Januarys feel like trying to swim in custard. Treading water, exhausting with no forward motion.
I don’t like the uncertainty that comes along with the promise of a new year. Anxiety demands that I am in control, with every future step planned.
Right now I am very much not in control. I’m desperately job hunting, trying to figure out university, sorting my life into cardboard boxes. Really all I need is for one thing to fall into place so I will have some sense of clarity, and I will be able to shake January off and move onto my future. Nothing has fallen. Yet.
But. Right now I am stuck in uncomfortable January so I may as well make the best of it.
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I do want to be better at writing. I’d like to write everything from the position of having solved whatever experience, to have wise and comforting words that are good and gentle and strong.
I am beginning to accept that right now is not the time for that. Not today or this week. I have enough of my own mess to sort through right now. Besides, it’s no secret that I am one that is still in and not yet through.
Despite being in a dark room all day with no job and no essays to write, I’m doing my best to look up and out. (Not just apply for a few jobs and then sleep the day away like my anxious brain would simultaneously love and hate.)
So I drew Ellery.
Over the last two years, there are a lot of things I credit to me maintaining some sense of sanity. High up on that list sits both art and Ellery.
Everyone needs an Ellery.
We first met as baby university students, awkwardly trying to figure out seating in a classroom full of unfamiliar faces.
We then spent the rest of our first year perfecting the art of frolicking.
This process includes: getting locked in the engineering building whilst pretending that we belonged (despite the fact we were always dressed like art students), arriving late to class due to sharing a piece of gluten-free, anti-stress cake, also arriving late to class because the stationary shop had opened a sweet section, birthday picnics, getting lost in more buildings that we had no reason to be in, and arriving on campus with wildly different hairstyles completely unannounced.
Ellery is sunshine and bumble bees, songs you play on repeat, candy floss without the sickly sweet aftertaste.
I never really believed in Anne of Green Gable’s kindred spirits, I got far too cynical for that by 18, but I guess Els is the closest I’ll get to one in a non-fiction world.
So from my little bundle of gloom, I will remind myself of the good and beautiful and kind. (and we’re seeing each other Tuesday)
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Today I don’t really have much else to say, but I think that is alright for now.
I’m planning and working on bits and pieces for this blog right, even though my words are not great at the minute. Looking forward to all that.
I’m also feeling a bit drained, but I think that’s just part of the process of the less glamourous recovery moments.
Anyway.
All my love,
B.
britts amelia. 