It's Really Happening III
I’m incredibly excited about moving to London. Not only are there a million new opportunities and experiences available to me there that I am excited about making the most of, there are also a million aspects of Guernsey that I am equally keen to leave behind. Throughout the entire process of arranging to move and in general for the past couple of months, I’ve only really focused on those two categories of things; reasons why I am excited to leave. That is until this weekend, when, suddenly and without warning, I began to feel quite sad about the whole thing.
I know what you’re thinking - it is deeply out of character for me to be down about anything, especially in any kind of sappy, sentimental, wishy-washy kinda way, but it turns out that yes, even I am capable of having feelings. There are a few things I am going to miss about the island; admittedly not many, but they are certainly all things I will miss very dearly.
I have talked before about how I’m going to miss being by the sea, but it bears repeating once more. I genuinely believe that being by the sea has a positive effect on my mental health - it’s calming, it’s awe-inspiring, it really puts my usually fairly minor quibbles and quandaries into perspective. Running along the cliffs on Friday and having spent today bouldering on the west coast, the thing that made the whole experience so enjoyable was not the actual activity of running or climbing, but of simply being able to look across the water for hours at a time, and to feel its soothing presence.
The other thing that I will miss is one that in some ways, I will distinctly also not miss. There were times during lockdown 2.0 when I was absolutely desperate to get away from this thing. It’s loud, it drinks a lot and I’m related to it; it is my brother. His sleep schedule is pretty much the inverse of mine, and he plays music all the time. He is an 18 year old straight white male, and I know I am in a bit of a stones-in-glass-houses situation here, but that is maybe my least favourite demographic of person of them all. To be honest, I could write a whole blog about how annoying he is, but I have a rule of trying not to be mean in public about people unless they really deserve it. And… he doesn’t. After having gone to another one of his gigs last night, while crammed into a sticky, grungy bar alongside 100 or so sticky, grungy fellow revelers, I was struck for the first time with pangs of sadness about leaving. I am genuinely heartbroken that I’m not going to be able to go to his shows - at least not for the immediate future, and even shortly thereafter not without a great deal of time, effort and expense. Which really sucks. Being able to see someone I love do something they love and be incredibly good at it is a pretty unique happy-chemical-cocktail, and one I’m gutted I’m not going to be able to enjoy once I’ve moved to the big city.
Don’t get me wrong, I am of course still, on the whole, excited to be leaving. I still think it’s the right thing to do, I’m not having second thoughts or regrets. Actually with regard to regrets I have very little, I’m quite proud of the way I’ve made the most of my time in Guernsey once I knew it was limited. But part of me had genuinely thought I might have got on the plane out of here with no real negative feelings at all, apart from apprehension of what might await me, so this weekend has caught me a little bit off guard. I think the surprise has been a good one though - it shows that I’m normal and human, and also that in my time here I wasn’t purely waiting to leave, I did actually build relationships and come to find things to enjoy and love about the island. Saying goodbye to those things is going to be harder than I’d anticipated.