Who claimed this would be weekly! Not me!
It’s been a very busy couple of weeks leaving and returning and working out how to work from home again. It’s been a lot of making plans and spending more time on trains than I thought was humanly possible within the space of a week. It really hit home when someone asked how long I’d been back and I said it must have only been a week to the day but yet I’d only spent four days in my home city. This weekend is no different but I get to see more people I’ve been dying to see for the past few months, and then I get the ultimate honour of being a bridesmaid at the wedding of one of my oldest friends. I’m so excited and still so overwhelmed about being asked - I am sure the day will be one of the best of my 2017.
I’ve fully embraced being back at home by drinking approximately 100 cups of tea, burning candles at my desk (Macaron - Voluspa from Anthropologie, smells gorgeous) and wearing a different jumper every day. I am making Christmas-based plans and eating all the food I’ve missed so much (all of it). Job applications are boring and I don’t want to go too in-depth into the process but if anyone sees a job I might like/be good at, please don’t hesitate to send it my way.
I haven’t been completely missing from the internet, and I wrote this over on Dear Damsels about why I love winter because it’s so consistent and also because I love it being dark and cold because I fully embrace the weather of most of the year we can do nothing about.
Now, on to the point of the post.
I get given a lot of advice, we all do. I also hate being given advice, I sometimes call them ‘platitudes’ rather than advice because honestly a lot of the time it feels like the person might not have bothered saying anything at all. That being said, I’ve realised that being in your mid-twenties and therefore, being a ‘Millennial’ (still hate it as a term) means that you’re either reading a think-piece on advice someone is giving, or talking about your problems with your friends and inadvertently talking about ways you could make yourself feel better.
It hasn’t all been terrible, so I thought I’d share the best pieces of advice I’ve been given:
‘Nice things don’t happen’
Going with my favourite first, this might sound like terrible and fatalistic advice, but I love it for that reason. I love the concept that nothing just spontaneously happens to you and the best things in life are usually the result of continuing to work and try and just keep on pushing until something gives. Which not only feels very true to my experience but also is literally the only way I can motivate myself some days, so we can but hope it’s actually somewhat true.
‘Just learn to let things go’
This one said to me not by a friend trying to comfort me, but by someone who may as well have said ‘can you please just stop talking about this problem’. Well eventually I have learnt to let things and people go, specifically people who don’t take my concerns and problems seriously and try and tell me to ‘just let it go’. Never let it be said I don’t take the advice I’m given.
‘Life is too short and your peace is too valuable’
This one I have applied in very specific circumstances. For example, I have unsubscribed from all the podcasts I listened to which constituted of privileged white women talking about how hard it is to live in central London as a freelancer and how scary it is to have non-opinions on the internet. I believe in diverse opinions but I also have no desire to spend my time listening to 50 minutes of basic-business talk which could leave me wanting to pull out my own eyes.
‘Listen to the people who love you’
People have been screaming this at me, but most importantly my best friend. This resonated with me so much I wrote about it for Anne T. Donahue’s weekly newsletter. It’s very true though, I hope you do focus in on the people who care about you and like you. You are definitely allowed to believe your own hype, because life will take you down a peg or two all on its own, without you inviting people in to help.
See also: ‘The Devil doesn’t need an advocate, he’s literally fine.’
‘Don’t tell everyone everything, you don’t know what their intentions are’
I wrote an entire post about this, about not always discussing your future plans with everyone and actually, now I’ve gotten into the incredibly tedious activity of applying for jobs, I’ve been finding it much easier. Apart from telling people who need to know when I’m going for an interview, I haven’t really discussed what I’ve been applying for or even how I’m feeling about it. Beyond the fact it’s very boring and every job application that doesn’t accept a CV makes me want to pull out my eyes.
*****
I’m on Twitter - @clairegillesp - where we are still on lockdown because of job apps but I accept basically everyone to follow me, so don’t be put off by that.
I’m on Instagram - clairegillesp - where top-quality UK and wedding content will be coming very soon.
I’ve been listening to Ed Miliband’s podcast Reasons to be Cheerful which I love as much as you would expect, and I’ve been reading ghost stories (The Upstairs Room, The Silent Companions) on the recommendation of the podcast What Page Are You On? I would heartily recommend both of them, as well as the December issue of Vogue, which is the first under new Editor-in-Chief Edward Enninful.
xx
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