I have been absent for quite a while.
It's really shitty as I know that Scarphelia has been damaged by this, but these circumstances have been out of my hands.
Last week my house was broken into and we were robbed. Amongst the things taken was £50 cash from my room, my cheerleading uniform and my laptop.
To say this time has been stressful is a borderline comical understatement. Not only am I currently dangling on the precipice of crashing and burning dramatically due to the strain of assignment deadlines, balancing three jobs and training hard for competition, my laptop was not backed up at all, and I lost... everything.
But to be honest, it wasn't even the theft, the fact that they stole my cheer uniform two days before comp, the invasion of privacy or the personal loss which disturbed me most - we were robbed while we were sleeping in the house.
Luckily (or unluckily depending on which way you look at it) I was sleeping in a different room of the house, as it was just me and my one female housemate left in the 6-bedroom house, we were scared of being alone in the big house, so slept in her room on the second floor. The remaining rooms were locked as our other housemates were away in Liverpool at the time.
The thieves entered the property in the night and scoured the entire house as we slept, finding the rooms on the top floor unlocked, and robbed them blind.
But what if one of us had woken up? What if we'd gotten up and gone to the toilet in the night? We could've walked out of the room and come face to face with the thief. Would they have been armed, just in case? Would they have stabbed us? attacked us? Ran?
I shudder to think about it.
But, how horrible these circumstances may be, I've come to realise that they are tests. Tests of strength, grit, determination and above all, character. Am I going to admit defeat and sit around feeling sorry for myself, and try and pick the pieces of my life back up from the cold, hard floor? Hell no. If anything, stuff like this makes me more determined to go out there and create something spectacular.
How many times have I found myself, night after night, curled up in bed with my laptop, having not moved all day, eating chocolate and pointlessly trawling through Facebook, or half-heartedly watching a TV show I'm barely interested in? Far too many times of late. That is not the silver I so proclaimed myself to be.
I've realised that all while I'm sat here, preaching to the world about being silver, I'm doing just that. Sitting here. I need to stop being a hypocrite and start practicing what I preach. And I think perhaps that being robbed, and having the pivot of my existence taken away from me, has relinquished a curse that I was not previously aware of.
I'm free. And now, I will not let anything stand in my path. It is my time to take back on the world and start creating again.
So firstly, this is an apology. Secondly, this is the start of another series of unbelievable events.
Indeed, I started to take my own advice and my god, if I ever had any doubts before wether I was doing the right thing, these doubts are now soaring irrelevantly amongst the clouds, like my soul.
Since the robbery, things have gone wildly out of control in the most incredible way possible, and the real challenge here is to try and get it all down before anything else happens.
So let us begin...
Scarlet-Ophelia.
