I turned out fine

I’m not sure what drew me back to VuTales, but I’m glad I had the chance to browse around again. Arly wrote a really solid blog, it was incredibly calming in the mildly stressful period I know find myself in. It made me think about what I’ve experienced so far in my first year at uni and I thought it would be cathartic to talk about it. None of my friends really know the full picture of everything that happened, so this is the only honest account of it all, and where I can be honest with myself about what happened. It’s actually really long, so please don’t trouble yourself to read it all.

If it sounds pretty depressing so far, I’m just in a sad mood at the moment. I’m normally pretty perky, but its 1am and I just want to get this out.

The summer before first term started, I was still working in the community pharmacy as a medicines counter assistant. I was pretty bored at the time because I just did the same thing everyday, but the hours were full-time and I had nothing better to do in my gap year. I was looking forward to uni naturally, but I was a bit worried as well. I hadn’t had to force myself to make new friends since I was 11 and it just felt a bit intimidating. I’m pretty sure I drove my mum crazy by constantly asking “What if I don’t make any friends? What if no one likes me?” Oh, and my self-esteem was a bit low too. My mum just kind of rolled her eyes at me and told me not to worry about it.

As it turns out, I really didn’t need to worry about it. The girl I met at the King’s interview for pharmacy was going to UCL too, so I wouldn’t be entirely alone. We enrolled together and I met her flatmates who were super nice people. The first day of induction I went early to SOP (School of Pharmacy) and talked to literally all the asians there, making a whatsapp group for everyone and just getting to know people generally. All the hours bantering with old people in the pharmacy paid off, I finally knew how to talk to people normally; something I sadly didn’t manage to grasp in sixth form. Somehow I ended up with a really good group of friends who all happened to be british-born chinese or from Hong Kong or Malaysia.

This is a digression, but there’s a saying that you are the average of your five closest friends. I’ve thought about it time and time again, but I just never felt like I was anything like my best friends in uni. Only now do I realise that perhaps they are who I wanted to be.

We all got close frighteningly quickly, turns out four of us girls were in the same practical group so we went to 3 hour labs and workshops together happily. I threw my first ever party at my flat and invited all my friends from my course, it was pretty hilarious. But by November, I had broken up with my boyfriend. Our relationship was only ever surface-level; I never found out what he wanted out of life. What his motivations were, what he feared. I don’t think I ever asked, but then I don’t think he knew either. Even so, I was devastated.

One of my friends informed me that I felt like I was ‘having my heart ripped out of my chest’. Personally, I still feel like that’s a bit too dramatic. On some level I realised I was sad, but it just didn’t register deeply enough for me to have to confront the issue. If that doesn’t make sense, you’re right. I mean I skipped lectures, avoided my friends at lunch and partied a lot with my cheer society but I genuinely didn’t understand why I did all of that. In hindsight, I was probably pretty fucking sad.

It was during this wild time that I hooked up with one of the guys in my cheerleading society. I don’t even know how it happened, the chief reason being that I am unashamedly suppressing all my memories of him. I ended up in his room during the day and nights just so I wouldn’t feel alone in my own accommodation. If you find it strange that a guy would encourage such clingy behaviour from a girl he just met, you’re entirely right. He was incredibly strange, but I was too far gone to notice, or even care if I did notice.

I really don’t think my friends approved of my behaviour during this time, but they still stuck with me and brought me lecture notes and forced me to eat at lunch. Like I said, they’re a really good bunch of people. They could have written me off but I am so thankful that they didn’t. We all went to the pharmacy boat party together, and I flew off to Singapore the next day to join my parents for the winter holidays.

The day I flew back, the cheer guy helped me carry my stuff back from the airport. I would have preferred to take an uber back, but it was nice of him to offer. I called him the next day and told him I didn’t want to see him anymore. If you’re wondering why, I don’t really have an answer for you. I think the main pattern in my sometimes erratic behaviour is that I do what I want, occasionally with a chilling lack of concern for other people.

His reply was that if I broke up with him, he would make sure my performance would suffer within the society. I wouldn’t be invited to extra training or socials, he would make sure the seniors shunned me. If you’re thinking, “so fucking what?”, you are braver than I am. I still suffered from the low self-esteem that people who haven’t experienced many challenges have. I felt that all the relationships I had worked to build in my society would be destroyed if I left him. So I felt that I couldn’t leave.

Even though that period feels in my mind as if it happened to somebody else, I still feel sick. I don’t want to go into too much detail, but things got worse from there. And just when I thought it couldn’t get worse, it did. I struggled with pretending to be happy to my friends on the outside, when I was constantly under a huge amount of stress. I was always worried about whether I would say anything to make him angry, what he would do to me, until there was no space left for anything else. My performance in cheer suffered, my performance in classes suffered. I barely saw my pharmacy friends because all of my stuff was at his place instead of my dorms a 2 minute walk away and he stopped me from hanging out with my cheer friends without him. He made himself my whole world and if I had been a little bit different, I would have let it happen.

Even though normally I’m not entirely in touch with how I feel, I knew something was wrong then. I just didn’t know how to express it. I struggled to tell my friends that something wasn’t right, because I didn’t even know what exactly was bad about the situation. I think his control over me started to unravel when he took me to the Phd room.

It was some time around April when he started asking me to study with him outside of his room. It was a graduate study room in the pharmacology building and my friend’s ex-boyfriend was studying there. The cheer guy warned me sternly, “He hates you. Stay away from him.” Apparently it turns out I’m too like his ex-girlfriend. I accepted it without question, but honestly since when does one person hate another for a reason as silly as that? I should have known better.

Somehow we started talking. The ex-boyfriend was not entirely alright. He couldn’t recover from his breakup with my friend and he refused to try. He talked about it with a lot of people, looking for their acceptance and he mostly got it because it turns out my friend was a pretty psychotic girlfriend. However he couldn’t accept it within himself and it was only recently that he got over her. Even though everyone told me about my friend’s behaviour towards the ex-boyfriend, she’s still my friend and I still support her, even if I have lost a lot of respect for her.

Anyway, I watched him. His ex-girlfriend was controlling of him to an obsessive level and eventually he just snapped and broke up with her after a particular incident. He couldn’t sleep properly, he constantly talked about getting back with her and he just didn’t take care of himself. But he was free. She had already focused her attentions on another member of our cheer team and he didn’t have to suffer her behaviour any longer. I was envious.

In any case, I’m not entirely sure what happened that one day. The cheer guy left to go study with his group of maths friends and I was there with my cheer captain on the same table. Then I started crying. I told him some of what happened. I didn’t cry at all when I was with the cheer guy, but when he left it just came out by myself. I don’t remember what happened on that day, but it ended up with the cheer guy walking me back to my dorm. I told him I couldn’t see him anymore, and he said that he knew it was coming. I went back to my room that I had cheerfully covered in anime posters the previous term. I hadn’t been back for a while and it felt like someone else’s room, but it was nice to finally be alone.

My friend’s ex-boyfriend messaged me and asked if I was alright. I don’t know why, but it was easy to tell him why I couldn’t stop crying in that study room. The threats he made, the way he would hold my arms and tell me how easy it would be to break them. Videoing us having sex without my knowledge and replaying it back to me and mocking me. All the horrible things that I could never ever tell my friends but I could tell this guy who was basically a stranger.

I’ll never tell him how grateful I am that he listened to me that night, because that’s not how our friendship works. But yeah, we became friends. And because I have an obsession with categorising my every relationship with people, I called him senpai because I looked up to him. Because he had the courage to do what he needed to do and he suffered for it, but he still carried on.

Of course everything didn’t become all rosy after that. Eventually I had to go to the doctor because I was still having breakdowns during my exam period and was referred to the student psychologist who told my tutor what happened and he basically saved my academic life. I don’t know why I’ve been fine typing all of this out until now, but when I think of my tutor I’m struggling not to cry. Oh, fuck it. He sat me down and told me I was brave. But honestly I think he was braver. He was in my situation only his wife was physical, and he suffered it for years and years until he thought his wife would hurt his kids. So he went to the police station and told them what happened.

He’s one of the bravest men I know. And he told me one of the things that have carried me over until now: “One day, you will find someone kind and gentle who will never hurt you.” Because he did. He found someone like that, so there has to be someone like that in this world for me. He helped me sort out everything- the extenuating circumstances form and personally talked to the people I would have needed to talk to. I can’t ever thank him enough.

Things still weren’t fine after that. I managed to muddle through most of my exams and luckily my practicals were before my breakdown so I managed to do pretty well on them. My last exam was over a month after the crisis in June and on the morning of the exam, I snapped. I lost control, I couldn’t move. I didn’t want to leave my room because I had the bewildering idea that that guy was waiting for me outside. It was entirely irrational, but I could not leave my room. I phoned my friend and told her I couldn’t make it to the exam. She snapped at me, “you’re ruining your life,” but honestly, I felt she was being a bit dramatic. She was the one who came up with the previous gem of having my heart ripped out. I went to the GP surgery and the nurse wrote a letter for my extenuating circumstances form. She told me I was brave but I didn’t feel very brave. I still don’t.

My friends came and took me out to dinner. They thought about ways to alleviate my fear of the guy coming to find me. He had managed to make it past my halls security before to surprise me. It was all a little pointless because the fear came from within me. I was more afraid of him in my head than of seeing him in person. I ended up going to the summer ball a few days later with them and I ended up crying with my best friend on a bench in the rain. “I was so worried about you,” she told me, “why didn’t you tell us?” I couldn’t then and I still can’t now. I was caught up in my own spiral, always wondering how he could have done it, why he hurt me, how could he have hurt me in this way.

So exams were over, it was almost summer, everyone was relaxed, I hung out with different groups of friends everyday. It was with another group of friends from my course that I would meet a guy who would be the first to ask me out on a date after the cheer guy. The whole story is a bit convoluted and is perhaps a story for another time. I never felt like I wanted to date again, but I had a good time and I’m grateful for the experience.

So how did I ‘get over’ it? I don’t think there’s ever going to be a way to get over this kind of hurt, it’s the sort of pain that only fades with time from your memories. I recovered very quickly, but that’s because I cheated. I remember reading a rubbish article once about people who could never forget anything. One of them said the only way he could forget was imagining that memory as a page in a book and setting it on fire within his mind, letting it go from him. I told myself quite forcefully that I didn’t remember how we met, even though I do remember, and burned the memory from my mind.

It’s weird, I still know how we met but I have to work harder to dredge up the exact situation. It’s a weird trick, but it worked for me. Any painful memories that lingered, they’re gone. I can barely remember his face and his voice. I don’t even remember most of what he said to me and did to me. I think it’s better that way.

Things got better after the memories faded. I ended up doing the exam I missed in an exam centre in Singapore. I just got the results back today- I passed. It’s funny, while I was panicking and waiting for my results, I realised how much I wanted to carry on with pharmacy, how much I wanted to spend more time making memories with my friends. It was kind of life-affirming.

Any weird things left over from it all, I would say my refusal to cry. I used to cry when I felt like it, not that often but just to release pent-up stress or anger. I cried a huge amount during my exam period but the summer ball in June was the last time I cried. Until recently. My friend passed away a few days ago. She was in my course and we were friends. We talked quite a bit. I was determined not to cry, because I promised myself that unless I felt worse than what I did during that time, I did not deserve to cry. But then I realised how much I missed her already, and that I wouldn’t see her this october in lectures, talking about summer and our treasurer training for our respective societies. Then I realised it’s okay to cry for my friend. And it’s alright to cry for my tutor.

I was incredibly upset to hear of her death. It was entirely unexpected. Her memorial service is on Thursday, I’m going with my group of friends. She was a genuinely kind person, there aren’t that many of them that I know. I am grateful to have been her friend for a year and sad that we won’t have the chance to make more memories with each other. I jokingly promised her I would join her taekwondo society and I’ll do exactly that next year. During our training as treasurers she invited me to lunch with her and her society’s president and we made all these extravagant plans together. I still can’t really believe it.

Trying to sum up this year has left me at a loss for words, though you’ll never know it with how much I just typed. Calling it eventful would be an understatement. And if I could do the year all over again, I’m not entirely sure I would. For better or for worse, I’ve managed to come out of the year relatively unscathed. I’ve made some really good memories and some very bad memories which will help me appreciate the happier times more. I’ve come out of it quite a bit stronger, I think. I appreciate my self-worth a lot more. I know exactly what I will and will not tolerate from my partner in a relationship, even though I’m not ready for one now. And I’ve luckily managed to make a lot of very supportive friends who I love from the bottom of my heart. More than I can love a boyfriend at least

The first term of second year will be starting soon. This is what I’m looking forward to next year:
being a transition mentor for the first years, it’ll be hilarious
my boots interview next week
doing treasurer stuff for cheer, I actually like being on committee since everyone’s a lot more relaxed this year
living with my pharmacy friends- remember the girl who told me my heart was being ripped out? We’re very close
making more good memories with everyone, without boy drama hopefully, come on we’re all 20 now

Thanks for reading maybe I’ll do another summary at the end of next year if vutales is still around. You know, I don’t know if people will actually read this but I don’t want any pity. I have a prideful streak a mile wide and sometimes I refuse to acknowledge that I was ever at the mercy of someone else. It’s just something that happened to me, and he ended up not doing his masters here and is off to do something useless somewhere else far away from me. I consider the whole thing done and over. It’s strange, I was sad at the start of this incredibly long post but now I’m smiling for no reason. I’m meeting my friends later today so I should really go to sleep. Bye!