Growing and Changing

After speaking to a lot of the friends I have made over the last year of University, we realized that we have all changed as people a significant amount, however cliche that may sound. And since today is the anniversary of the day I moved to London to start this next chapter of my life, I thought it would be fitting to discuss some of the changes I have made in regards to lifestyle and my outlook on relationships and studying.

First of all, as a whole my entire approach to the way I think about myself and people around me truly has developed due to my rise in confidence. Moving away form all my friends and family last September to live alone in a new city was obviously terrifying, like I have said before. But, that gave me the incentive to throw myself into situations I usually wouldn't be comfortable in, such as auditioning for multiple shows and making my self available to go on spontaneous day trips throughout London with these new people I have only just met. My personality has not changed, I still enjoy all the things I use to, but they way I can express all of this definitely has. All of my friends from home like a lot of the same things so a few of my interests were not spoken about as openly, as I could never expect to have a group of football mad, MyNuLeng fanboys engaging in a conversation about the casting for Les Miserables. Now being surrounded by musical theatre nerds every single day has satisfied my need to break into The Book Of Mormon at random intervals throughout the day and melt as I watch James Cordon's Tony Awards Carpool Karaoke.

When I was a few years younger, although I always wanted to be accepting and understanding of everyone, I was still just as judgmental in some ways as a lot of the other people my age. Now however, I honestly can say whenever someone tells me of the scandalous or controversial lifestyle decisions someone is making, rather than becoming patronizing and looking down on that person, I accept that everyone can make their own life choices and if that includes going slightly "off the rails", along as it does not become self destructive I would never try to stop someone.

Myself and two of the best friends I have ever had began discussing the possibility of living together after University ended, and although that is still another two years away we realized we don't think there could be anything that any of us could do that would make us fall out enough to not have that work. I know a lot of people say that and they believe that their friendships will last forever and are strong enough to battle through anything, but they way we discussed it wasn't really to do with us being strong but more to do with the fact that we all have the exact same mind set on most topics. As soon as a controversial subject rises, we are all on exactly the same page and do not even need to say a word for us all to understand that we think the same thing.

In school I always hated studying and I never wanted to be in class, but over the past year I have been getting more and more excited to go to my lectures and seminars and even more so for my rehearsals. After getting our timetables and reading lists for 2nd year, I was immediately thrilled about having to buy a million books about musical theatre and directing. My work ethic when it comes to my degree has sky rocketed, where i use to find any excuse to not do work, now I will spend extra time to make my work as good as it could possibly be.

In regards to general student life, everyone says that you gain about 15 pounds in your first year due to not being able to afford good food so eating copious amounts of carbs and sugar. This for me however really was not the case. I have always struggled with my weight but in my first year of university I actually lost about 17 pounds, which ideally would have been more but it was a start. When I do my big Asda shop I never buy snacking foods, I could go to the store with biscuits or chocolate on my shopping list but when I get to the aisle i change my mind so only really buy Quorn and vegetables. Now, I am even slowly starting to pull dairy from my diet, as I have unofficially stopped eating meat purely because I'm scared I will under cook it. But, although it is true in some cases that it is hard to eat well at university, if you are strict with yourself it can be done and can hold some great results.

Now, I know this blog is a lot longer than the rest of them have been and I also know that I haven't posted for a long time but, being exactly a year since I started this journey I thought it was right to recap on a few things I have discovered about myself over the year. University in my opinion feels a lot like a sitcom, especially now in my new house, we are free to do as we please and come out with some cracking one-liners that just leave you expecting a laugh track to be fired up. Hopefully I will get back into the habit of posting more regularly, but please let me know what you thought of this post and if you have any suggestions for some things I could talk about, that would be fabulous.