Finishing my degree was simultaneously a more and less dramatic occurrence than I had expected; an anti-climactic climax if you will. The physical completing of my last exam was curiously void of all pomp and circumstance… no fireworks were set off, no ticker-tape parades exploded through the streets as I wandered back to my student house, with a view to beginning the truly unenviable task of packing up my wardrobe. People walking past me on the pavement, seemed blissfully unaware of the huge milestone that had just plummeted from the sky into the gravel path of my life.
However, the after-effects of leaving university, I’m not entirely sure I was prepared for. Rather than ceremonious marching, diploma in hand, directly from the open doors of Southampton University, into the glamorous London offices of a high-selling magazine to begin my glittering writing career, I found myself spewed out from the false promises of undergraduate life into a world full of rejection emails and unpaid internships. In this way, things have definitely changed dramatically, as I am now no longer comfortably cushioned between the reassuring contentment of years of university. Now I am on my own. Left to survive as an adult, ON MY OWN.
This fact has recently become all the more salient, as for the past three months I have been ‘working’ (the inverted commas signify my disdain at the lack of payment), in London as a content intern for a travel website. Don’t get me wrong, I am aware of my fortunate position in terms of all-important CV embellishments. However, I can’t help but feel the slightest bit uneasy to be entering this particular, uncertain stage of my life. With having to ‘work’ in London, also comes an even bigger challenge for someone as accident-prone and over-analytical as myself – commuting.
‘The notion of commuting is bound up irrevocably with universally-acknowledged discourse, which is underpinned by tired and unfounded clichés’, I had arrogantly and pretentiously stated to my mum before I began my internship, in response to her tall tales of her own commuting days. Much to my dismay, it has transpired that these clichés are such for a reason. Even though I am not quite yet a successful working-woman, I do feel I have at least learnt some valuable life lessons from this latest development in my life.
The first of these, is never to sit down on a tube at rush hour. After the first few weeks of settling myself in spare seats on the tube wherever possible, I have now reached a stage whereby I will actively avoid ever sitting down, even on non-busy carriages. This is purely to avoid the terrifying, but all too common situation of an age-ambiguous passenger hovering next to my seat, thus forcing me to either take the dreaded risk of offering it up, which could subsequently cause offence, or taking the equally unsavoury option of cowardly ignoring their presence and being silently judged by fellow passengers as a callous bitch for doing so. I have resorted to ridiculously extreme measures to avoid having to make this choice. Once, so as not to take a seat from an older lady who had passed up the empty-space opportunity by telling me she was getting off at the next stop, I am ashamed to say, I panicked, and told her I was too. Of course, I had been planning to stay on for another two stops, but instead got off when she did anyway just to avoid looking like a compulsive liar.
Secondly, I have learnt to keep myself to myself whilst commuting. As much as this goes against my better nature, I now know that there does come a point in life where its best to blend in. However, unsurprisingly, I haven’t managed to achieve this at all times, and my usual haphazard, catastrophic personality has burst out on a few commuting occasions. I regularly come a cropper with regard the much-feared, ‘sleeping-with-mouth-open-on-train’ situation, but never have I witnessed another train-sleeping mishap as terrible as the day I unfortunately chose an aisle seat on an overground train, and fell so deeply asleep that I ended up horizontally blocking the entire aisle, and was only roused by a queue of angry passengers who were unable to board because of my intrusive position.
Another lesson I have learnt from my commuting adventures, is that whilst on trains, it simply HAS to be a case of every-man-for-himself, otherwise nothing gets done. Any act of human-kindness whilst commuting is 100% sure to backfire in the most embarrassing of manners. I learnt this one day whilst attempting to navigate the human idiot-filter, otherwise known as the ticket barrier. In front of me was one of the idiots that should have been filtered out, trying to post her ticket through upside down. At 8:30 on a monday morning, no-one had the time for her incompetence. Trying to help everyone out in one divine act, I heroically posted my own ticket into the slot to release the barriers, hoping that, if I moved fast, both of us would be able to get through. Indeed we both would have, had I not been wearing a hopelessly hipster rucksack at the time. Needless to say, I was stopped in my sneaky tracks as the barriers closed around my rucksack, yanking me backwards and leaving my limbs flailing in the air as I watched the ticket-idiot stroll happily into the swirling crowds without so much as a backwards glance. I will admit that I was helped out of this situation by the lady behind me, who forcibly shoved my rucksack upwards and out of the grasp of the barrier, which could have been an act of kindness, but was more than likely an act of desperation borne out of her need to get to work on time.
Lastly, daily commuting has taught me that I need to learn how to wait. Carlos Ruiz Zafon once wrote that ‘waiting is the rust of the soul’, and if this is true, mine, as well as the soul of every other regular commuter must be a crumbling pile of brown dust by now. The best we can do with the endless minutes of waiting for trains, waiting for stations, waiting for passenger information and waiting on the world to change (as John Mayer would surely be doing if he was there too), is learn to use them productively. And so, you will be pleased to hear, most of this blog was typed out painstakingly on my iPhone whilst waiting for a delayed train to Cambridge.