Notes From The Smoking Area

When my nervous system finally settles at night and I finally feel relaxed and ready to sleep- I get flashbacks to some of the most embarrassing recesses of my mind:

Walking around Edinburgh drunk with a cone on my head.

Begging my ex to get back with me despite it being perfectly clear it was not to be.

Getting the giggles during a really sensitive talk in Modern Studies in S3.

Or the time I fell getting onto the number 30 bus in Edinburgh.

These all spring to mind (and the others).

“so called ‘memories’ which feel more like a nonconsensual time capsule to puberty-ville or hangover-ville or worse fear-ville.”

As a member of the generation that was brought up using snapchat as a core social media vessel, I am ashamed to say as a 24 year old man, I have been known to still contact my friends this way.

I tell myself it’s because I’m a visual learner. In reality I think it’s because you barely have to speak. You can just send your face. Which, if you were to ask my ex, is probably for the best because I’m not someone you want to have a lengthy correspondence with.

My insistence on still using this social media, means I am flooded everyday with so called ‘memories’ which feel more like a nonconsensual time capsules to puberty-ville or hangover-ville or worse fear-ville.

Today 7 years ago I was sitting a biology exam I thought I failed- I didn’t. 

4 years ago I was cutting up a silly bastards top at 11:20 in the morning because he broke up with me. 

2 years ago I wasn’t writing my dissertation instead getting high and eating rustler hotdogs. 

A year ago, I was looking tanned and sexy. 

My mum once reminded me that she wasn’t confronted daily with the decisions she made at 18 when she was 24.

She was able to look forward. Reconcile with those parts of herself because there was a distance between her younger self and her current self. 

Obviously consequences lurk, but I can’t think of any meaningful consequence that has arisen because of ‘the fear’.

So I knew I had a choice:

I could delete Snapchat or try and reconcile with some of these fear inducing versions of myself. 

I have a 1,787 day streak with my best friend and life partner. It’s the biggest commitment I have in my life. 

I am not deleting Snapchat. 

So day in and day out for the last year I have forced myself to watch through each and every memory.

Not miles away from a scene from A Clockwork Orange. 

Day by day being faced with the me who went through puberty.

The me who went to uni.

The me who got drunk for what seems like 90% of my late teens and early 20s. 

Each day feeling something that I can’t quite describe yet, but it feels like it would be near a sense of forgiveness almost. 

Seeing actually how heavy at times things did feel for me. Seeing me get better, then worse, then glowing up then winter hitting and I plummet to the depths. 

Understanding the seasons of my life as they aren’t entirely different. 

It is much easier to appreciate the peaks and troughs of life when you are not actively in a trough. Seeing yourself go through a break up, crying over someone you don’t even think about now.

“Don’t cast judgement on someone you can no longer change. Channel that into who you can become, because our futures are not dependent on who we have been, it’s who we are now.”

It reminds you that no feeling is permanent.

I can look back on the boy that I used to be.

The messy, embarrassing, skinny jean wearing tragedy.

And know, without him, there would be no me.

I like my life, I like who I am becoming but there is no now without who I was then.

The vapid shit head that I may have been- but of course I was, I was 19. 

Who you are is in no small part down to who you have been. Your mistakes and victories, your heartbreak and your love, all the things that make you, you. 

But don’t cast judgement on someone you can no longer change.

Channel that into who you can become, because our futures are not dependent on who we have been, it’s who we are now. 

So be kinder to yourself reader because who knows maybe future you is cringing at how much of a bitch you’re being…