exams!

So exactly one month on, the first exam is over. It was bizarre. I actually felt anxious / nervous / panicked / worried before this exam. These are normal feelings to have the night before an exam leading up to the moment when the examiner says 'stop writing, turn your scripts over...' blah blah blah. Thing is, I was surprised to feel anxious - I can't remember feeling that way in a long time, since A levels. That was 3 years ago! Then I was surprised that I should be surprised at the nervousness.

Ah, I'm not sure I explained myself very well but it really hit me that I've been emotionally lame or something for quite some time and only now that I'm returning to normal can I say that my lack of drive all this time was 'just a phase'. After all you can't know something is a phase till its over. Feelings are the driving forces behind our actions and I suppose like all things, you don't know what you had till it goes. In my case, I only know what I've missed when I get it back. Like when my eldest brother used to go off to boarding school for months at a time, I'd be sad when he left but I'd only realise how much I'd missed him when he came back.

I don't think I can fully express how strange this concept is to me after I've so casually laid it down in black and white. I mean, its normal to think that when a person injures their leg, it takes time to heal, that a person can be mentally ill and recover <--- that at least has some physiological links but who thought that disfuntional emotions could be a handicap? I dunno, maybe I'm just a bit slow on the uptake of understanding life. Or at least of understanding myself. But what can a person really know of something that changes constantly? How much good does it even do to try and constantly keep track of the changes to evaluate them? The amount of time and effort it would take is probably not worth the results in the end.

Anyway, its nice to fear failure, to hope for something good and to want to work for it. Ha ha, can't believe I just said it was nice to fear something. Ah well. Really though, it wasn't so long ago when lack of ambition wasn't enough to make me back down from something because I had the fear of failure to fall back on, to drive me to complete a task and complete it well. Where had that gone?! Sigh.

I have much to be grateful for. Its so true that we never understand quite how much we have, how much we are given, that we might just as easily not be. Here's another observation from my self-psycho-analysis. Its always easier to talk about something when its over.

My childhood is over. Seriously. I think I was on youtube or something looking at my account profile and it had the usual location, gender, age... OH MY GOD. The numbers two-one have never looked so BIG. I know I had a full year, as with all birthdays, that this is the number I'm approaching but still, it was sobering to see it somehow. I know you're legally an adult when you reach 18 but thats still teens and people are still more than willing to see you a just-a-kid which is a great cover for a whole range of mistakes, careless actions, etc. So now that I'm not 'kidding' myself anymore (hah!) I wonder if what I'll do with my life. Will it make a difference? Is it ok to ask a question that could take the rest of life to find out?