writing is something I enjoy so I’ve finally pushed myself to let other people read things that normally remain as notes in my phone before being discarded every 2 years when I upgrade my contract. “So, why now?” I hear you ask, well the honest answer is I don’t know. I’ve blogged on and off over the years (they’ve all now been deleted so don’t bother googling), but I recently found myself out of work for various reasons and so finally had the time to put pen to paper, or, more accurately, qwerty keyboard to Microsoft Word. Now, with some gentle encouragement from friends I’m putting Word to WordPress, and I’m quite scared if I’m honest.

At this point I should probably say a bit about who I am and what this blog is going to be, but unfortunately the answer to both of those topics is that I don’t know. I’m 24, I live in a small village in the North East with my boyfriend, I have a Criminology degree and have had a variety of jobs in the last few years; most of which have involved working with some very twisted criminals so that gave me plenty of funny stories if all other blog topics fail (every cloud and all that). As for the blog, that remains to be seen. A friend who is already an avid blogger, and a very good one come to that, told me to just start writing about what I enjoy and that will help to establish myself, so that’s what I’m going for. I don’t have many posts mapped out yet, but if I’m going by things I enjoy then you can probably expect a nice mixture of books, anecdotes about my dog, left wing feminist rants, Bake Off, the Downton Abbey movie, food and the perils of living with a man. If any of those topics appeal to you, please stay tuned, and if they don’t appeal to you then please just close this tab and we’ll say no more about it.

Here goes!