Hi
It’s been a while.
I'm not here to dwell on why it has been about nine months since I last posted on this blog, that was an inevitability with the life 2022 has given me, a life where I had very little time to watch anything, never mind write about anything. But as of Sunday I’ve moved back to London and my original plan, now that I have some spare time, was to return to this blog with a few reviews of things I have watched this past year before I got in the swing of regular weekly writing. However, when I arrived in London I felt a lot more emotional and self reflective than I expected, to a point where I reminisced about when I was last in London and how this was a platform that essentially turned into, to put in bluntly, therapy. So I’m afraid if you’ve come to this post expecting the usual ramblings about why a piece of media made me cry, you might want to give this one a miss as I want to talk about feelings, hugs and vulnerability.
I approached a theory that the reason I found myself arriving in London feeling especially emotionally overwhelmed was because it was the first real downtime I’ve had in a while. Spending time with myself has never really been something I was good at, especially since Covid forced that upon me, which is why this last year my life has basically been composed of three things: Work, Socialising and Sleep. But I was working behind bars and restaurants with people I know and consider my friends, then before and after work I was immediately socialising until I had to go to sleep or go back to work. It was a whirlwind of constant socialising and I loved it. And during this time, I began hugging people a lot more, there was never such a thing as diminishing returns with socialising in this context. I was seeing people everyday yet you’d be consistently excited by their presence, repetition became a factor most people would find exhausting, but I found it comforting. For the next few months I hugged people celebrating new jobs, I hugged family members at funerals, I hugged friends tight mid dance or sing-along, I hugged friends who were struggling whilst they hugged me whilst I was struggling until eventually I had to hug a lot of people goodbye.
I had a lot of people ask me if I was excited or if I was scared about moving to London/leaving Huddersfield, but I always struggled to answer the question because of just how much my thoughts fluctuate. Some days I would be so excited to leave Huddersfield for a myriad of reasons, yet scared of the prospect of moving to London, whilst other days I would be terrified to leave Huddersfield yet so excited to go to London. When it got to those last few months I realised I never slowed down enough to really consider my feelings about it, these aren't real feelings I had, they were attempts at answering a question within a binary that I was not thinking about. In fact I didn't really have time to feel anything, the stress and craziness of the last few weeks meant that I didn’t consider these feelings until the second I landed in London. And then I came to realise that no matter how excited I was for whatever London had to offer, that comfort and reliability in the life Huddersfield had given me was something I was incredibly scared of losing. It was that social reliability that I loved but I also found myself forming some of the most intense and rewarding friendships this last year, which were especially hard to say goodbye to.
There’s probably some scientific study claiming the exact extent in which people require social intimacy, but we don’t deal with science here, we mostly deal with Doctor Who and emotions. I always hold friendship and connections with people as an extremely important factor, I’m usually the person enjoying the hug a lot more than the other party which in all honesty probably makes me a bit of a needy friend in some circumstances but I’d never consider myself a social butterfly, more like a social addict. It is a basic human need to be appreciated, to be loved and for some people that comes in the form of fame or achievements, for me it comes in the form of close friendships. The thing with the life I’ve been living this last year is just how quickly I reached that social intimacy I so needed, which makes the thought of reaching that point with new people intimidating and frustrating. It was a coping mechanism, I didn't have time to feel unhappy because I was very rarely alone, now I am in London and I am alone. Don’t get me wrong, I've met a few people and I have these opportunities lined up but I find myself wanting to skip straight to that comfort part of friendship because that is what I need right now, I love learning from people and growing closer through how much you learn about people and that is a difficult thing to expect immediately. It will happen eventually with some people, but this is the first time in a while I’ve felt like a fish out of water socially in a long while.
Now, this is the point where I do some much needed damage control. I am in fact feeling fine and my situation is much brighter than this melancholic piece may suggest. To some of you this might sound like the pathetic ramblings of someone feeling sad about something as trivial as moving to university. I’ve even met with friends that are down here, I’ve even talked about this exact feeling but I still felt the need to try and put it into words on my own terms. I want to clarify that my reasons behind writing this sentimental nonsense was an admittedly unsuccessful attempt at trying to rationalise my emotional response to this big change in my life through my own brain and not through the fear that I was making the wrong decision. Because I haven't made the wrong decision, yet that doesn't mean I can't feel intimidated, overwhelmed and a little (perhaps quite a bit) homesick for Huddersfield. I hugged a lot of people goodbye which made me reflect on writing this, that hug goodbye is always the toughest no matter the context. It is an attempt to hold on a second longer. A hug is the most intimate in terms of the proximity you can be in with a person and the irony of a hug goodbye is the inevitability of the fact that proximity won't be with you for a while after you realise.
This piece has gone through a lot of iterations in the last few days, the more I write and talk about my feelings the more they tend to change. Which is a good thing, I joked about this blog being a form of therapy, but I truly believe it is the only way to help think about one’s emotions in a rational way. I’ve always been someone who tries to understand feelings, I think there’s this need in me to try and decipher the patterns one goes through that inspire emotion and thus invoke actions that may be hard to understand. That is why when I arrived in London hit by a wave of melancholy after all this excitement around the move, I tried to decipher my feelings through the lens of my emotional patterns of the year before but in reality there was no need to do any of that. I think as a society emotion has become a by-product of factors out of our control, we focus on the patterns to emotion which thus negate the importance of the emotions themselves, whether this be through diagnosis, focusing on the past or wider socio-political impacts. None of these were why I felt sad when I got to London, I felt sad because I was leaving behind a group of friends that I loved that made me the happiest I’d felt in a long time. And I am worried that I might not return to that in any sort of way and that period of my life is over, which is something that is okay to be sad about. No matter how exciting this new chapter is and no matter how well it is going so far, I still can feel sad about that and miss what I have left behind because change is scary and it’s okay to feel overwhelmed. Perhaps I wanted to communicate the reasons behind in a way you, the reader, might understand which is a fool’s errand; as if it was achievable to communicate the way my brain works on a blog piece written mostly in the early hours of the morning.
It was really sad leaving Huddersfield and I almost felt disappointed by how immediately it affected me because of the amount of support and excitement I had received from my friends when I was moving. My brain has rattled between feeling sad and excited, I find pride and self achievement hard to register emotionally, instead I tend to have a dismissive attitude about my own self. But if anything it reaffirms that there’s very little consistency in emotions, no event has a dichotomy of emotions that refuse to overlap, every emotion overlaps and runs through people differently. It is strange how quickly we associate emotion with context, we always tend to validate emotion through the bigger things going on, rather than perhaps the immediate context that validates the immediate reaction. And that is the same with a hug, you associate the feeling you get out of a hug with the reasoning behind that hug, the concept of a hug doesn't have a universal emotional response. Often it does not have the same response between the two parties, yet that never undermines the feelings one experiences during that hug, no matter the bigger contexts passing by a hug, it always elicits an immediate emotional response that is valid to your current emotional state. If I was to hug you, whoever you are, right now I would probably feel sad and I may even shed a tear, it would be for a lot of reasons that are all very valid and hopefully nothing against our hug, but I’d still hold onto that hug a second longer, hold it a little tighter and feel a little better.
Thanks for reading.