on getting what you want

(& feeling nothing about it)

Ever since a few nights ago when Jemma and her boyfriend came over and we sat in the garden watching a meteor shower, I haven’t been able to stop looking at the sky. Partly due to the ‘heatwave’ (about three sunny days), I’ve been sleeping with my windows open and watching the stars as they materialise out of the darkness one by one. Just as your eyes focus on the smallest white dot, another emerges behind it, and the sky seems to stretch into an endless black motorway dotted with cat’s eyes, leading far beyond mine or your comprehension. There must be something primal about seeing a shooting star because there’s definitely something addictive about seeing something quite literally otherworldly - the second it’s finished sprawling itself across the sky, a part of you thinks you must have imagined it and you find yourself instantly searching for another. But right now it’s late on a Sunday night, and I’m watching from my window as the stars appear, and I suddenly started thinking about something good that’s happened recently, and how I want to write about it. So that’s what this is.

“Are you having that thing” Lizzy asked me recently “where you think that if you didn’t get in you’d think you weren’t good enough for it, but now that you do have it, you think it must be shit'. “Yeah” I replied “I’m having that thing”. The mind loves a lose-lose situation.

I recently got something that I want, something that I worked to get and thought was potentially beyond my reach. I’ve wanted it for a while and have waited for a time that makes perfect sense, but it turns out that you waiting until you feel completely ready is a good way to ensure that you’ll never do it. So now I’m in that strange space, in between getting the thing and starting the thing, where I have lots of time to question my decisions and freak myself out.

When I was in Spain earlier in the summer (pre-Brat summer, if you can imagine such a time) staying at Stella’s house with her and Alice, we were cooking dinner whilst listening to the Hamilton soundtrack. We were singing along to ‘Satisfied’ whilst chopping peppers and drinking white wine - I was on guacamole duty, as I always am. ‘Nice going Angelica he was right, you’ll never be satisfied’. After the song finished, I said to Alice and Stella ‘I really relate to that song’, to which one of them agreed and the other thought was sad - but I can’t really remember which one said what. I don’t particularly relate to the whole sister-getting-married-to-Lin-Manuel-Miranda-after-I-introduced-them-at-a-winters-ball-in-1780-but-I-love-him thing, which is kind of the whole point of the song, but I do relate to the general tone of the song; the idea that you’re predisposed to a feeling of dissatisfaction. I think I see in myself what Hamilton sees in Angelica, something insatiable and restless.

Tell me if this is relatable: I can recognise a good thing when it’s happening, but it’s easier to feel it when I can dismiss my own involvement in it, and pass it off as a kind of cosmic gift from the universe, rather than the result of any decisions I’ve made or work I’ve done. It seems easier to believe that good things are handed down from some kind of universal force or deity, than to acknowledge the part I’ve played in their acquisition. No?

About a month ago, the morning after the UK election, I was in Portugal visiting my dad, watching Rishi Sunak’s resignation speech on TV. The dregs of the champagne we’d drunk the night before whilst celebrating the Tory loss sat dried up on the table next to me, and I felt semi-hopeful about the potential of the new Labour government. There, sitting on the sofa, I got an email notification. ‘An update on your application’. There was a time, when I was about 17, frantically checking my UCAS waiting for an outcome of my uni application, that those words haunted me. I felt a pang of apprehension or adrenaline, but mainly trust - in whatever happens being okay. But, to be honest, I had prepared myself for disappointment.

‘Congratulations, I’d like to inform you that you have been successful…’. etc etc. I stared at the email. I hadn’t prepared myself for actually getting what I wanted. Tories out and a place on the course I wanted, two things that just a few months ago felt pretty out of reach.

And then the predictable thing happened; I opened up my personal little Pandora’s box and all the self-doubt and anxiety flooded in. In a strange way, I think I’d have been more comfortable with not getting in; then I could tell myself the vague and relaxing mantra: ‘everything happens for a reason’ and be done with it. But this, which isn’t a random occurrence, but is a direct result of decisions I have made and actively worked towards, requires a level of trust, not in the conveniently abstract ‘universe’, but in myself, which can be a trickier force to summon.