I'm 22 now but I won't be for long.
I'm sitting on my bed cross-legged, listening to Simon and Garfunkel's "Leaves That Are Green", with this surge of happiness and nostalgia lapping at my feet. The last couple of weeks in this spring break I have learnt many things about myself, and of others.
Dinner parties, barbecues, afternoon drinks, midnight walks through the city, art in unusual spaces and new friendships have spurted from nowhere like a struck water main, filling my life with a sense of completeness. We've spilt chocolate on white skirts, dug holes in back yards with our bare feet from dancing, commented on each others' dogs, hugged and laughed and walked in the rain and it's reminded me something important that I often forget when struck with the mundanity that comes from a life that is heavily saturated by work and study. These two weeks I have put the books down, closed the computer down, strapped on a pair of sandals and let my feet guide me through a lot of positive change.
There's been this sudden realisation that I am truly surrounded by people who love me and make me happy, and I needn't change that whatsoever. From graduating last Thursday and having my mum sit with me at the beach, running her fingers through my hair as I lay across her lap in the afternoon sun, telling me how proud she is and how she wants me to actively seek to improve my situation - not that it needs "improving" - I am well loved and I love well. But she stresses the importance, over everything else, to be happy at all times. And I find myself growing in a way now that I no longer find happiness in certain aspects of my life - and I must change these.
Over the weekend I visited some workshops and performances from This Is Not Art here in Newcastle, and got a real feel for the things that make me happy. I watched a panel discussion (and by panel I mean for go-getter girls lounge around on a leather couch in the steaming heat of a gun club in Newcastle East) called "Funny Ladies" where comedians Gen Fricker, Kara Jensen-Mackinnon, Lauren Bok, Claire Sullivan, Lefa Singleton Norton talked about satire writing and the female stand up comedian - whether women subject themselves to this differentiation or whether it is put on them by a male audience, and their doing the same back to man. Claire Sullivan talked about how her friend heard in the audience two men remark "I bet she's going to talk about her period" and then when she proceeded to talk about something on a totally different end of the spectrum, they huffed and walked out, disappointed.
My favourite woman in the discussion, however, was the soft spoken but witty-as-all-hell Kara Jensen-MacKinnon, who is a political satirist for The Roast on ABC 2 amongst other things. Reading over her work and her online portfolio as a source for inspiration, I realised that I wanted to do exactly what she was doing. Just churning out an arts degree and then pissing off to do whatever the hell she wanted - namely writing. Her job was accidental and came from only her passion and not any particular attempt to seek it. I feel that while we should work towards what we want, it should be only a fuelling of passion, and then allowing whatever result amounts from that to be the result that makes us happy.
So I'm at this point now where I am weeks away from finishing another semester of Law, feeling eager for the summer and all its change and equally its challenges. And I'm feeling good. Because a shift has occurred - I'm working towards my passions, and not towards results. Towards a state of being, and not towards sitting haphazardly in a tight pencil skirt in a rickety position on the corporate ladder, waiting for someone at the bottom to shake it beneath me.
Dinner parties, barbecues, afternoon drinks, midnight walks through the city, art in unusual spaces and new friendships have spurted from nowhere like a struck water main, filling my life with a sense of completeness. We've spilt chocolate on white skirts, dug holes in back yards with our bare feet from dancing, commented on each others' dogs, hugged and laughed and walked in the rain and it's reminded me something important that I often forget when struck with the mundanity that comes from a life that is heavily saturated by work and study. These two weeks I have put the books down, closed the computer down, strapped on a pair of sandals and let my feet guide me through a lot of positive change.
There's been this sudden realisation that I am truly surrounded by people who love me and make me happy, and I needn't change that whatsoever. From graduating last Thursday and having my mum sit with me at the beach, running her fingers through my hair as I lay across her lap in the afternoon sun, telling me how proud she is and how she wants me to actively seek to improve my situation - not that it needs "improving" - I am well loved and I love well. But she stresses the importance, over everything else, to be happy at all times. And I find myself growing in a way now that I no longer find happiness in certain aspects of my life - and I must change these.
Over the weekend I visited some workshops and performances from This Is Not Art here in Newcastle, and got a real feel for the things that make me happy. I watched a panel discussion (and by panel I mean for go-getter girls lounge around on a leather couch in the steaming heat of a gun club in Newcastle East) called "Funny Ladies" where comedians Gen Fricker, Kara Jensen-Mackinnon, Lauren Bok, Claire Sullivan, Lefa Singleton Norton talked about satire writing and the female stand up comedian - whether women subject themselves to this differentiation or whether it is put on them by a male audience, and their doing the same back to man. Claire Sullivan talked about how her friend heard in the audience two men remark "I bet she's going to talk about her period" and then when she proceeded to talk about something on a totally different end of the spectrum, they huffed and walked out, disappointed.
My favourite woman in the discussion, however, was the soft spoken but witty-as-all-hell Kara Jensen-MacKinnon, who is a political satirist for The Roast on ABC 2 amongst other things. Reading over her work and her online portfolio as a source for inspiration, I realised that I wanted to do exactly what she was doing. Just churning out an arts degree and then pissing off to do whatever the hell she wanted - namely writing. Her job was accidental and came from only her passion and not any particular attempt to seek it. I feel that while we should work towards what we want, it should be only a fuelling of passion, and then allowing whatever result amounts from that to be the result that makes us happy.
So I'm at this point now where I am weeks away from finishing another semester of Law, feeling eager for the summer and all its change and equally its challenges. And I'm feeling good. Because a shift has occurred - I'm working towards my passions, and not towards results. Towards a state of being, and not towards sitting haphazardly in a tight pencil skirt in a rickety position on the corporate ladder, waiting for someone at the bottom to shake it beneath me.
