The Quite Nerdy Blog

I am incredibly, incredibly privileged at this point in time. Though we are in the midst of a global pandemic, myself and my family are all financially and medically stable and though its exact shape remains uncertain, I have a future ahead of me where I will return to university in September. This is something I'm intimately aware of and I wanted to preface everything I'm about to say by stating this, because I know that for all the struggles I have had in this period, those are basic needs that I have not had to worry about. Regardless though, I have been struggling, particularly psychologically. That state has been far less frequent as lockdown gradually lifts and I can see friends and family again, but especially in the early weeks of lockdown, I found myself totally incapable of finding motivation. Uni work was completed, I was living with my family like a teenager again and I was worried about leaving my little village. In short, I felt like any agency my life had previou...

As a lot of you probably know, I'm on a year abroad at the moment, off studying in the crazy world that is Florida. It's very exciting and everything, all these new experiences, but there's a side of it that has acted as a really profound entry point into another side of myself that has seemingly always been there; it can be really, really fucking isolating. Of course, I'm only about two months into it and at this point in my first year of Uni back in Exeter, I was feeling similarly alone, but there is a difference, in that I'm so far away from all I know and completely separated from alcohol, something that allows me to ignore these feelings for a little while. With all that time that sobriety has given me, I've had plenty of time for thinking and self-reflection and while I worry that this post is just going to come across as a narcissistic excuse for free therapy, it isn't that. This is an honest attempt to try and explore what it is I'm feeling ...