The Unprecedented Joy In Making Someone's Day

I peer down curiously at the small white envelope with my name on, handwritten in small bouncy script. 

"Dear Katie, university dropout and proud,"

My mind is completely absent to the memory of the girl who'd emailed me asking for my address a few days prior. I eagerly yet cautiously tear into the package to find a four page long, handwritten letter.

I'm not two paragraphs in before a lump starts to rise in my throat. 

By the end, my hands are shaking. 

Why I've Decided to Drop Out of Uni

At the start of this academic year, my final year of Uni, I decided to start a little project. 

After three years of being pretty much the worst academic nightmare known to this University, to try and keep myself motivated til the end, I decided to keep a photographic timeline of a final year student, by taking one selfie (of undoubted despair) during the midst of my assignments, and one selfie (of undoubted relief) after finally completing and submitting each one.

In my head, I thought perhaps I could collate these images into a whimsical but profound insight into what it's actually like to endure the final stages of a degree, and perhaps I could make it into some kind of empowering, motivating article at a later date.

Little did I know, however, that it would have the complete opposite effect on me. 

Because half way through only my second assignment of term, when I found myself howling in a helpless heap on my bedroom floor clutching my prescription for strong anti-depressants in one hand and a 5000-word, due in for the next day, assignment brief in the other, I had to ask myself some serious fucking questions as to why I was voluntarily paying £9,000 a year to subject myself to this. 

Four months and a whole chronology of trials, tribulations and tears later, at the start of my final semester in my final year of Uni, I have decided to drop out. 

Withdrawal Symptoms: A Stark Reminder of Being Human

"Don't get me wrong when I say this..." Emma pauses and narrows her eyes with an almost imperceptible shake of the head, 

"But you're not normal."

My eyes close and I inhale sharply with a small smile on my face, savouring the taste of that very sentence, before exhaling a deep whooshing thanks - my tone weak with simultaneous gratitude and relief. Thank you I repeat slowly and firmly, reestablishing eye contact as we both give a small nod in mutual and earnest understanding of exactly what this means.

2015: The Rise of the Cyber-Sisterhood

Sometimes I experience sentiments so powerfully fundamental  deep down in the core of my being, that there just doesn't seem to be sufficient words in the English language to truly convey the intensity of how it feels. 

Instead, I get images, visions almost.

It begins with a sensation deep in my chest, similar to that before you sneeze. 

I can see it. I can hear it.